AGNSW_AnnRep_00 full.pdf - Parliament of New South Wales ...

Pierre Bonnard, Promenade des nourrices – avec frise de fiacres 1899
four lithographes 144.7 x 225.6 x 4 cm overall
Gift of Margaret Olley 1999
the intelligence of the institution and, ultimately, its value
to the community, is regrettably slow to follow. The
strains that are imposed on an institution such as this, in
fulfilling an ever-expanding public role with a very public
responsibility and expectation to maintain the highest
standards of stewardship of high value and sometimes
vulnerable assets, are becoming ever more apparent as the
effective value of our recurrent funding budget allocation
seems to, gradually but irrevocably, reduce.
Art museums are most certainly not only about
packaging, about buildings and the most visible of public
services, they are to an equal if not greater degree about
scholarship, care and conservation, learning, education
and all the less obvious and superficially visible activities
without which the viability and value to the community
of that expensive building and its expensive contents
would be prejudiced. It is, to my mind, mildly
preposterous that it is easier to attract government
funding for a new building than it is for a new picture, or
a new publication, or even for such a fundamental
responsibility as a new conservation programme. It is fully
understandable that government priorities should change
to better reflect perceived public sentiment, but
institutions such as ours would find their long-term
responsibilities and roles at risk if we were to be overly
subject to the, often of necessity, short-term obligations of
government and transitory public mood. Clearly our art
museums are no longer the passive and somnolent
institutions they once were for we energetically pursue our
present and potential audiences but, perhaps strangely, it
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is a fact that our responsibilities have not changed a jot
and we must not be seduced away from those essential
tasks by transient expediencies and modish fads. All the
things that we do in the realms of enhanced services to
the community, such as the variety and quality of the
exhibitions, information access, advisory services and
education programmes, stem from the quality and
credibility of our most fundamental responsibilities to
collect, care for, research, interpret and display our own
and loaned collections of works of art.
In viewing our priorities for the forthcoming year
and beyond those fundamental responsibilities remain the
determining factor. Above all we harbour our annual
ambition to enhance the collections and presentations,
whether of the permanent displays or exhibitions, to
continue to broaden our audiences through information
access, and to generally enhance the experience of visiting
the Art Gallery. Our own priorities of course also evolve
and change with the passage of time and the fulfilment of
projects. The 2000-2001 year will see a concentration on
a number of particular projects, paramount of which is
the construction of a new 100-seat theatre to replace the
‘theatrette’ that was displaced by the development of the
new Gallery shop. The Art Gallery’s Asian ambitions will
also be the focus of much attention as we finalise the
development of the detailed plans for the construction of
a second Asian gallery, work on which we plan to
commence in the second half of the year 2001. Another
aspect of our Asian plans is the launch, early in 2001, of
an entity called VisAsia, an initiative which will bring