The art museum as a means of communication (1947–1958)

The chapter explores the ways in which a distinct rhetoric about access and openness was mobilised at London’s National Gallery after the Second World War through the use of visual technologies including photography and television. It specifically considers the popular Exhibition of Cleaned Pictures of 1947 and BBC’s television quiz show AVM? (1952–1958) as examples of the gallery’s intended programme of emancipatory viewership that consolidated, in parallel, the museum’s role as an authoritative locus of expertise. Rather than seeing both episodes as mutually exclusive, the chapter investigates the internal logic of democratisation and professionalisation as a series of co-dependent operations that simultaneously enabled openness and closure, freedom and coercion, at once defining and blurring the boundaries that separated the public from the expert.