100 IDEAS - the role of culture in the 21st century

At London's Southbank Centre a festival of ideas and debate has just begun. It includes talks, performances, Q&As and multi-media events to explore the role of culture in the 21st century. Ralph Rugoff, new director of the Hayward Gallery, talks about what he hopes the series might achieve and how it aims to be part of the wider discussion to discover just what public institutions based on a 19th century model are for in our more democratic and participatory era.

It seemed important whilst building work is going on to keep a place open where people can come and think. It is an opportunity to use the galleries which remain open for different but related purposes so that people can understand that galleries are not just places to see things but also to think about them. At this time the Southbank is engaged in rebuilding its whole artistic programme and vision and the Hayward Gallery needs to change too. This is an opportunity to explore what cultural Institutions can be in the 21st century and what kind of role they can play. To do this in public - not just talking to ourselves but inviting all kinds of people to take part with differing points of view and encouraging the public to ask questions - has the side benefit of being a listening exercise to help us redefine what we do, extend and find new ways. This approach seems more exciting than a private think tank exercise.

For me as a curator I take my lead from artists. They offer the best models. It seems to me that art today is really open and discursive. It is looking at other disciplines - social sciences, music, and social work. Art has become a huge open arena where all these issues can be discussed and is an umbrella which brings all these disciplines together. I hope 100 ideas will act as a fertile, productive, yeasty mix. When people ask why people are creative, where does their creativity come from, if you look you see it is essential that creative people talk to lots of different people from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. So 100 ideas is an experiment along those lines to see what comes out.

Why have you selected these particular events?

The particular choice of people involved is a completely organic process. There is no fixed number of events. We are going to collect ideas at each event and put them on our mini-website so that people can add to them. We will stop when we have 100 and then do a newspaper exploring them and hopefully come up with 100 questions and 100 next steps/actions. The goal is to start something that can keep going and not be a one-off dead end, an event with no after life.

What is your own background? How have you come to this point? Why London now?

Born in New York, started out as a writer on the arts then became an independent curator, made documentaries, became director of a Contemporary Arts Institute in San Francisco for six years with programmes which got me noticed enough to get appointed to this job at the Hayward. London is an incredibly energetic place at this time. Much more internationally connected now than say ten-fifteen years ago and much more connected to the rest of Europe. I would like to see the art world here take itself a little less seriously. It currently has a bit more glamour than it needs. With a little less glamour gatherings could be more relaxed, enjoyable and more interesting. Despite the high cost of living in London there are more European artists and curators here now, and more galleries and institutes showing artists from all over the world. I imagine that being in the EU has only encouraged this mobility and led to greater mix and diversity.

This diverse mixing is part of globalisation. How it is affecting culture?

I was in conversation with an artist from Holland last night about the political changes in that country over the past five years. How it is no longer the open liberal country it was. Our responses to globalisation are driving our culture and our politics at this time.

Globalisation is the extreme face of capitalism erasing any local value or tradition in the overall organisation of profit. It represents a threat to any sort of traditional society and therefore it is no wonder people feel threatened. Cultural distinctions are being dissolved or are seen as irrelevant to this core thing - globalisation, which is deciding how we live. Compensatory action is the growth of fundamental values we see in the Middle East, in the US and in the response of the Right in Holland and France. When social values are being eroded we look to find a scapegoat to unify us momentarily and for us right now that is fundamentalism.

How do you see the current relationship of culture and politics?

I feel we have a passive attitude to our relations with politics and our relations with culture too. We see it as something we do in our spare time and not that we are cultural beings. We do not live outside culture rather it is the water we swim in, the air we breathe. Having the experiences that cultural institutions offer can be part and parcel of our life as political and cultural beings.

However, the gap between the macro level and the micro of daily life is still something we have no clear sense of how to navigate and define. One of my few hopes for changing this is the daily politics surrounding consumer choice. Making decisions with our wallets - punishing the behaviour of corporations whose policies we do not approve of. They are not subject to election and yet some sense of social responsibility is necessary. They have incredibly powerful positions. We have to be careful corporate social responsibility is not just PR or window dressing. If we can develop some more informed sense of consumer choice whereby it will be in the interest of corporations to be transparent about their policies and form a very different relationship with the public. Governments throughout Europe are cutting back on what they offer the public. There is room for interesting things to happen in that gap.

Are museums and galleries making best use of the internet and new technology in their relations with the public?

Personally feel way behind in terms of using the internet as a public platform and also as a way for public participation. All museums should have a facility for featuring public reviews for example. I feel though that as we are all mindful of budgets and we do not have a model where the internet makes us money, we are guilty of not sufficiently developing it as a communications tool.

With the internet life seems to have become much more of a public space. Anyone can put the most personal of feelings or activities on the internet and into the public domain. Is this affecting the role of galleries as public spaces?

I think it is another of the pressures which is making us re-examine the 19th century model of the public institution and redefine where we are going in the 21st. The Hayward is reopening in May with a Show by Anthony Gormley where he puts 30 sculptures on buildings all around London. This is the gallery reaching out beyond its physical location. The Hayward has also in the past been a little more isolated than other galleries and museums in London. This too is going to change with a range of shows which we will share with European museums and museums from the rest of the world. We are working with museums in both Italy and France in the coming year.

One of the 100 Ideas events is a discussion with the historian and philosopher, Theodore Zeldin on the art of making portraits. He believes each age needs it own type of portrait to greet the world differently as people develop new aspirations and our consciousness and ability to reflect grows. The Hayward wants to work with him on a new kind of global portrait gallery of portraits by ordinary people of themselves based in the awareness that humans are infinitely complicated and not entirely what they appear to be on the surface. Instead of meekly agreeing to be judged or categorised we put forward our own interpretation of ourselves and reveal as many sides as possible of an individual. We want to enable people from every walk of life to say what they want the world to know about them and in this way hopefully help to diminish misunderstandings and re-invent relationships.

100 Ideas: programme of events

Ralph Rugoff became Director of the Hayward Gallery in May 2006. From 2000 -2006, he was Director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, where he was also the founding chair of the Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of the Arts. He has written for newspapers and magazines, and has contributed essays for books and periodicals on a wide range of contemporary artists, including Circus Americanus (Verso), a book of essays on popular visual culture. In 2002 he served as a curatorial adviser to the Sydney Biennale, and in 2005 he was a curatorial correspondent for the Turin Triennale. In December 2005, he was awarded the $100,000 Katherine Ordway prize given in recognition of important contributions to the field of contemporary arts and letters.