There's a big new exhibition about consumer culture at the Victoria and Albert Museum called Brand.New. What do brands mean? How do we respond to them? Why do we buy one thing rather than another? It just might help to redefine the museum a little for the 21st century, and it most certainly needs it. Where, in terms of customer recognition and loyalty, is the V&A itself positioned these days? Do people know what that logo means, what it stands for as an institution? Do they know what they are buying into?
So before I preview Brand.New for you, let's consider the V&A brand. Part of the problem lies in the name. The names of the Science and Natural History Museums tell you what they are. The Victoria and Albert Museum does not. Indeed, the name only confuses. You expect a museum of Victoriana, but that's not the idea: it's just that Victoria and Albert were not only monarch and consort, but were the Posh 'n' Becks of their day, invoked to endorse everything. This - the jewel in the crown of Albert's South Kensington cultural district - was a built memorial to a famously golden relationship.
The V&A is a vast, sprawling, Gormenghast of a place. It covers 11 acres, has 145 galleries, seven miles of rooms in all. It is a museum of decorative arts. Which means lots of different things. Not fine art especially, though that comes into it. And not music or literature. Nor does it deal mainly with "design" in the modern sense. That is because the late Victorians, in thrall to the noble-craftsman fantasies of John Ruskin and William Morris, didn't acknowledge design as a discipline or a profession. So what you find in the V&A is fashion, or rather, costume. There's furniture. There's sculpture. There are medieval and classical and oriental treasures. There's silver, gold, porcelain, glassware. Bits of ancient buildings, and a complete, very important 1930s American office interior by Frank Lloyd Wright. There are galleries devoted to the 20th century. There is a fine architectural drawings collection, now merged with the even finer collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects. There's a matchless photographic archive, and the Canon Photographic Gallery for exhibitions. There's an important resource in the National Art Library, which only initiates know about. There's this, that, and the other.
So it is the nation's attic, packed with all the stuff that was no immediate use to any of the more specialised museums and galleries, but was too valuable to throw away. It has no single, massively controversial piece, the way the British Museum in Bloomsbury has the Elgin Marbles. Yet it is a huge repository of knowledge and information, and once you get into it, it is endlessly fascinating. And it can mount some excellent temporary exhibitions that pull in the crowds, such as Art Nouveau earlier this year. It needs them badly: by 1999, with a £5 entry fee, the museum's visitor numbers had fallen well below the psychological 1m barrier. This makes it the least popular of London's big museums. Even the relatively dinky National Portrait Gallery - before it opened its popular new extension - outgunned it in 1999, but then the NPG, like the huge draws of the National Gallery (5m visitors) and British Museum (5.5m) is free.
