{"id":3502,"date":"2013-12-05T19:03:54","date_gmt":"2013-12-05T18:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/?p=3502"},"modified":"2015-07-15T15:07:57","modified_gmt":"2015-07-15T13:07:57","slug":"martin-roth-the-man-who-is-conceptualizing-the-va","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2013\/12\/05\/martin-roth-the-man-who-is-conceptualizing-the-va\/","title":{"rendered":"In dialogue with Martin Roth, the man who is conceptualizing the V&A"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Martin<\/a>

Martin Roth, copyright V&A ImagesLOWRES<\/p><\/div>\n

After ten years at the guidance of the Dresden State Art Collections, in September 2011 Professor Martin Roth was appointed Director of the V&A Museum, London. Also thanks to ambitious exhibitions like the current one dedicated to Chinese painting, or the one by the daring contemporary artists duo\u00a0Elmgreen&Dragset<\/a>, he has been turning an historical museum, somehow a little dusty, into a cool cultural hot spot.<\/p>\n

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What do you consider special about the V&A?<\/em><\/p>\n

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The V&A\u2019s collection is very special. It started in the 1850s and just over 160 years later we have around 2.5 million objects. It\u2019s extremely high quality, very diverse and full of surprises. Some parts of it are well known, such as fashion and jewelry or Islamic design. But not everyone knows that the V&A also has a great art collection, for example. You can find paintings by John Constable, prints by Picasso and Warhol, street art and much more.<\/p>\n

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All these incredible objects are part of the story of design. Design shapes our world, and we all have an interest in kind of questions the V&A asks – what is the process that takes you from design idea to finished object? How have designs changed over time? How can we design the future?<\/p>\n

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Since the 1850s young students, designers and artists have been using the Museum as their toolbox. Anish Kapoor, Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, Jonathan Ives, and more, all came to the V&A to study the collections. Seeing how historic objects were made and designed took their work in new directions. And there will be some famous creative artists of the future standing right now in the galleries and study rooms \u2013 we just don\u2019t know their names yet.<\/p>\n

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What would your ideal museum be like?<\/em><\/p>\n

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It comes back to the collection. Any museum, but especially an ideal museum, needs an outstanding collection. And the right people to study, preserve, interpret and display it. The collection and the work that goes on around it give a museum meaning and purpose, connect it to the past and take it into the future. An ideal museum also needs to be flexible and it needs to respond to the world outside. So it\u2019s a combination of a solid, high quality collection and expertise, infused with a kind of experimental, alert, risk-taking spirit. And the less red tape the better. We\u2019re talking \u2018ideal\u2019 here, of course\u2026<\/p>\n

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What is the best way to link fine arts with contemporary art? Is it a new trend?<\/em><\/p>\n

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I\u2019m not sure we need to work too hard at it \u2013 there has always been a link. Art history is a continuous story; though it\u2019s not a story of progress so much as one of inspiration and evolution. A few weeks ago I heard a lecture by George Steiner, one of my heroes, and he made a striking comparison between art and science. Science, he pointed out, always moves forward \u2013 theories are disproved, knowledge advances. But one artwork doesn\u2019t invalidate the one that went before. So there\u2019s always the possibility of an exciting exchange between past and present. At the V&A we often show contemporary and historic works side by side so you can see that exchange happen \u2013 at the moment we have an installation in the garden by contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing, created in response to the historic works in our major exhibition Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900.<\/p>\n

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Should European countries share their artistic heritage? Could it be a way to promote their integration?<\/em><\/p>\n

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Yes, for sure. That\u2019s something I believe strongly in. While we continue working with Shanghai or Rio de Janeiro, let\u2019s not forget Milan or Vienna and the incredible shared heritage that we, as Europeans, have here on our doorstep. People have been trading and travelling and exchanging art and design across Europe for centuries. You only have to ask that Monty Python question, \u2018what did the Romans do for us?\u2019, to realize the truth of that. To understand the history of opera you have to understand how it evolved in cities across Europe \u2013 and that\u2019s just one example.<\/p>\n

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Could you link an old master to a living artist and explain the link?<\/em><\/p>\n

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If you walk through the main entrance of the V&A you\u2019ll see an instruction in the mosaic of the floor \u2013 it tells you to look up. And then, looking up, you see through several floors to the ceramics galleries and a circular red shelf filled with white porcelain ceramics. It\u2019s a permanent installation called \u2018Signs and Wonders\u2019 by the artist and writer Edmund de Waal. He calls it part of his love story with the ceramic collections at the V&A, which he used to visit as a child of 7 or 8. After climbing up endless stairs to look at endless rows of pots \u2013 European porcelain, Japanese porcelain, Chinoiserie – he somehow, maybe unlike most other children, became fascinated. He\u2019s just influenced by one old master \u2013 unless it\u2019s the V&A! \u2013 but several. I think that\u2019s often the way influence works, it comes from many different sources before it\u2019s channelled through one person.<\/p>\n

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What have you learned from the exhibition on Chinese painting?<\/em><\/p>\n

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There\u2019s so much we can all learn. Years of research have gone into making this exhibition and its curator, Hongxing Zhang, is one of the world\u2019s experts. Perhaps that\u2019s one of the lessons \u2013 never hesitate to invest time and money in pioneering, quality research. And I think visitors are surprised to see how Chinese painting has evolved, how dynamic it is, and the humour in it. There was a popular misconception that the tradition was a stable and recognizable one and rather serious. But this exhibition surprises you constantly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After ten years at the guidance of the Dresden State Art Collections, in September 2011 Professor Martin Roth was appointed Director of the V&A Museum, London. Also thanks to ambitious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1797],"tags":[1369,1235,1483,1482,1485,1481,1484],"class_list":["post-3502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-dialogue-with","tag-alexander-mcqueen","tag-anish-kapoor","tag-george-steiner","tag-hongxing-zhang","tag-jonathan-ives","tag-martin-roth","tag-vivienne-westwood"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3502\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}