Sydney Art Museum Receives Big Funding Boost
By SEBASTIAN SMEEJUNE 13, 2017
SYDNEY, Australia — After four years of uncertainty
and controversy, a proposed expansion to Sydney’s premier art museum, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, has received a major boost with a local grant of 244 million Australian dollars (about $184 million).
The expansion, called Sydney Modern, will also help the city catch up to its chief rival, Melbourne, as a destination for great art,
and help prevent it from missing out on both exhibitions and gifts of art for want of adequate space, in the view of supporters of the project.
To make the grant promised for the Sydney Modern project more palatable, the government announced
a new Regional Cultural Fund of 100 million Australian dollars (about $75.4 million).
Although Sydney’s state art museum is perennially popular — it attracts about
a million people a year — it looks cramped and outdated in its current form.
And in the last two decades it has lost ground — in terms both of visitor numbers and quality of experience — not only to Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria
but also to art museums in smaller cities like Brisbane and Canberra, which have benefited from their own expansions.
A former prime minister — once known as a great champion of the arts — has publicly lambasted the project.
The state treasurer, Dominic Perrottet, said the expansion would "turn our 19th-century gallery
into a global museum of the future," the Sydney Morning Herald reported on Tuesday.
