While your editorial 'Time to refine the business of culture' (September 9) clearly supports changes in the way art museums in Hong Kong are funded and run, it could have explained that the economic gains of an investment in the arts are potentially far greater than the expenditure.
As we look forward to the development of the West Kowloon cultural hub, it may be worth re-examining the traditional free-standing model of a museum, which essentially isolates the arts from other urban pursuits such as shopping and dining. That 2 million people visited last year's exhibition of Picasso's huge Parade ballet curtain at Two IFC should tell us something about where museums should be sited. The large crowds who visited the art installation The Box and the Australian artists' project Urban Dream Capsule at Langham Place offer further insight into how to build museums and cultivate an interest in the arts.
Museums should offer a place for quiet contemplation and serious thought, so merely setting up exhibition cases in shopping malls may not be the answer. But expanding opening times and bringing art to where people already congregate for business or leisure would bring in enough people of the appropriate demographic to allow corporations to see the benefits of an expanded role in funding the arts.
For example, it might be an excellent idea to use the Central Market site at the bottom of the Mid-Levels escalator for a new museum of contemporary art in Hong Kong. Locating it at the level of the escalator (with its daily traffic exceeding 45,000) or on the top two floors of whatever replaces the Central Market, with a viewing deck overlooking the city, as with the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, would provide a ready audience of office workers - who would find it convenient to visit the museum during lunch breaks or after work - as well as tourists.
A famed local jewellery designer somewhat whimsically suggested that replacing the Wan Chai pedestrian overpass to the Immigration Tower with a widened, multilevel walkway-cum-art-museum would make it one of the most visited museums in the world within a month of opening. The idea has a lot of merit.
Other models for change, such as expanding funding for alternative spaces for young artists, providing larger spaces for commercial galleries next to new museums and offering a large venue appropriate for art auctions or gala art functions, could enhance local artistic development and raise the level of critical and intellectual discourse by making exhibition spaces for more experimental work and acquisition possibilities available for local artists and curators.
