V&A in South Kensington

As a graduate student of art & design in London at St. Martin's School of Art, following exhibitions and shows at the Victoria & Albert Museum was a requirement. A requirement without saying, meaning of course, you must know everything going on there without being told you must attend to its programs.

In recent years, the V&A as it became simply known, has become a friendly museum that caters to the taste and sensibilities of a paying audience. It wasn't always this way and had gone through a transformation to become a exhibition space appealing to popular tastes. V&A was never a high arts museum like the Tate or the National Gallery of Art. Within its walls exhibitions of design, clothing, industrial design, graphics and crafts were assembled.

However, in the early 80s when I was attending grad school, the museum was known for its extensive survey exhibitions of design and defining the trends in architecture, furniture, graphic and industrial design. It was at the V&A I first experienced the Memphis Group of Italian designers like Ettore Sottsas from Milano. I also saw annual exhibitions of industrial design of young British designers who went onto design groundbreaking commercial products like Macintosh computers, iPods, and iPhones.

As one V&A employee remarks in the video below, 20 and 25 years ago when I was living in London, the museum did not try to reach out to the public and instead required that you grasps its importance. That was true of many British libraries and museums in that time.