We've been hearing for years about the curator as star, but they were mostly flying curators, drafted in to shape huge biennials and other spectacular events, rather than institutional figures. That latter side of arts admin, though a booming industry, has been quietly booming, and hasn't had quite the same cachet as wheeler-dealing globe-trotting curators vying with each other to nominate the Next Big Thing. That may be changing. The Hugh Lane Gallery's extraordinarily energetic hyping of the Francis Bacon Studio at the time of the exhibition last year convinced many people that the Bacon Studio was up and running in the gallery when, in fact, its opening had been quietly deferred until this Spring. But the essential point was that, with something like brilliance, the gallery quickly realised the show-biz nature of the whole thing and ran with it.

There were also less positive signs of the nature of change. IMMA Director Declan McGonagle once remarked that he'd like to see art occupy as prominent a position in the general culture as sports, that it would be the subject of popular interest rather than just of specialist publications. Yet when, late in the year 2000, IMMA found its way into the newspapers, and onto the airwaves, it wasn't because of the attention-grabbing antics of any budding Irish Damien Hirst, but rather on the basis of a boardroom battle within IMMA itself. Concurrently, another arts-admin controversy erupted into public view when Project's Valerie Connor found herself being summarily dispensed with (which, allied to the Project's apparent downgrading of the visual-arts programme, engendered an unprecedented storm of protest across the arts community).

Without wishing to delve into the rights and wrongs of these very real disputes, and the very real hurt and upset of those involved, it does seem that taken together the controversies represent something of a landmark in the Irish art world. The visual arts have until recently seemed exempt from the commercial pressures that have always been part and parcel of, say, theatre. It seems fair to say that, prior to the controversies, the general public perception was that arts admin was a fairly placid, well-mannered profession, if not positively genteel, practised by like-minded enthusiasts organising all manner of improving cultural events. Overnight, this cosy perception was transformed and the cultural arena suddenly looked more like a corporate battleground. That is not necessarily accurate, but things have certainly changed, among them the level of expectation of arts institutions, which now form part of the universal mixed economy. From one viewpoint, Lars Nittve landed the best job in the art world when he was appointed Director of Tate Modern in London (he said so himself at the time). Yet a number of things must have given him pause for thought as he moved into Bankside. One is the huge budget needed to run the huge building with its huge collection and huge staff, a budget that, in the mixed economy, the institution has to substantially generate itself. Another may well have been the ambiguous position of Sir Nicholas Serota, who, though he has been a dynamic and perhaps indispensable figure in establishing the impressively high profile of modern art on the British cultural scene, is also a forbidding, slightly chilly presence on that scene. Now it looks as if NittveÕs ambitious bid to put his stamp on the Tate, with the didactic, perhaps excessively didactic Century City (surely inspired by the wonderful Cities on the Move which featured at Louisiana when he was there) might have come a cropper, meeting with a decidedly mixed response. Of course the scale of operations in London is incomparably greater than in Dublin, but the issues are comparable, and indicative of the evolving role of arts institutions and those who run them.

Aidan Dunne