Let the buyer beware

Glasgow's new musem is not so much a monument to modern art as to one man's personal taste and a city council's purchasing power.

How on earth did it happen? That is the principal question that comes to mind as one wanders through the lacklustre galleries of Glasgow's new Museum of Modern Art. How did a city with such a rich and varied artistic heritage, from the Glasgow Boys and Charles Rennie Mackintosh to Stephen Conroy, manage to land itself with such a hopeless farrago? For, from one of Scotland's finest neo-classical buildings, set in an enviably central location, and with a more than reasonable budget for acquisition and development (pounds 3m and pounds 7m respectively), its director, Julian Spalding, has created nothing so much as a gigantic missed opportunity.

In literal terms, the "how" is answered by the director himself in his rabidly polemical new book on the venture: "The Leader of [Glasgow] Council, Pat Lally, called me into his office and said, `You said you needed more money for buying modern art - would pounds 3m do?' - I was too surprised to reply." But evidently not too dumbfounded to accept. And thus, courtesy of Glasgow Council, began the great roller-coaster ride of spending and the creation of what is now popularly known as GoMA, but which might better be called "Spalding-World".

For, make no mistake, this gallery, for all its pretence to be one of Europe's largest collections of contemporary art - "the largest outside London", it claims (pace the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh) - is nothing more than a huge indulgence of one man's taste. And what taste it is. Over four floors and 24,000 square feet of gallery space, Julian Spalding has laid himself bare. Not content with merely shooting himself in the foot, he has blown off the entire limb. Welcome to your tour of a fundamentally flawed aesthetic sensibility.

You can guess from the moment you walk in the door what awaits you within. The "spectacular mirrored mosaic entrance hall" by Niki de Saint Phalle is kitsch on a grand scale; like her pediment outside, it's perfectly appropriate... for a 1970s department store or a discotheque. Beyond, Spalding has divided his four galleries into elements - earth, air, fire and water. Earth, as we might expect, is on the ground floor. (Fire, below stairs - presumably a sort of artistic Hades? - was not yet ready on the museum's fourth day of opening.) The first observation one can make is that the works on view in the Earth gallery tell us nothing about earth. What they do tell us is how not to display works of art.

Spalding has taken the elegant, high-ceilinged Corinthian chamber of David Hamilton's 1829 Royal Exchange building, until recently the Stirling library, and transformed it into a cross between a conference centre, an antiques fair and a church hall. Beyond Nicola Hicks's equine sculpture (which lacks the gravitas required of the opening exhibit of a public gallery), huge grey screens, set at oblique angles and fixed with depressing permanence in lumps of granite, support a dozen of the collection's largest, and most important, paintings. What, I wonder, do Ken Currie, Peter Howson, Steven Campbell and John Bellany make of the way they have been presented? Not much, I suspect.

Having exercised an all too rare discernment in purchasing such works as Currie's The Bathers and Campbell's Painting in Defence of Migrants, Spalding instantly destroys their impact by displaying them with no more thought than an art student might show in decorating his bedroom with reproductions of favourite paintings. Spalding, in fact, seems to treat all works of art as if they were no more than mass-produced images.

The tedium of the first gallery is unrelieved - even by the quaint tableaux of the Mexican Day of the Dead at the far end. The staircase by which you leave amounts to no more than a pastiche of that in the Royal Academy's Sackler Galleries. At the top, the architects have cleverly destroyed the harmony of Hamilton's subtly proportioned lantern well by inserting into one wall a niche, from which no one but a child can look down into the Earth gallery. It is hard to imagine a more jarring contrast with the neo-classical elegance of the well's wrought-iron railings than this smooth, cedar-clad aberration.

Seeking solace, you might make you way through an absurdly small doorway into a gallery devoted to Michael McMillen's mundane scale model Inner City. Opposite, in another room, an audience appears to be enjoying the jokes of Eduard Bersudsky's automata. Ah. This must be the "art for the people" extolled by Spalding in his glossy new book on the gallery and the "philosophy" behind it. "Art is made for people by people," he writes, with gob-smacking insouciance.

His populism is writ large upstairs in the ludicrously titled Water Gallery. Beryl Cook's accordion player in a tam-o'-Shanter (one of five works here by the artist) is a Glasgow cliche if ever there was one. But look at the label. The artist has given us a few words of wisdom: "If only," she writes, "he'd been wearing a kilt as well." Well, Spalding is an Englishman and I would not expect him to recognise the sort of patronising comment to which we Scots have long become accustomed. But he might have spared a thought for his precious "people". One thing is clear, though: whatever it might be, and while it does include a number of works by contemporary Scottish artists, this is certainly not a specifically "Scottish" gallery, although that might have offered a much healthier criterion than the ones Spalding has chosen. He defines his museum as "representing the art of the world". Perhaps that explains the inclusion of so many fourth-rate paintings by pseudo-naive artists of Eastern extraction and the presence of such ridiculously overrated painters as Dora Holzhandler.

What little there is here to please the eye and raise the spirits comes in the shape of works by John Byrne, Alison Watt and a few nice photographs by Nick Wapplington and Joseph MacKenzie. But, for a more representative flavour of what GoMA has to offer, take Andrew Hays's self-portrait. You could pick up better on the Bayswater Road. "I painted this while other work was drying, on a day when I had nothing else to do," says Hays. Quite. And it shows. So why buy it?

Upstairs, the Air gallery is best described as "a big room with some art in it". Here again are the ubiquitous screens with labels that look like baggage tags.Among the works here are three paintings by Bridget Riley, pieces by Bruce McLean and Margaret Mellis, and a Craigie Aitcheson crucifixion. A brave attempt at a 1960s display is hidden in an unnecessary stairwell, while two important installations, which I recognised as being by Ian Hamilton Finlay, are neither labelled nor well presented.

One of the few positive aspects of the gallery is its walk-through lay- out, and descending the stairs, past a huge Australian Aboriginal dot painting by Paddy Japaljarri Sims, to a strong group of eight works by Alan Davie - two of major international importance - is one of the few moments at which one's spirits lift.

Spalding quite rightly declares, "The only criteria for modern art entering a public art gallery is its quality," adding that "this has, in the end, to be a question of personal judgement based on experience." This jars somewhat with his admitted criteria for including so many paintings by Beryl Cook - that her works sell by the million in reproduction. This surely is not a "personal" judgement, but one based on popular taste. It is certainly no criterion for the creation of a major public art collection: you might as well hang a gallery with the original photograph of that classic 1970s icon, The Tennis Player Scratching Her Buttock.

Of course art is for the people, but a visit to an art gallery should be a different experience to that you have at home when looking at your Athena prints. This is not elitism. It is common sense. As it stands, Glasgow's new gallery is more apt to baffle the visitor and to perpetuate the myth of art's intractability than to render it more accessible.

Spalding states that the role of the curator is to spot new talent. "A high price," he writes, "like a gold frame, is not a guarantee of quality." True, but here lies the essential paradox. For Spalding is in effect saying, "This is art for the people - but only because I say so." Setting himself up as the arbiter of taste, he rejects the proven means by which the quality and value of art has long been determined: by a gradual consensus of curator, collector, dealer and critic. Instead he decries these selectors as being "sustained by their own mini-economy and supported by public funding", censuring them as "constrained by the fear of getting it wrong". It may be the most arrogant piece of nonsense written on the condition of art in the past century.

Don't get me wrong: Spalding's initial intention - to create a new gallery of modern art for Glasgow - was admirable. The evidence, though, is that he lacks the intellectual rigour to carry it through. If the museum is to be of any lasting worth, and to carry art to the people in the way that Spalding professes to wish to do, it must be taken in hand, before it is too late.

n At the Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow