On the 21st June, the Saatchi Gallery played host to some of the most eminent art curators and critics from around the world. A roomful of well-coiffed, Mont Blanc-clutching art enthusiasts gathered to thrash out the question: are museums bad at telling us why art matters?
 
Alain de Botton quickly got to the heart of the matter: why do we need art at all? He answered by drawing a parallel between art and religion: art being the thing that reminds us of all the good clichés of religion. He proposed that we need to review the ‘framing device’ with which we view art, suggesting that museums should reform how paintings are grouped – for example, a ‘gallery for love’.  People nodded in agreement that ‘museums should be propaganda for good feelings’ – clearly this crowd would visit the ‘De Botton Galleries’.  
 
Matthew Collings, however, from the ‘School of Saatchi’, contradicted de Botton’s argument by highlighting the ‘misconception’ that neutrality is a bad thing. To him, neutrality serves a particular visual aim – allowing an individualist response to a painting, while not distracting us with irrelevant differences, or creating a ‘visual jumble’. Collings laughingly dismissed de Botton’s idea, saying if we created ‘a gallery for love’, it would be a brutal execution of the complexities of the works.

What was this debate lacking thus far? A prop. Cue Ben Lewis, white shoebox in hand (‘it’s not just any shoebox, it’s a work of art’), who used the Gabriel Orozco imitation to demonstrate the ‘problem’ of art today: gimmicky nonsense. As he creatively explained ‘I could fart in a gallery and call it art’ because ‘art’ has become such a wishy-washy concept, a thing that museums insist on telling us is the best thing ever. He accused museums of being ‘cultural fascists’ that judged merit by the success of a work, not its enduring quality.

Chris Dercon, the director of the Tate Modern, was always going to try to outmanoeuvre this stunt – using Lewis’ box as a way of making the audience aware of the difference between thinking and feeling. He described museums are ‘the home’ of the issues facing us today: questions about multiculturalism, the Big Society, our future. Museums are places to thrash out issues, structures for communication. As he said in summary – ‘It is speaking that matters, surely not how we speak?’

Matthew Taylor, the Chief Executive of the RSA, took a rather different approach altogether. His speech was more a plea for the audience to tear these modern art works off the walls, not to ‘hide inside shoeboxes’. He urged the public to decide what kind of future we want; saying that the art community is the best place to lead this debate. His view is of museums as places with the potential for self-aware autonomy and ultimate freedom: representations of the kind of world we want.

Lastly Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, took a rather more pragmatic view of museums: as places of space, focus and narrative. These three things set the terms to begin to understand the context of an object. All we can ask for is that museums try to be, in Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘zones of silence’. He said the beauty of museums is that they are places free of plans, places where people are not trying to get anywhere.

All in all, the night produced some very lively debate and we all left feeling like we had no idea what the purpose of museums was, but we sure as hell wanted to find out by going to them. The final verdict decided the audience were against the motion…just.

The recording of the debate is coming soon. Look at the photos here.