Sydney Art Museum Receives Big Funding Boost<br />By SEBASTIAN SMEEJUNE 13, 2017<br />SYDNEY, Australia — After four years of uncertainty<br />and controversy, a proposed expansion to Sydney’s premier art museum, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, has received a major boost with a local grant of 244 million Australian dollars (about $184 million).<br />The expansion, called Sydney Modern, will also help the city catch up to its chief rival, Melbourne, as a destination for great art,<br />and help prevent it from missing out on both exhibitions and gifts of art for want of adequate space, in the view of supporters of the project.<br />To make the grant promised for the Sydney Modern project more palatable, the government announced<br />a new Regional Cultural Fund of 100 million Australian dollars (about $75.4 million).<br />Although Sydney’s state art museum is perennially popular — it attracts about<br />a million people a year — it looks cramped and outdated in its current form.<br />And in the last two decades it has lost ground — in terms both of visitor numbers and quality of experience — not only to Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria<br />but also to art museums in smaller cities like Brisbane and Canberra, which have benefited from their own expansions.<br />A former prime minister — once known as a great champion of the arts — has publicly lambasted the project.<br />The state treasurer, Dominic Perrottet, said the expansion would "turn our 19th-century gallery<br />into a global museum of the future," the Sydney Morning Herald reported on Tuesday.
