A review of the David Bowie Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum
Last week, I finally visited the David Bowie Centre at the Victoria and Albert Museum East Storehouse in London. This acquisition by the V&A was the culmination of 15+ years of work by a team of archivists, researchers, curators, business managers and appraisers (me!) leading to an unparalleled, legacy-enhancing, permanent exhibition and study centre in London. But how did it get there?
David Bowie was a hoarder and he had the foresight, vision and understanding that his costumes, lyrics, instruments, artwork, photographs, concert posters and other career-related memorabilia were important. In the early 2000s, he employed a fastidious and wonderful archivist to begin the process of cataloguing, storing and preserving his collection of “stuff”. As the archivist worked through documenting, cataloguing and storing over 90,000 items, all of the items in the Archive were photographed and long-term members of Bowie’s team added pertinent information to the database about different shows, concerts where certain costumes were worn, and photographs of Bowie wearing them. Bowie himself provided background information to build the stories behind the objects. The history of the objects was documented by the people who were actually there.
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Fast forward to 2013 and the Victoria and Albert Museum mounted the ground-breaking exhibition David Bowie Is… The exhibition toured the world and became the Museum’s most popular and highest grossing exhibition ever. The touring exhibition needed insurance appraisals so I initially worked on this Archive to provide appraisals for the exhibition and tours for insurance purposes. As the V&A sought to acquire the entire David Bowie Archive on a permanent basis, updated appraisals were required to understand the true value of the collection. In this case, the fact that everything was catalogued and photographed in a database made the appraisal process significantly easier, cutting times and costs. In 2023, at the culmination of all this work, the V&A announced that it had acquired the Archive for the nation.
This didn’t happen overnight. Along with Bowie’s vision for his Archive, it took a team of people many years to get the collection up to museum standards. One of the many stumbling blocks for a donation of this magnitude is the manpower needed to catalogue, photograph and process the collection. The David Bowie Archive had already done the work and the extensive database ensured that the archive could be seamlessly incorporated into the V&A Museum’s system.
Another obstacle to such a large donation is the space needed to store such an archive, a factor that institutions continually struggle with. In the case of the David Bowie Centre, no doubt the hugely successful touring exhibition demonstrated the importance of, and appetite for, such a collection but it also caught the attention of potential donors and supporters; the V&A secured funding of $12 Million from The Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group to acquire and display the archive. In this Music Archive space, this is practically unheard of.
So what can other musicians and bands learn from this and how do appraisals tie in to this process? Firstly, the initial investment is worth the long term goal of preserving your legacy. It is important to understand the long game. An archivist is crucial to catalogue the collection and build a comprehensive database. And it is crucial to make sure the stories are documented by the people who lived them before they are no longer around to tell those stories. I have been in countless Estate situations where the stories behind the objects are lost because the person who lived them is no longer around to tell them.
A specialist music archive appraiser should be brought in to ensure everything is valued adequately for insurance purposes. As the collection is properly archived, objects might go out on loan to museums and institutions - not only does the database help track these loans but having an insurance appraisal in place means that everything is properly insured as it travels to exhibitions. And if the end goal is to ensure the permanent legacy of the musician or band by securing a donation or acquisition with a museum or institution like the David Bowie Archive, a specialist appraiser can provide a donation or acquisition appraisal to help with tax and fiduciary responsibilities.
The David Bowie Archive is the gold standard for how music archives should be treated, from archival to storage to appraisal to exhibition and acquisition. As other musicians start to understand the importance of their “stuff”, we can only hope that more music archives will end up in museums and institutions for us all to enjoy.