Times Online
March 17, 2006
The Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust Award 2005
"What are Museums for?" was the question set by the Charles
Douglas-Home Memorial Trust Award in 2005. The winner of the annual
essay prize established in honour of the former Editor of The Times
who died in 1985 is James Delingpole, a novelist, freelance journalist
and regular contributor to this paper
Why
is it that so often when I visit a museum these days, I leave feeling
ever so slightly cross? I'm thinking, say, of those wretched animatronic
dinosaurs we parents have to queue for at the Natural History Museum,
completely ignoring the genuine prehistoric skeletons either side.
And of that display cabinet at the National Maritime Museum where
nautical objects have been plonked apparently at random in the same
glass case in order to illustrate a curator's trendy post-modern
point about the hopelessness of trying to extract meaning from artefacts
so far removed from our own time and place.
But, hey, why pick on those two? Pretty much everyone in the museum
world is at it these days and has been for some time: the exhibition
at the Horniman, which proudly claimed - though with no supporting
evidence, that voodoo was one of Africa's "great contributions
to world culture"; the Gainsborough exhibition whose curator
presumed to judge the mores of 18th century society by the PC standards
of modern Britain; the decision by Manchester City Art Gallery to
hang its paintings lower, the better that they might be enjoyed
by children and the disabled; Palmer Majority Report (of which more
later); the National Gallery's campaign to the keep Raphael's Madonna
of the Pinks apparently less on the grounds of its artistic or historical
merit than on its subject's status as a single mother; almost anything
containing the words "access", "relevance" or
"inclusivity."
What
all these diverse irritants have in common is that they are part
of the same worrying, hidden debate. "Hidden" because
its arguments, though familiar to the point of cliche to anyone
who works in the museum industry, are pretty much unknown to the
people outside it. "Worrying" because the conclusions
reached by these self-serving guardians of our national heritage
are so often dangerously at odds with the needs of the public they
claim to serve.
Someone
in the audience of scholars, curators, directors and other museum
professionals made this point rather well at an Institute of Ideas
debate at the Wallace Collection last year on the subject Should
We Junk Collections? "Most of us here are quite used to this
sort of talk," she said, "But if it were to be overheard
by the people who actually visit our museums a lot of them would
be quite horrified."
She
was referring in particular to the argument put by Maurice Davies
- deputy director of the Museums Association - that museums ought
no longer to consider it their primary duty to preserve their collections
in perpetuity. Rather their main job should be to engage audiences
with evangelical zeal, taking their collections out of the galleries
and storerooms and into hospitals and schools, letting them be experienced
and enjoyed by as many people as possible. And if one or two objects
got damaged or even destroyed in the process, well, so be it.
To
those of us reared on the fogeyish assumption that a museum's collection
is sacrosanct - that the British Museum will always have its Elgin
Marbles and the Pitt Rivers its shrunken tribal heads - the idea
of ancient vases being mauled and chipped by mobs of primary schoolchildren
or Roman coin hoards being flogged off to fund the acquisition of
a more socially relevant collection of graffiti art is indeed a
pretty shocking one. But for the new breed of museum professional,
this line of thinking is very much the fashionable orthodoxy. Indeed,
if you consult the Department of Culture, Media and Sport's strategy
documents Museums For The Many and Understanding The Future, you'll
find it's actually new Labour policy.
As
the former Labour arts minister Mark Fisher argues in his introduction
to Britain's Best Museums And Galleries there has in the last decade
or so been a potentially disastrous shift in attitude among those
reponsible for governing our museums. Where once museums were valued
as repositories of objects they are now increasingly judged not
by what they are but by what they can achieve; by how effective
they are as agents of social change.
At
the vanguard of this new movement is David Fleming, formerly of
Tyne & Wear museums, now director of Liverpool Museums, and
bete noir of traditionalists everywhere.
"He really is the anti-Christ," one told me, "At
Tyne & Wear he made it his mission to replace his middle class
visitors with politically approved C2s and D2s and this he did very
successfully. How? By ditching half the objects and turning it into
a sort of amusement arcade with buttons to push and flashing screens."
Fleming
replies that under his stewardship Tyne & Wear's attendance
figures almost trebled and that he gained working class audiences
without alienating his core middle class one. "It irks me immeasurably
when people say I don't care about objects," he says. "I
fully accept that a museum's job is to collect, preserve, record
and pass on unimpaired to future generations things of value."
But just as important, he argues, is that a museum should be used
as a "powerful tool for learning", especially for the
socially disadvantaged. The sort of person who stands most to gain
from a museum, he reckons, would be a child with little interest
in education, from a family background where parenting skills left
something to be desired.
This
sounds to me more like a job for a decent primary school teacher
but perhaps - as I'm sure Fleming would see it - I am irredeemably
out of touch. And maybe he has a point. Why, in heaven's name, should
publicly-funded museums pander to an educated elite? And why shouldn't
they be used to help pick up the poor and needy by the bootstraps
and change society for the better?
To
help make up my mind, I went to look at two very different institutions:
one, a museum of the old school, the Lady Lever Gallery in Port
Sunlight; the other, Fleming's pride and joy, the former Liverpool
Museum, recently refurbished and expanded in a pounds 35 million
development programme and now trendily renamed in the approved definite-article-free
style (cf Tate Britain; Tate Modern) World Museum Liverpool,
From
the outside World Museum, Liverpool still exudes the fading Victorian
civic grandeur of its neighbour the Walker Art Gallery. Stepping
inside, however, the impression I got was that I'd entered some
kind of super-primary school, possibly a lavishly funded co-project
with the European Union: a soaring, modern five story atrium with
each department represented by illiteracy-friendly pictures - a
fish, a bug, a dinosaur, a hand, a star. ("Children from St
Vincent's Primary School and their artist in residence Alan Murray
produced these banners," said a sign).
I visited
the Clore Natural History wing, a sort of state-of-the-art school
biology lab with lots objects (silicified wood; ammonites; skulls;
shells) for visitors to paw and molest. A microscope was focussed
on a stinging nettle. "Ouch!" said the caption. An exhibit
on sea spiders asked "Are the spiders in mum's bath going to
get this big?" A class of seven-year olds milled about, opening
and closing specimen drawers, pushing and prodding but without focussing
on anything in particular. Two or three young, friendly curators
were trying to engage their attention. "Do you get much time
to do any research?" I asked one. "Not as much as we'd
like," he admitted.
Upstairs,
in the Ethnographic galleries, a video of a man dressed in tribal
robes introduced the African section with a lame rap number. "You
might think of them as a simple people/But in essence they were
truly complex," it went.
If
you wanted to be annoyed by this sort of thing, you didn't have
to look hard. A section on weapons seemed to think that their main
purpose was for "dancing and initiation rites" rather
than fighting. The one on masks claimed: "These objects show
how important identity is to us and how we make identities for ourselves
and for gods and spirits." Ancient Egypt, it is stressed, "was
an African culture". The Roman Empire was "multicultural."
And
besides the glib pacifism, woolly cod-sociological gobbledegook,
cultural relativism and political correctness, the texts seemed
designed to insult the intelligence of anyone past primary age.
This is no accident. Museums are advised by local authorities to
couch their labels in language no more complex than can be understood
by a child with a standard reading age of twelve.
"I
do worry that there's nothing there for those people who have that
bit of education, who would like to know more in depth," a
Liverpool curator said to me. But as he went on to admit, middle
class museum goers are going to keep coming no matter what you do.
The key to expanding audiences is concentrating on the C2s D2s and
Es. "It's why all our promotional leaflets are in simple language
and done in reds, yellows and blues like the world Barney [the horrible
purple American TV dinosaur] lives in. You see in lower income households,
it's the kids not the grown ups who decide whether or not visiting
a museum is a worthwhile leisure activity."
A tunnel
journey away on the other side of the Mersey, the Lady Lever Art
Gallery in Port Sunlight could hardly be more different. This fabulous
collection of pre-Raphaelite painting and decorative art, amassed
by the soap powder magnate Lord Leverhulme, is most definitely not
the sort of place you'd want to entertain a child. It's fusty, unglamorous
and object-rich; the labelling is austere to the point of dullness.
"The Lever does tend to attract the blue rinse brigade,"
admitted its curator of paintings, Julian Treuherz, as we took lunch
in the subterranean museum cafe thronged with elderly matrons.
Treuherz
was far too politic to tell me what he thought of his boss across
the river, but it seems unlikely that he and Fleming would find
much to agree on. His worry is that marketing-led, access-driven
policies are having a dangerous effect on scholarship. "A lot
of museums pay lip-service to it but their staff are too busy on
access-type projects to do any serious research. If all our museums
end up with is interpreters and presenters without any primary experience
of the paintings or ceramics in our collection, then we're not doing
our job properly."
Symptomatic
of this, he argues, is the new trend for hanging paintings lower
so as to make them more accessible for children and the disabled.
Thus are politically correct considerations given a higher priority
than scholarly or aesthetic ones. "A lot of paintings were
made to be hung at a particular height," Treuherz says, "hanging
them lower just spoils them." But if - as is so often the case
among young curators these days - your MA is in Museum Studies and
not Art History, how can you possibly be expected to understand
such nuances?
And
if you're going to keep pandering like this to perceived public
needs, he wonders, why stop there? "A lot of people might say:
'Oh it's very off-putting having art in these big buildings with
columns and steps.' Are we supposed to scrap those as well?"
This
question is not altogether a rhetorical one. Those "big buildings
with columns and steps" are an example of what the Department
of Culture, Media and Sport's latest consultation document - Understanding
the Future: Museums and 21st Century Life would probably term "intellectual
barriers to entry". By this it means those qualities in a traditional
museum - the grandeur of the building, the way everything is arranged
and labelled, perhaps even the other visitors' middle class accents
- which the people who generally don't use museums might find off-putting.
Of
course it never occurs to the document's authors that these "intellectual
barriers to entry" might actually be a desirable thing. Rather,
it is taken as a given that these are problems which must be overcome
at all costs. A museum's job, in other words, is to make itself
equally attractive to every single member of the population. And
until it has done so, it might be said to have failed.
The
flaws in this access-for-all argument, are nicely exposed by Josie
Appleton in her paper for the Institute Of Ideas - "Museums
For The People?" By endlessly trying to second-guess the needs
of their audiences, she argues, museums are failing in their primary
function of preserving, displaying, studying and where possible
collecting the treasures of civilisation and nature.
Resources
that might have gone into the maintenance of collections are instead
being diverted to fashionable "access" projects; curators
are now so busy interacting with the public that they barely have
time left for study; and the harder they try to make themselves
more user-friendly and socially relevant, the less they fulfil their
purpose as wholly distinctive institutions which provide a refuge
from the mundane cares and concerns of ordinary life.
What's
more, these changes have been imposed on museums without any obvious
justification. "Nobody outside the cultural elite ever demanded
that museums become more accessible, relevant, inclusive, diverse
and interactive," she argues. "All these views were hatched
within government and the museums and then projected out on to the
public."
But
just how serious is this crisis in our museums? Is it, indeed, a
crisis at all? During the course of my research I visited all sorts
of institutions from tiny local museums like the one in the castle
in Haverfordwest to trendy, state-of-the-art ones like the Baltic
exhibition space in Newcastle ("Well that was a complete waste
of money" I heard one elderly Geordie complain to another,
walking out of a conceptual art exhibition for which admission was
free) to cherished classics like the Natural History Museum. And
I have to admit that on the surface, I found little suggest that
the picture wasn't rosy. Even World Museum, Liverpool, for all my
quibbles, has been quite beautifully lit and displayed with a magnificent
collection which is well worth a detour.
And
I did love the well-deserved Gulbenkian Prize-winner - The Big Pit,
Wales's museum of coalmining history, where you get to put on a
helmet, lamp and battery and travel in a cage lift 300 feet underground
to inspect a seam. Everything about the place is first rate, from
the genial ex-miners who act as your guides to the deft way in which
the labelling manages to negotiate such fraught subjects as the
Miners' Strike and the nature of the relationship between miners
and mine-owners without sounding horribly chippy or political.
Nearer
home, I never tire of the Imperial War Museum, the very model of
the well-balanced modern museum. What I admire - most of the best
museums manage this I think - is the way it manages to appeal simultaneously
to so many different interest groups without compromising the needs
of any of them: small children can use it as a form of giant adventure
playground climbing in and out of bombers and mock-ups of submarine
bunk beds; older ones can immerse themselves in the sights, sounds
and smells of the Trench Experience; while tragically-obsessed war
buffs like me can can tour each gallery very slowly, poring over
every letter in the display cases and listening to the archive recordings
made by War Veterans.
The
two Tate Galleries perform a similarly brilliant all-things-to-all-men
trick with their marvellous Art Trolley, run by volunteers at weekends.
Your children are handed out high-quality crayons, clipperboards
and project sheets based on specific works of art; and while your
brats are temporarily distracted - and learning to look closely
at a painting or a piece of sculpture for perhaps the first time
- you, the culture-starved parent, manage to snatch a rare and precious
moment in which to gawp at some decent pictures.
These
are the sort of things, I suppose, which the DCMS would cite as
proof as the success of its access-and-education-first strategy.
I'd counter that they're no more than any intelligent, reponsive
museum director would have encouraged to happen even without the
pressure of heavy-handed government directives. And that in any
case, just because our museums seem healthy on the surface and positively
abrim with sexy, modern, access-friendly initiatives doesn't necessarily
mean there isn't something rotten going on behind the woodwork.
A good
example of this rottenness - one which I doubt even one in ten museum
visitors has ever heard of - is the 2003 Palmer "Majority"
report by a Blair-government appointed Human Remains Working Group.
The subject it discusses - the disposal of human remains from museum
collections - may seem quite harmlessly esoteric. But what it says
about current thinking on museums, both in the government and among
curators, has extremely worrying implications for all of us.
It
was called a "majority" report because one of the only
two scientists on the working group, Sir Neil Chalmers, refused
to associate himself with its findings (some of which were subsequently
enacted in the 2004 Human Tissues Act, which led to a new Code Of
Practice for the profession). Museums, it argued inter alia, should
be allowed to release human remains; and researchers should obtain
consent from biological or cultural descendants.
All
pretty harmless stuff, you might think. And anyway, why shouldn't
oppressed native peoples be allowed the comfort of seeing their
ancestors taken out of the storerooms and display cabinets and buried
with dignity? But this is just the sort of sloppy, touchy-feely,
post- colonial-guilt-induced thinking which has created such havoc
in anthropological departments across America. It has led idiocies
like the repatriation to Mexico, by Harvard's Peabody museum, of
two thousand bodies which had already proved themselves vital in
an important study of osteoporosis; and the case in Idaho of a 10,000-year-old
woman discovered by archaelogists and then ceremonially re-buried
by local native Americans (Shoshone), despite the fact her ancestry,
beliefs and religion, if any, were completely unknown.
Thus
have the shrill cries of a few vocal minority groups successfully
stalled the march of progress. For, as Tiffany Jenkins so brilliantly
argues in her Institute Of Ideas paper Human Remains - Objects To
Study or Ancestors To Bury?, this is more than just a cynical, bien-pensant
sop to the grievance industry. It represents, in fact, a wholesale
disavowal of those very Enlightenment values for which museums were
first established. The pure search for knowledge and scientific
truth has given way to relativism, postmodernism, post-colonialism,
superstition, and the politics of victimhood.
But
then this is of a piece with developments not just in the world
of museums but in culture across the board. It has to do with a
strain of leftist counter-cultural thinking which has been with
us since at least the Sixties and was partly inspired by the generation
of French philosophers like Foucault and their notions that there
is no such thing as empirical truth, merely a succession of equally
valid viewpoints and that authority is no more than the brutish
creation of the reigning hegemony which should be questioned at
every turn.
If
you subscribe to this version of reality clearly you're going to
have major ideological problems with the very idea of museums. Not
only do they tend to be rigidly hierarchical and based on collections
amassed at the very height of white male European imperialism, but
they are also informed by fairly rigorous notions of what is historically
important and what is not; what is worth preserving for posterity
and what is dispensible.
Museums
are, by definition, bastions of tradition and connoisseurship. If
only all the directors and government apparatchiks responsible for
them acknowledged this simple truth, museums would not be in the
trouble they are in today. Unfortunately, these noble institutions
have fallen victim to the cant of the age: on the one hand the market-driven
utilitarianism of the right which has forced them to justify their
existence in crude economic terms; on the other, the guilt-ridden
orthodoxies of the cultural left.
Are
the people of the North East really so culturally illiterate that
they cannot relate to a museum unless, as at Tyne & Wear, it
includes works which "may not necessarily be famous or highly
regarded but instead have been chosen by members of the public simply
because they like them or because they arouse certain emotions or
memories,"?
Would
the British public really have begrudged the National Gallery's
purchase of Raphael's Madonna Of The Pinks, if they had not been
reassured by the presence in the next room of single mums from Waltham
Forest modelling their own related images of mothers and children?
Does
anyone really think when they enter a museum: "Goodness me.
All the curators and staff here look hideously white. If only the
museum could enforce some kind of positive discrimination programme
in order that people from ethnic minorities might redress the balance?"
In
themselves these are minor details. And you might say the same of
those handsome - but surely counterproductively distracting - animatronic
dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum; or the trend for more simplistic
labelling; or the slightly shabby look so many museums have nowadays
because the only money available is for large capital projects or
access- and education-driven ones, not routine maintenance; or the
push-button gimmicks by the labels at the V & A which always
seem to be broken; or the way, at the Tower of London, you're not
allowed the chance to contemplate or imagine any more because of
the plethora of busy labels directing you exactly what to think.
All these things in themselves are indeed no more than trivial distractions.
But put them altogether and what emerges is a picture of an industry
which has lost its sense of purpose.
Not
even our foremost directors have remained quite immune to this new
strain of muddled thinking, as I noticed during the course of a
fascinating interview with the British Museum's director Neil MacGregor.
Sprightly, charming and impossibly erudite he may be, but when I
asked him what he thought museums were for, I could almost have
been listening to the trendy PC orthodoxies of his counterpart at
Liverpool Museums.
Yes,
he said, a museum has to act as a form a library and to be "about
serious engagement with objects and the ideas that they embody",
and to inspire a sense of wonder. But at heart, he argued, a museum's
job is to serve a far more radical function: to create the "right
level of doubt" in its audience, to cause them to question
the very nature of their society and ultimately to "change
the citizen."
This,
he argued, is the function museums used to perform up until the
mid-Nineteenth century when they mutated into the "aesthetic
and intellectual laagers"we remember them being for most of
the Twentieth century. Originally, they were "intensely political"
places, enabling free citizens to make up their own minds on such
issues as the battle between geological evidence and scriptural
"truth."
"As
we get back to a world where there are more and more people in positions
of higher authority saying there is one revealed truth, the need
for the Enlightenment insistence on truth as the best hypothesis
to date is greater than ever," he said. But does this not smack,
rather of that Foucaultian world where there's no one authority,
only a number of conflicting versions thereof?
MacGregor
describes himself as a "relativist and proud of it."
When he displays an object, his constant worry is which of the "many
truths" about that object he should "privilege".
Should he favour the poetic truth over the historical one? Just
how reliable is that historical one anyway? And should it be addressed
towards the university-educated audience or should it be expressed
in much simpler language when, after all, over 50 per cent of the
museum's visitors do not have English as their mother tongue. "No
solution is right," declares MacGregor, sagely.
Oh
really? While I wouldn't for a moment question the sincerity and
essential decency of MacGregor's Weltanschauung he sees it
as part of the greater cultural battle against fundamentalism in
all its forms, and he does put his money where his mouth is, viz
the Museum's recent bridge-building collaboration with Iran it
nevertheless seems to me symptomatic of the intellectual decadence
that has afflicted our culture.
It
reminds me of the dispiriting way history is taught in school now
where instead of the teacher giving you an idea of what actually
happened you're handed a variety of different texts and accounts
of the same event and invited to make your own mind up. A nice idea:
creating a nation of free thinking intellectuals. The problem is,
it's predicated on the lamentably optimistic notion that our ailing
education system has given the nation sufficient intellectual grounding
on which to form such subtle judgements. It hasn't.
And
if even the director of our oldest and greatest museum is uncomfortable
with the idea of the museum as a superior form of authority, is
it really any wonder that the whole system is in such trouble? How,
after all, can the very real problems facing our museums - what,
if anything, they can afford to collect for future generations;
how to safeguard those collections they have when their maintenance
budgets are either frozen or dwindling; how far they should capitulate
to politically correct nostrums like "education" and "access";
the issues of deaccessioning and repatriation - be sensibly dealt
with unless the people in charge of them have consistent, unembarrassed
sense of museums' absolute, immutable, cultural importance?
At
the very beginning I set out to answer the question: "What
are museums for?" To me it seems blindingly obvious. They exist
today, just as they did 250 years ago, for the preservation, collection,
display and study of precious objects. If in the process they also
manage to create some kind of beneficial social change be it bolstering
its visitors' education, self esteem or sense of community, then
all to the good, but these are no more than side effects, not a
museum's raison d'etre.
What
I realise now, though, is that the problem isn't the many different
answers the museums industry is finding to answer this question.
The problem is the question itself. To ask it is already to presuppose
that a museum can only justify its existence in some form of utilitarian
value; it implies that culture can be measured; that a museum can
be submitted to cost benefit analysis; that it ought to be micromanaged
by the state if, according to the political precepts of the moment,
it is found wanting. But museums are above all this nonsense. At
least they should be.
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