Art Gallery of NSW Director Michael Brand on the Importance of Ambition

In December, the director of the Art Gallery of NSW will unveil Sydney Modern, the $344-million extension that will double the gallery’s size and, he hopes, prove the critics wrong.

Current role: Director, Art Gallery of NSW
Tenure: 10 years
Age: 64
Previous roles: Consulting director, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto; director, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; director, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; assistant director, curatorial and collection development, Queensland Art Gallery.

How do you define good leadership?

It has to start with imagination. Not many organisations these days are going to hire a CEO just to keep things ticking over. You’ve got to be able to think of different outcomes and different futures. Communication is obviously critical – with your leadership team, with your staff, with your stakeholders. Have clarity and get on with working out what you’ve got to do and do it efficiently, with no drama.

Imagination is something a lot of leaders don’t talk about but in your arena, creativity is very important.

We’re basically a public-private partnership. We have to raise a lot of our funds – commercial revenue, sponsorship deals and all of that – so we’re at an intersection between the government world and the private world. The creative world meets the technical world. We’ve got to have security, we’ve got to have the right climate conditions for works of art. We have young school kids, we have art history professors. Everyone mixes in a museum and to me that’s one of the beautiful things.

When you were appointed director in 2012, Sydney Modern was already in the planning stages, wasn’t it?

I inherited a master plan that said, “We need roughly this much more space and we’ve looked at various options and we believe here is the place.” That’s what I was shown when I was talking to the board about this position. So I’ve been very lucky to do something significant but start from the beginning, without someone else having designed it. It was very much an open slate but it does take a long time to achieve.

It’s been 10 years in the making. Has that been frustrating for you?

I don’t think it’s frustrating. When you build a project of this scale that involves a public institution in the middle of an amazing city like Sydney, people are interested. You have a lot of stakeholders, whether it’s government funders or potential private benefactors. There are people who love the Art Gallery, people who love architecture, people who love urban design. Everyone is going to have an opinion so you have to be patient and bring everyone along on that journey.

This is a monumental project, something that will be around for generations. How heavily does that weigh on you?

It’s a huge honour but also a huge responsibility. A building site like this in Sydney – overlooking the harbour and the Botanic Garden with the city skyscrapers in the background – is very rare. Making sure we live up to that opportunity was the biggest challenge.

Do you think a lot about legacy?

I think a lot about institutional legacy. This isn’t a personal project. But I feel excited to have the chance to make a mark on a city and change the way people experience art.

Many leaders have to balance short-term business needs with long-term vision. What’s your comfort zone?

An art museum is almost by definition long-term, particularly one like ours. We’re 151 years old so we know exactly how public perceptions, ambitions and desires change over time. You have to presume that any decision you make now will be looked at in another 150 years. It’s also business as usual – you’ve got to keep the doors open and staff paid and the art safe – but you have to be on top of changes in society, too, because art intersects with politics, social ideas and ethics and they change quickly. An art museum trying to debate whether Impressionism is a good idea is a bit behind the game.

You talked about everyone having an opinion. How does that play out for you in your daily life, listening to all the voices?

Works of art embody all sorts of ideas, ambitions and points of view. When you put that in front of visitors or viewers in a public space, that’s when everything comes to life. You’ve got to respect the fact that people have different opinions and you want there to be debate. But what you’d like to have is informed, respectful debate.

There’s critique and there’s critics...

Exactly. There’s criticism, which is often personal, and then there’s critique. In Australia there’s probably a bit too much of the former and not enough of the latter. With a project of this scale, there should be critique. The public should be looking at what we’re doing and keeping our feet to the fire. What you don’t want is bitter personal criticism or only negativity.

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How do you deal with that? You’ve had former Prime Minister Paul Keating accusing you of creating a megaplex and current NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet accusing you of being out of touch over restaurant expenses. It’s got to sting.

You just have to focus on what your duties are, do those with integrity and ignore the other stuff. I mean you can’t take personally what you know is not accurate.

Do you lose sleep over it?

No. It comes with the game of running a high-profile institution in a dynamic city... You have to be careful not to get distracted by things that aren’t actually going to make a difference.

An important part of your job is getting people to part with their money. You managed to get more than $100 million for Sydney Modern so you’re clearly very good at it. How did you develop that skill?

I have a PhD in art history but I can tell you that wasn’t part of the training – Philanthropy 101 [smiles]. First up, it’s not something you do by yourself. It’s a huge team effort and the director has a particular role in that. If you think about it, what I do is just try to share a dream with people and it’s something I’m very excited about. I meet a lot of people and tell them what we’re hoping to achieve. It’s actually not that hard but it isn’t all gushy enthusiasm. It’s a very rigorous, disciplined system of finding the right people to talk to and knowing how to pace those discussions. This campaign has been fantastic but it’s a lot of work. It’s not like, “Oh, I’ve had an idea and I think that person is interested in contemporary art so they’ll give us bags of money, surely.” You don’t just turn up and get the money.

You work with such wildly divergent people. You have donors, I’d imagine a fairly robust board and government…

And artists. The wildcard [laughs].

How do you manoeuvre among all of those people and do you change your style depending on who you’re talking to?

No, I think you ought to have a consistent style. And if your style is open, reasonable, fair and decisive, I think that works with an artist, a banker or a corporate leader. And in an art museum a bit of informality works in both directions. I don’t think an artist wants to see me marching around 24/7 in a three-piece suit with a starched shirt. I think everyone respects the sense of genuine rather than playing to a particular crowd.

What would you describe as your biggest strength as a leader?

I’m a clear thinker and maybe a bit obsessive about that. It becomes a bit of over-organisation sometimes [laughs] but you do need to manage your time and thoughts. You can’t just have plans running all over the place; things have to be achievable. Sometimes being ambitious is seen as a negative here, whereas in the United States, if you’re not ambitious you’re not going to get anywhere. I think I’m institutionally and collaboratively ambitious. We want to make some big changes because you only get to do it once in a lifetime.

And what about your biggest gap as a leader?

Sometimes I over-prepare for things and then you run the risk of losing spontaneity and your natural personality, for better or worse.

When you’ve been in a role for 10 years, everyone starts asking how much longer you’re going to hang around. Your predecessor, Edmund Capon, was here for 33 years. How do you know when it’s time to go?

Sometimes it’s made very clear to you [laughs]. Hopefully not in this situation. I’m not aiming for 33 years but it is actually a lot of fun. What better place to work? Seeing art from all over the world, young school kids coming for their first art museum experience – that’s not something you want to flee necessarily. But you do need to think about succession planning and know that if you stay too long, you might complicate the process of finding the next person or deny leaders of another generation the chance to have their say.

You’ve described yourself as an optimist. Does it help when you’re leading an organisation to have that positive energy?

Absolutely. If you’re conveying pessimism, that would be terrible. One of the key things during the COVID situation was to keep that optimism going. Curiosity, optimism and imagination are not words that are used all the time but to me they are absolutely key.

How do you wind down?

I have a happy family life. And I listen to music a lot. I wouldn’t mind having more time to pursue more personal creativity. In this role, everything is very guided. You have to be so careful – one wrong word and you’re crucified. Could this upset the government, could it upset a sponsor, could it upset the art world, could it upset colleagues at work inadvertently? I’ve been doing some personal writing and it’s been good to think that I can write whatever I want.

Is it fiction?

No, I’ve been writing about my teenage years. That sort of writing is interesting because you’re not footnoting everything. It’s really liberating.

What advice would you give a new CEO?

Drop the “I” and the “my” right away – it’s all about “we” and “us”. Listen to people and ask questions. “What are your goals? Are there things that you would have liked to have done but didn’t have the chance?” If you talk openly, with curiosity, you can create a place where ideas can intercept and influence each other.

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