Kelvingrove Renovations: A Letter

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Dear Sir,
       Over two weeks ago the Herald arranged to give me an early view of the Glasgow Kelvingrove Art Gallery renovations, enabling me to write about these in the Saturday Herald. My article described a display called Conflict and Consequences in the main museum level, in which armour and weapons were shown beside or under horned and tusked beasts with a fearsome shark. On a visit with the BBC yesterday I find that the display has now been shifted upstairs close to the Holocaust display with photograph of Anne Frank, and the Koran found outside Kabul in the 19th century by an unknown Scottish soldier, also a case containing silver wire standing sculptures of human bodies, or perhaps only of their nervous systems.

     The curator, Mark O’Neill, told me these arrangements were better than the old ones where natural history exhibits, human artefacts and paintings were displayed separately – better because more democratic, since people would have to find their own connections between such very different things, instead of having the connections made clear. I regard this as a Post-modern idea. I am an old-fashioned chap who insists on being just modern.

     Yours truly, Alasdair Gray