Benny Higgins has had a finger in so many Scottish pies, it is hard to know where to begin. Standard Life, Tesco Bank, Scottish National Investment Bank, Buccleuch Estates, Sistema Scotland. The Festival Fringe, Fine Art Society, the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) — in his time, he has presided over all of them.
The one that has meant most to him is the one he has decided to hand over. This year he will step down from NGS, where he has been trustee and chair for 12 years, a period in which the galleries have struggled with a funding crisis so severe that at one stage it had to close the doors on one of its modern art galleries. He has much to say about that.
“I’ve been very lucky to have been able to do lots of different things but I honestly think the day I got the call to say that I was becoming the chair [of the NGS] was the proudest moment of my life,” Higgins says.
Higgins despairs of the way the Scottish government views the arts
BIG SCOTLAND
He recalls being told by his friend, the late Sir Angus Grossart, he was probably not going to get the job and to prepare himself for disappointment, so when the invitation came it was unexpected. Now, as he moves on, he feels not only a sense of pride but “a keen sense of loss”.
That may be because it is the kind of job he could not have begun to contemplate as he grew up on a housing scheme in Toryglen, Glasgow, where his father was a waiter and his mother worked in a butcher’s shop. In those days, his best hope of advancement lay as a promising footballer with the Celtic youth team.
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However, his grandfather, a docker on Clydeside, was of that generation of working-class intellectuals who took a keen interest in books. “I was one of 18 grandchildren and I was the only one that he took an interest in,” Higgins says.
“He wrote a letter to me when I was 15 which began with the words, ‘As I reach the last few furlongs of my life, I want to write to explain why I would like you to read and I’ve attached a list of authors and books that I want you to read through. But please, if you’re reading a book and you’re not enjoying it, put it down and find another one’.”
Higgins launching a community football programme with Craig Levein, left
TOM FARMER/THE SUN
That, says Higgins, now 64, “was very good advice”. Books diverted him from football to the arts and, though he read mathematics at Glasgow University and went on to become an actuary, he learnt to draw and spent many hours at the Kelvingrove Museum, where he acquired a love of pictures that has never left him.
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“I have a genuine passion for art itself,” he says, “but I’ve also got a passion for the benefit it brings to people — the idea that art is for everybody. I think if anybody, from any walk of life, were to walk into a Caravaggio exhibition and have it explained to them, they would love it.”
He is particularly thrilled that, as he hands over, the current Andy Goldsworthy exhibition at the national gallery in Edinburgh is drawing record crowds. “I don’t think Goldsworthy is a household name,” Higgins says, “but he’s an amazing artist and that show is just doing so well. It gives me a sense of reassurance about the human condition.”
Which is why he despairs of the way the Scottish government views the arts. The national galleries, he points out, are “structurally underfunded”, their staffing costs rising by 53 per cent in five years while funding has increased by only 44 per cent. The cost of the entire galleries’ estate has doubled in that period — mainly because of utilities — and there is a £17 million backlog in funds needed for maintenance and weatherproofing. Meanwhile, the government has called for increased efficiencies as a means of saving costs.
Andy Goldsworthy’s exhibition at the National Gallery is drawing big crowds
STUART ARMITT
This week Anne Lyden, the NGS director-general, told MSPs she could not “honestly” rule out closing galleries after years of “systemic underfunding”. NGS runs several galleries in Scotland, including the National, Portrait, Modern One and Modern Two.
“They demand efficiencies but efficiencies are just a euphemism for cost-cutting,” says Higgins. “What we get is propaganda about the fact that [ministers] think the arts are important but you can’t judge people by what they say. You have to judge them from their actions.”
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What concerns him immediately is the future of the Art Works, the purpose-built repository of more than 130,000 pieces at Granton, near the waterfront, which NGS wants to open to the public, much in the way the V&A has at London’s Olympic Park. It would mean opening access to the vast majority of art held by NGS that the public rarely sees, an innovative project Higgins believes would “look after Scotland’s art now and for future generations”. It will cost about £90 million and if the government is unwilling to invest in it, “there’s no one else”, Higgins says. He sees it as a measure of where the government stands on the wider importance of the arts.
“It perfectly matches the national performance framework, which may not be an original idea but it does make sense,” he says. “It’s like an old-fashioned scorecard of things you want to achieve in a community or society. It’s about regeneration, it’s about education, it’s about wellbeing. It’s about conserving and protecting the £6.6 billion of art that we have, the 130,000 objects, of which only 3 per cent are on display. And [ministers] need to get behind it.”
The V&A’s equivalent London project cost more than £1 billion, most of it provided by the UK government — making the NGS request modest in comparison, he argues. “If we could get 50 per cent from the Scottish government and 20 [per cent] from the UK government, then we could find the rest,” he says. “I think we take Scotland’s cultural heritage for granted. The arts are an essential part of what Scotland means at home and abroad. We should be doing more of that.”
So what of his own next move? Recognising the importance his Glasgow schooling had on his life, Higgins is looking at becoming involved in educational projects. “It’s one thing I’ve only dipped my toe in,” he says, “but if I felt that I could make a contribution in that sphere, then that would be very appealing.”
There are clearly more pies to come, awaiting the Higgins finger.