We were just talking the other day how utterly boring British museums have become over the last 20 or 30 years. This is because the administration of them has moved away from the collectors (and thieves) who originally set them up and been placed in the hands of directors pretending to be curators. Every university now offers a degree in museum curation. I spoke to a young woman whose educational background had little to do with history or anthropology, and she said she was considering a degree in 'curation'.
Curation is now a massive - if niche - commercial industry in itself. Air condition systems, lighting systems, conservation materials, media management, display systems, security systems, film and photography services, educational programs, catering - everything you can think of.
When I was a kid, they unlocked the doors of the British Museum in the morning, you wandered in and spent several hours peering at dusty exhibits randomly piled up in glass cabinets, then maybe had a cup of tea and a stale sandwich in the gloomy basement before going back out in the modern world. These days they tell you what sort of 'experience' you are supposed to have and keep most of the stuff which really interests children in storage.
Even the wonderful Pitt-Rivers museum in Oxford is beginning to go down the route from which there is no return to the past.
In an attempt to 'bring history alive', historians speak in the present tense when referring to events which may have taken place thousands of years ago. They are sanitising the presentation of history, and anything which happened or was created more than 2019 years ago is deemed to be B.C.E. - Before Common Era - so as not to offend non-Christians by calling it B.C. I wonder what our official Defender of Faith - the Queen - thinks about that.
I like to get my hands dirty.
One really has to wonder what the 'common era' represents; could it possibly be 'the birth of Christ'? The two dates are remarkably similar.
ReplyDeleteIt's a spooky coincidence.
DeleteYes, you said it all. I agree with everything. As a child I loved the way museums were, old, musty, mysterious things in glass cabinets, stuffed animals, Greek statues, vases, coins, lumps of pottery all thrown together. Now it is plastic, interaction, glossy, with pictures showing you what an Egyptian looked like and what a Roman looked like, nothing is left to the imagination and getting carried back in time yourself without interference. You just look at it and the museum woman's (usually a woman) view of what you should see is presented to you. The Curator's MA's are a joke. They just started one at Chelsea when I was there. As Morris said, I just want to stick my work on the wall myself, and I don't want a bloody curator or a spirit level.
ReplyDeleteNeil McGregor is ok, but also bloody ambitious.
DeleteI use BCE because I can't stand most Christians and don't want to have to utter, even incidentally, any of their dopey dogma.
ReplyDeleteI remember the V&A in the 1970s, and it was exactly as you described, a delightfully dusty old place that very little "wall text" so you were free to come to your own decisions and make independent interpretations of the objects on display.
I also deeply miss the old Museum of London. That was a real attic. It seemed that the stuff was put on display in the most random fashion, and one minute you'd be looking at medieval buttons and the next you'd be faced with wax molds of people's faces exhibiting tertiary symptoms of syphilis. I was last there in 2016 and couldn't find the VD exhibit. Too "triggering" for today's yoof, I guess. And the whole place had been cleaned up and brightened up, and every aspect of your visit was managed through signage and wall text and inter-active "interfaces" so that you only experienced precisely the sociobiological interpretation of history that the curators wanted you to experience. There is no serendipitous roaming in a museum any more. It's all mediated.
I cannot take devout atheists seriously I am afraid. You protest too much. The same goes for Stephen Hawking.
DeleteP.S. Next time you are in London, visit the Sir John Soane Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Marvellous. A private collection:
Deletehttps://www.soane.org/
Been there!
DeleteBeen there!
DeleteTwice?
DeleteAnd does anyone remember all those stuffed birds and animals so dusty because they had been there so long that some feathers had mouldered away and everything looked as though it never had been alive.
ReplyDeleteI remember a stuffed bear vividly from my childhood town of Haslemere, Surrey.
DeleteHaslemere Museum is - like Devizes - still nice and old fashioned I believe.
DeleteMuseums spend a lot of money trying to induce more people to visit. Even museums whose collections have no intrinsic appeal to children have Directors of Education to attract parents with young children. The Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia exploits their manuscript of Bram Stoker's outline and research notes for Frankenstein to mount an entire festival day complete with a local parade and ghoulish puppets.
ReplyDeleteI suppose such activities advertise that they are vibrant and relevant to the community and encourage donors and foundations whose support they depend on.
Last week I went to the MFA in Boston to see the Ansel Adams exhibit. They had hyped it so much that I couldn't get near any of the photographs at 10:30 on a Tuesday morning.
DeleteBram Stoker didn't write Frankenstein. It was written - in Bath - by Mary Shelley.
DeleteOops. Meant to say Dracula. #AgeingSucks
DeleteI know, but I couldn't resist shaming you on so many levels, especially since you lived here for quite a long time.
DeleteI had to stop and consider, did I go to museums as a child? Of course I did. The Cleveland Museum of Art was a favorite destination of my grandmother. The Crawford Museum (cars and wheels -- horse power of all variations), Natural History. Now the dinosaur skeletons soar from the ceiling and delight my grandchildren (when they were kids, anyway), but I was just as thrilled by walking past the mile of horse statues. The horses were outfitted in armor, and so were the mounted knights with spears. I wonder if CMA has returned that gear to England?
ReplyDeleteI remember donating my mother's massive collection of her parents' turn of the century glass to Stan Hywet, the home, then museum of the Seiberling family, (Goodyear Tire and Rubber). The curators were so grateful; they were hard pressed to set the tables; "the Seiberlings took everything when they left".
To equip an entire household with museum-quality stuff must be a grand thing.
DeleteOurs have become 'child-focused' to the degree that I feel put off by the presentation. There are signs with simplified language written in big, bright font and usually baring some sort of mascot to, I guess, get the children engaged abound. It feels like going to an amusement park where you can only go on the ride if you are 'this height'.
ReplyDeleteYes, it stinks and is nothing but patronising to the child. Give a small child an expensive gist in a cardboard box and 9 times out of 10 it will play with the box.
Deletegift, not gist
DeleteI got the gist. ;)
DeleteI am a council house kid who didn't go to museums...my parents were too busy working...but I did go to a Grammar School and then did start to visit places that I once considered 'posh'...and I agree with you here Tom..........and did you mean to that last sentence to come across as sexy? I suspect you did.........................
ReplyDeleteNo, sorry. Far from sexy. I mean real dirt - even earth.
DeleteAs an 11 year old the RAF museum at Hendon was marvellous as were the Natural History and the Science Museums. I did not get into the British museum until I was in my mid 20s in about 1985.
ReplyDeleteThese days the last museum I had a look around was the Wallace Collection, which I liked and was brilliant to escape other people’s shopping expeditions.
I also loved the Imperial War Museum. I was obsessed with WW2, and probably still am.
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ReplyDeleteThanks for that John.
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Delete"Curated". So over-used to the point of ridiculousness. If a bar isn't advertising a curated row of gin it isn't worth its salt, apparently. Perhaps like out-of-work actors who always call themselves actors not waiters, the out-of-work curators don't want to be called bartenders either.
ReplyDeleteI've never thought of the modern museum experience as being over-curated, rather as dumbed-down and so often there's just not enough to See as the space is occupied by Interpretive Material...Although (and getting off my high horse)...in an otherwise-empty room in an exhibition on Classical Beauty in a museum in Athens, a perfumier recreated a classical-era perfume to sniff from a wall-mounted laboratory flask, which I did think was rather special.
I once sniffed Napoleon's personal Cologne when I was very ill, and it haunted me for years.
DeleteWas it just delirium?
DeleteWasn’t it 4711 cologne ? XXXX
DeleteI was in bed with really bad flu, so I was probably a little delirious. I had a pile of National Geographic magazines, and one of them had a 'scratch and sniff' panel with molecules of the Cologne embedded in it. I tried to find the same one for years afterwards (always being told it was 4711) but never could.
DeleteGive something a fancy name and you can bet the greedy "universities" will start a Mickey Mouse degree course for it! Money, money, money.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to have studied Mickey Mouse and get a BA in MM 1st class!
DeleteBea sums it up nicely. Norwich Castle Museum which used to be a splendid museum is now like a children's play area and feels like adults are no longer welcome and nothing is for them.
ReplyDeleteEducationalists are usually pains in the arse.
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