V&A East Storehouse is the open-access depository for the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection of art, design, fashion and performance. With a total floorspace of 16,000 square meters (over 30 basketball courts) and spanning four levels, it is based in Hackney Wick, London, on a site originally used as the media centre for the 2012 Olympic Games. It is free to enter.

Walking up the stairs, through an airlock, I found myself in a world of steel, glass and gantries; of spacious aisles, long shelves and open crates – all artificially lit from above to protect the exhibits.

I passed marble heads, ornate furniture and colourful vases; cherubs, chessboards and chimney pots. Here was an example of Palestinian embroidery, a collection of Yemeni funerary stelae. Over there, costumes and cannons; street signs, an abacus, a wireless and some grandfather clocks. Through the glass floor-window, a carved colonnade from Agra.

Everything was carefully catalogued and bar coded – but, at the same time, the collection was completely jumbled up.

Arms and armour, rococo mirrors, a gleaming motorbike and a ‘70s mug collection. A Minitel 1 computer terminal. A small child’s West Ham top, sponsored by ‘BAC, the window people.’

A middle-aged woman walked past, observing to her husband:

‘They seem to have had a lot of boxes in the olden days.’

I was feeling a little disorientated. I yearned for some commentary to make sense of it all - something to aid insight and understanding; to illuminate theme and variation. However, the collection is arranged by the sizes and weights of the objects. And, with the exception of some highlight-displays at the end of each storage rack, there is no attempt at formal categorisation or neat narrative.

A sign asked for Feedback:
‘What new stories could we tell about our objects?’

Underneath, someone had complained:
‘Silence is a terrible narrator.’

To be fair, visitors are invited to scan QR codes to learn more about some of the objects. But I’m too old for that now, and it reminds me of Covid. There is also an Order an Object service, by which you can arrange an appointment to see up to 5 pieces from the collection in a private study room.

Most people were, like me, just wandering around, taking it all in, peeking at anything that caught their eye.

Past some ceramic tiles, tribal masks and a toy truck. A gilded altarpiece, a corset and a double bass. Blue plaque, bike, Budha, Bowie setlist.

At length, I overheard a Young Person exclaim in delight:

‘Every 2 seconds I’m seeing something and thinking: Yo, that’s so cool!’

Adopting this mindset, I determined to let myself go; to give in to the infinite variety; to be curious, available for interesting juxtapositions, for serendipity.
In the accompanying literature, one of the architects described the experience as ‘an immersive cabinet of curiosities.’ I found myself grasping for other analogies. It’s like channel surfing; walking through the internet of things; a garden of culture. It’s like Charles Foster Kane’s vast collection of antiquities. It’s the multiverse. It’s everything everywhere all at once.

I came across a couple of set-piece show-stoppers: the Kaufmann Office, a complete honey-coloured interior, designed in the 1930s by Frank Lloyd Wright for a Pittsburgh retail magnate; the Frankfurt Kitchen, a pistachio exercise in minimalist functionality, created in the 1920s by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, and installed in 10,000 flats.

And then there was a melancholy display of remnants from a now demolished Brutalist housing estate in nearby Polplar, Robin Hood Gardens. And some toiles that fashion students have crafted, based on original designs by Balenciaga – an imaginative exercise to better understand his technique.

Shoes, chandeliers, a painted tiger and a bus conductor. I could go on…

I’d certainly recommend a visit to the V&A East Storehouse. You just need to adopt the right mentality: set aside the Strategist’s craving for order and explanation; relax, be inquisitive, and open yourself up to stimulation and inspiration.

Finally, back to the Visitor Feedback:
‘What new stories could we tell about our objects?’

In a flamboyant scribble, a Young Person had requested:
‘Haunted, demonic and possessed, puhlease!!!’

Exactly.

'A police car and a screaming siren.
A pneumatic drill and ripped up concrete,
A baby wailing and stray dog howling,
The screech of brakes and lamp light blinking,
That's entertainment.
That's entertainment.
A smash of glass and a rumble of boots,
An electric train and a ripped up phone booth,
Paint splattered walls and the cry of a tomcat,
Lights going out and a kick in the balls.
I say, that's entertainment.
That's entertainment.
Days of speed and slow time Mondays,
Pissing down with rain on a boring Wednesday,
Watching the news and not eating your tea,
A freezing cold flat and damp on the walls.
I say that's entertainment.
That's entertainment.’
The Jam, ’That’s Entertainment’ (P Weller)

No. 577

Andrea del Verrocchio The Virgin Adoring the Christ Child ('The Ruskin Madonna')

On a recent visit to Edinburgh I came across Verrocchio’s The Virgin Adoring the Christ Child. It first struck me as a rather beautiful but conventional nativity scene. Then I noticed that the mother and child are located in a classical ruin rather than the accustomed stable. It transpires that this ruin represents the Roman Temple of Peace, which, according to myth, collapsed at Christ’s birth. It’s an early depiction of what we would call ‘creative destruction’: the demolition of the old order in order for the new to thrive.

The concept of creative destruction is familiar to us nowadays. It’s an acknowledged truth of business that progress demands disruption; and the idea seems entirely appropriate to our times of transformational change.

I want to suggest a more qualified evaluation of its merits.

When, as a teenager, I first encountered creative destruction, I was thrilled. In 1982 Paul Weller disbanded The Jam at the height of their critical and commercial success. We couldn’t believe it. They were the definition of youth, anger, romance and cool. It seemed an extraordinary act of self-sacrifice.

On a windswept Brighton peer a trench-coated Weller explained to a Nationwide reporter:

‘I think we’ve done all we can as the three of us and I think it’s a good time to finish it. I don’t want to drag it on and go on for the next twenty years doing it. And become nothing, mean nothing, end up like all the rest of the groups. I want this to count for something.’

Paul Weller, 11 December 1982

Weller made total sense. He had to destroy The Jam in order to pursue his new soul-inflected instincts; and, perhaps more importantly, in order to preserve that band’s iconic status.

At university I learned that the term ‘creative destruction’ derives from Marx and was popularised in the 1940s by the economist Joseph Schumpeter. It referred to systemic revolutions whereby old structures are endlessly replaced by the new. For example, the rise of the railway came hand-in-hand with the demise of canals.

In the course of my advertising career it was obvious that construction required deconstruction. We had to rip up rulebooks, rewrite processes, restructure departments, in order to create room for new ideas, platforms and perspectives.

However, while I was always excited about creativity, the charms of destruction eluded me. Why, I wondered, do we have to destroy in order to create? Isn’t destruction the very antithesis of creativity? Isn’t the whole concept somewhat macho?

Paul Weller is watched by a group of mods in the courtyard of a pub in Oxford, 6th October 1984. Photo: Steve Pyke

I put my reservations down to my own emotional squeamishness, an unwillingness to take tough decisions. But there seemed a similar psychological shortcoming in others who attacked those same tough decisions with alacrity.

It was certainly easier to subscribe to creative destruction when its impacts were gradual and manageable; when its effects were conceptual and procedural.

However, increasingly, with the accelerating power of technology, as opportunities to create have become manifold and magnificent, so the destructive impacts of change have also grown more widespread, deep rooted and precipitous. Witness bookshops, music, taxis…

I’ve come to believe that my emotional squeamishness may have been a valuable constraint. The concept of creative destruction should not be a licence to take an indiscriminate wrecking ball to industries, communities and careers.

We need to think more seriously about the jobs that technology destroys, the livelihoods disrupted; the transferral of wealth and power from the many to the few; the compromised rights and unpaid taxes.

We need to take a broader, calibrated view of creative destruction; a proper weighing of its impacts. We need to ask whether the net value created exceeds the net value destroyed.

We also need to be more mindful of how decisions are made and how transitions are managed. Should the chief beneficiaries of change determine its value? Should consumers be both judge and jury? Isn’t the role of Government to manage the market rather than stand by and watch?

Fundamentally, we need to beware of ourselves. In Verrocchio’s painting the infant Christ sucks his finger as if he has drawn blood. It’s a premonition of his own demise.

First published in The Guardian Media & Tech Network Friday 16th October 2015

No. 54

V&A East Storehouse: Everything Everywhere All at Once

I Guess Everyone Subscribes to Creative Destruction, But It’s the Destruction Bit I Worry About