CRAIG BROWN: End terminal boredom with art in airports

CRAIG BROWN: End terminal boredom by turning departure lounges in airports into galleries of the art museums hold in storage

To celebrate the Coronation, The Royal Fine Art Commission asked me to contribute to a book of short essays on how to improve our surroundings.

For some time, I have favoured abandoning all road repairs. This would save money, reduce congestion, and encourage us all to drive with greater caution.

At the moment, we spend lots of time and money making our roads quicker, and then we spend yet more time and money adding speed bumps, speed cameras and speed limits to make them slower.

So we should allow our roads to deteriorate. Before long, they would return to bumpy tracks, so that cars and lorries would have to drive carefully, with no need for all the expensive and unsightly anti-speeding apparatus.

That was my first idea for improving the environment. But I am, at heart, a realist, and it seemed unlikely that the Department for Transport would follow my lead: we have become a nation addicted to tarmac, cameras and signage, and a few words in a booklet was unlikely to cure our addiction.

We should turn departure lounges in airports into galleries of the art museums hold in storage, thinks Craig Brown

The British Museum holds about two million items in storage, and the V&A holds more than 250,000

A plan to make the world a more attractive place: art in airports, writes Craig Brown 

For this reason, I focused on my second, more practical plan to make the world a more attractive place: art in airports.

Travellers to any airport are advised to arrive three hours before departure on international flights, or two hours for European flights, even if it’s only London to Edinburgh.

That’s two or three hours of boredom punctuated by sudden bursts of panic.

The soulless shopping diversions — Burberry, Harrods, Marks & Spencer — serve only to increase your sense of twitchiness.

When your bags are already full to bursting, why go shopping in an airport? It’s as fruitless an activity as going fishing in a car park, or bungee-jumping in a bungalow.

All that space, all that time, and nothing to fill them with. On the other hand, our national museums are faced with the opposite problem: too little space, too much to include.

The British Museum holds about two million items in storage, and the V&A holds more than 250,000. At any one time, the Tate displays only one-fifth of its collection. Everything else is tucked away in the dark, available only to specialists.

These are not second-rate works, either. Take one of my favourite British artists, David Jones. Tate Britain holds 27 of his drawings and paintings, but only two or three are ever on display.

Travellers to any airport are advised to arrive three hours before departure on international flights, or two hours for European flights, even if it’s only London to Edinburgh

The soulless shopping diversions — Burberry, Harrods, Marks & Spencer — serve only to increase your sense of twitchiness 

Ditto Stanley Spencer, only more so: The Tate holds 237 of his works but all but a handful can be seen only by appointment.

Over the years, what I call Ad-man’s art, or Oligart — big, bold, brash, ploddingly literal, as shallow and accessible as a slogan — has elbowed anything more thoughtful and timeless and beautiful out of the way, and into storage.

So we have two problems: on the one hand, millions of bored and nervous people in airports, ready for the solace of art; and, on the other, hundreds of thousands of works of art, stored out of view.

And one simple solution: turn departure lounges into galleries, hung with the buried treasures of our national galleries.

If this is a success, the transformation can be repeated elsewhere in the airport. The stress and tedium of snaking towards passport control would be relieved in an instant with the addition of art along the way, showing residents and visitors alike the artistic glories of the country they are about to enter.

There are, I am happy to say, one or two small signs that my utopian dream may one day come true. At the end of last year, Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands introduced a gallery space in the terminal, which is a small off-shoot of the great Rijksmuseum.

Rijksmuseum Schiphol displays a selection of 11 great Dutch landscape paintings and is open 24 hours a day, an oasis of calm in a sea of anxiety and tedium.

Here in Britain, the National Gallery has been taking John Constable’s beautiful painting The Cornfield on a tour of shopping centres: Basildon, the Isle of Wight, Jarrow and Dudley. It would take just one inspired gallery director and one inspired airport CEO to transform the airport experience.

Bridget Riley, not Burberry; Hogarth, not Harrods; Stanley Spencer, not Marks & Spencer. We have nothing to lose but our chain stores.

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