Earlier this month, the jewel in this ongoing revamp of the quayside was unveiled: The V&A Dundee, a spectacular design museum just opened on the quayside that is an offshoot (albeit an independent one) of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Containing the largest exhibition space in Scotland, the museum hopes to garner attention for a city that has for too long had a low profile, not just across the U.K. but even within Scotland itself. In other words, Dundee is trying to do more or less what the city of Bilbao did with its Guggenheim Museum. [...]
Certainly, the 148,000-person city is not the industrial powerhouse it once was. A century ago, it was known nationally for “jute, jam, and journalism,” a reference to its role as a center for textile production, as the headquarters of a major (and still extant) media company, and as the place where marmalade is (apocryphally) said to have been invented. The city’s industrial base was decimated in the 1980s and, just like the rest of the U.K., Dundee is now battling galloping inequality. With many manufacturing jobs gone, an estimated 28 percent of the city’s children live in poverty. In the most deprived areas of the city, such as the housing projects of Whitfield, that child poverty level reaches over 96 percent. [...]
If V&A Dundee is straining under competing tensions, that’s partly a reflection of the stringent standards to which cultural spending is held in an age of relative austerity. In order to gain government funding, cultural institutions in the U.K. must demonstrate their worth as motors of social and economic transformation far beyond their primary role. Katrina Brown, director of the Glasgow visual-arts organization The Common Guild and former curator of Dundee Contemporary Arts, insists the proper focus for the museum’s success will be in providing something for Dundonians themselves.
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