Everybody out! (for 2 hours)
January 20 2012
35 rooms were temporarily closed at the National Gallery yesterday as room warders went on strike. The stoppage lasted two hours, but the Gallery managed to keep the Leonardo exhibition open. Between 30 and 40 warders took part, according to The Guardian. Two anonymous warders were quoted in the paper:
"Although we've been assured that CCTV equipment and the glazing of the pictures will prevent any kind of a situation and offer security and deal with any security issues, I think there's still a feeling that a human presence is more effective than a camera," he said.
Another said the gallery was focusing on rare incidents of major vandalism and ignoring the "minor but continuous" damage done to paintings by visitors touching them or falling against them. "It's happening daily," he said, adding that, if he was in the other room under his responsibility, "I wouldn't see it".
It's a tricky one this. Nobody wants to risk paintings being attacked, as happened recently with a Poussin. Glazing pictures is most tedious (thankfully, very few paintings at the Gallery are glazed). And it is sad to see any staff at galleries threatened with redundancy.
But as a frequent visitor to the Gallery it seems to me that the practice of having one warder per room is inefficient and expensive, not least because many rooms are quite small. I suspect that boredom amongst warders, not a lack of them, is a greater risk when it comes to guarding the gallery. No painting can be safe when a warder is playing sudoku. Would it be better to have fewer but more alert warders, which would be the practical result of a single warder occasionally having to cover two rooms?
