EXHIBITION going is a modern form of pilgrimage. Surely the Royal Academy's marketing strategists have missed a trick here: replicas of the exquisite pilgrims' badges on show at the Age of Chivalry would have been perfect souvenirs for exhausted worshippers at the shrine of art. This magnificent panorama of English gothic is only one of a record number of large exhibitions on show in London this winter. And this is of course only the offshore edge of a world-wide pattern. 

Of the changes in exhibition trends identified by this Magazine ten years ago (Editorial, July 1977), two have become even more firmly entrenched: the involvement of museums in exhibitions and the rise of commercial sponsorship. As to the first, the V & A's dramatic withdrawal from the major exhibition treadmill will perhaps be counter-balanced by the new exhibition rooms in the Sainsbury building at the National Gallery. Will the Gallery be forced by the mere existence of these spaces into a much more active policy of mounting exhibitions and agreeing reciprocal loans than has been the case in the past? 

Three further phenomena have emerged in the last ten years: the multi-venue old-master blockbuster, usually organised from both sides of the Atlantic; the Japanese factor - economic pre-eminence accompanied by an apparently insatiable appetite for western art; and - perhaps the most alarming new development - the fund-raising touring exhibition of 'treasures' and 'masterpieces', where star items in an impoverished museum's collection are trundled round the world like so many bearded ladies in a travelling circus. The combination of the last two implies an abandonment of the usual stringent criteria for loans. It used to be the case that responsible museums would lend only to exhibitions with a serious art-historical purpose; but fund-raisers now often speak louder than conservationists. To take one example at random: Mantegna's Dead Christ in Milan was not lent - some will say rightly - to the Splendours of the Gonzaga exhibition at the V & A in 1981-82. It was, however, dispatched to Tokyo for a show called Space in Western Art last year, as were several paintings on panel from Italy. To us Space in Western Art may seem jejune as an art-historical wrapping, although we would no doubt find an exhibition entitled Space in Eastern Art illuminating and instructive. But would the Japanese lend their greatest treasures to Europe under such a pretext? Surely twenty years ago there would have been a public outcry if University Museums had sent their finest works touring the world in search of funds. Now it appears an in-evitable - or even enterprising - response to Government cuts.

In view of these developments, the one-day symposium 'Why Exhibitions?' organised by the Art Historians' Associ-ation seemed particularly timely. In the event, however, although a number of thought-provoking issues were raised, they focused less on 'Why', than on 'How', 'What' and 'By Whom'. Curators in the audience did air the problem of whether museums should be devoting their shrinking per-sonnel to exhibition organisation rather than to their per-manent collections. Where exhibitions have direct relevance to the collections, as in Hard Times - Social Realism in Victorian Art, the current show at the City Art Gallery, Manchester, which was among those discussed at the symposium, the answer must be yes. And it was heartening to learn that the Arts Council diversion of funds to the regions has produced fifty per cent funding for posts in a new exhibitions department in Manchester. But the two other exhibitions discussed at the meeting - the Age of Chivalry at the Royal Academy and the Edwardian Era at the Barbican - are of course at non-museum venues, and the issues raised were rather ones of interpretation, scope and audience.

Other major shows now on view in London point up the differences in approach currently espoused. If we take the two poles to be 'object-based' and 'thematic', one extreme must be occupied by the Winterhalter exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Here the paintings are allowed to 'speak for themselves'; but their visual language is not of great interest. Much more rewarding is Manners and Morals at the Tate, which, despite its title is a straight presentation of an 'old-fashioned' stylistic progression chronologically arranged (see the December issue, p.819). At the other extreme is the Edwardian exhibition at the Barbican, where Sargent's portraits are construed as images of white imperialist patriarchy. However sympathetic we may be to the views of the past thus enshrined, it is hard to see why private owners and public collections should lend their pictures solely to make such points. The selectors admitted to a growing realisation that 'paintings could not be the sole bearers of the historical message' that they were trying to convey. But if we are to reject what another participant anachronistically described as a 'Berensonian view of quality' as attachable to works of art, there seems little reason for exhibiting pictures rather than reproductions (or indeed, as was seriously suggested, 'blown-up texts'), except as embodiments of a kind of entartete Kunst. 

That such cultural pessimism is not the inevitable result of a questioning approach to art history is evident in the exhibition. Nor need we accept the caricatured polarity that was allowed to emerge at the 'Why Exhibitions?' symposium between academic art historians and museum curators. Art historians were presented as bien pensant theoreticians, rejecting the art object as ideologically unsound, more concerned with professional self-esteem than with the needs or desires of the museum-going public. Museum curators were perceived as intellectually neanderthal creatures, troglodytically inhabiting basements filled with unvisitable objects, using conceptually vacuous exhibitions to lure in an uninterested public. Nonetheless, it was cheering to see an equal representation of both camps filling a hall to discuss issues of this importance - even if the primary question 'Why Exhibitions' remained unanswered. To make accessible the rarely seen, to alter or enhance perception of the already known, to unite comparable works - these are among the accepted reasons. To raise money, to cele-brate meaningless anniversaries, to cement diplomatic alliances, to promote the careers of museum directors - how often are these the real motives?