UK’S ARTS COUNCIL COLLECTION GOES ONLINE

The catalogue for the Arts Council Collection, which contains about seventy-five hundred works by more than two thousand British artists, including works by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Damien Hirst, Grayson Perry, Paula Rego, and Gillian Wearing, is now available online, reports Charlotte Higgins for The Guardian. The collection has been administered by the Hayward Gallery in London since 1987, and its main purpose is to lend art to museums in the UK. According to the Hayward’s director, Ralph Rugoff: “It’s a people’s collection, a national collection.” Formed in 1946 and built up through taxpayers’ money, the collection, which has a budget of £150,000 ($295,000) a year, has no permanent home beyond a discreet storage facility in London and another in Yorkshire, both inaccessible to the public.