ARTS / Room for improvement: What are the ideal conditions in which to look at art? Dalya Alberge asks three experts to make an exhibition of their fantasy blueprints: The curator
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Your support makes all the difference.LEWIS BIGGS has been curator of the Tate Gallery, Liverpool, since 1990. After leaving Oxford in 1974 he became an exhibitions technician and security guard at MOMA Oxford and the Whitechapel. He has also worked at the Arnolfini, Bristol, and the British Council. He joined the Tate in Liverpool in 1987 as curator of exhibitions.
Since art and life are inseparable, an ideal gallery presupposes an ideal world. Meanwhile, there are as many approaches to art (and so models for galleries) as there are people.
My ideal gallery's architecture should be stimulating, characterful but not overbearing. The rooms should be flooded by real daylight from above, and no leaking roofs. It would contain only 24 works of art, 12 permanent and 12 changing at a rate of one a month. It should be located somewhere I can pop into before breakfast or last thing at night. At the end of the street where I live?
Children would roam free, prevented by magic from damaging the art. There would be artists' materials at the entrance, and no one would be able to leave without having recorded some response to the art. Good company, along with good food and drink, would be continuously on hand, and a huge library of music available for the personal CD player you could pick up at the door. And, at the touch of a button, there would be holographic replicas of all the great artists and other thinkers programmed to carry on a discussion over coffee with a live interlocutor . . . and all free, of course.
(Photograph omitted)
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