Desperate Times Call For Desperate PR Missteps

When the Art Gallery of Ontario announced, at the end of November, that it would be temporarily shuttering its Canadian wing, it took some time for the significance to reverberate with the public. But now that it has sunk in that the public will no longer have access to one of Canada’s most important collections, negative reaction is building. Sarah Milroy writes that the AGO has some legitimate business motives behind its decision, but that it is making all the wrong moves for all the right reasons. What could AGO have done differently? “The contrast to Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum is instructive,” says Milroy.