Charles Saumarez Smith, chief executive of the Royal Academy, said museums were becoming ‘ageist’
Museums and galleries are trying so hard to attract the young that they are ignoring older visitors, an arts chief claimed yesterday.
Charles Saumarez Smith, chief executive of the Royal Academy, said even his own institution bowed to the ‘ageist’ trend of valuing young people more highly.
Speaking at the Hay Festival, Mr Saumarez Smith, 64, said: ‘A lot of the pressure from organisations like the Heritage Lottery Fund is to get young audiences.
‘But if you look at the demographic of the Friends [supporters of the RA], it tends to be older people who have the leisure time and inclination to come.
‘I have this issue constantly – we are constantly trying to promote the institution to a younger age group.
‘Yet, if I am honest, institutions are in danger of what I think occasionally and notice is an element of age discrimination – younger people good, older people not so good.
‘And being in the latter category myself, I am rather resistant to that.’
Mr Saumarez Smith said the focus on the young and neglect of the older generation was prevalent even among the RA’s own hierarchy.’
Of a forthcoming BBC documentary, The Private Life of the Royal Academy, he said: ‘I am conscious of the fact, and it was evident to me through the filming, that my communications team were extremely anxious to have as much of Tim [Marlow, the RA’s artistic director], who is younger, more handsome and more televisual, and as little as possible of me.
Speaking at a festival in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, Mr Saumarez Smith, 64, said: ‘Institutions are in danger of age discrimination – younger people good, older people not so good’
‘I only crept in by accident, giving them this guided tour at the beginning, and, when the film was shown, my director of communications thought, “Hell, this shows an old man as chief executive”.’
Mark Bell, commissioning editor for BBC Arts, said: ‘Cultural institutions including the BBC are acutely aware of this problem.’
He added that he recognised it is older people ‘who have time to go to the galleries’ and that attracting younger people to the arts is a ‘challenge for our times’.
Mr Saumarez Smith said the RA hopes to attract younger audiences by pulling in more tourists who ‘tend to be younger’ and through more original shows from contemporary artists.
Among them is Marina Abramovic, a Serbian performance artist whose previous work includes the Lips of Thomas, which involved her cutting herself and lying naked on a block of ice.
She plans to put a charge of a million volts of electricity through herself at the RA in 2020. It will be the first time a woman has appeared in its main performance space.
Of the accusations of ageism, Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said last night: ‘What [Mr Saumarez Smith] is saying might not be trendy or politically correct but it’s the absolute truth.
‘We do have an ageing population, wisdom comes with age and we need to value all our citizens equally.’
He added that, in its RA documentary, the BBC should be ‘making programmes that show impartially how we are as a country and not how they’d like us to be’.