This morning I went up to the South Square Centre in order to complete the signage for the Unit 9 exhibition, which open to the public on Friday. The current restrictions on movement because of the pandemic certainly give a new feel to everything. As visitors walk into the gallery they are confronted not only with the usual information leaflet about the exhibition, but with a bottle of hand sanitiser!
When I got home I settled down at the computer to send out notices of the event to friends in the locality. As I did so it occurred to me suddenly that it is entirely possible that we might face a problem I for one have never previously encountered in an art gallery. Because of the current distancing regulations we might be compelled to ask visitors to wait their turn elsewhere in the Centre because of the limitations of space in the gallery itself. Can you imagine that? People being asked to queue in order to get into a local art exhibition! We live in hope.
Moving off into the realm of fantasy, prompted by the above, I began to imagine that a situation might arise in which two visitors are tossing a coin in order to decide which of them is to be allowed to purchase one of my pieces.
As Cleo Laine once sang, “I can dream, can’t I?”
Seriously, however, Bradford is one of the local regions in which there has been a recent up-turn in the number virus cases, and we are compelled to return to an earlier level of restriction in some respects. My more immediate concern is whether visiting a gallery is sufficiently high on the scale of preferences of people for them to make the effort to attend an exhibition.