There is an argument that if it were not for the largesse of the National Lottery since 1994 our museums and galleries would still
In many ways I preferred those more civilised Dark Ages before museums became playgrounds and refectories flogging food
The record of the Lottery is a grim one in the visual arts. Only a collection of fools could have got it so wrong. Courtesy of the Arts Council-administered Lottery the Ashmolean has been converted into a department store; the British Museum has received a hideous swimming-pool roof and some fraudulent stonework; and new galleries of wince-inducing ugliness and irrelevance to their local communities have spread across the country like a pox (see page 12 for the latest of these). And don’t forget the cool billion that was wasted on the Dome – no one now mentions that disgrace. Then there have been the stillborn basket cases. New words are required for the chronic incompetence and waste represented by the Earth Centre near Doncaster and the Popular Music Museum in Sheffield, both of which are dead, and The Public in West Bromwich that is only nominally alive. There are, to boot, currently running sores in Newcastle and Colchester and more bailings-out than were ever managed by the brave crews of Bomber Command.
Many changes to museums have been carried out not because they were necessary but for the singularly rotten reason that money was available to be spent. Also, a new belief – one which among politically correct jobsworths is treated as Holy Writ – spread through the land deeming that museums are dull places
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which can be made “more accessible” to those who don’t care for museums and won’t enter one even when they are free. The theory is that if you take an object which is marvellous anyway and anywhere and put it in a new place which looks more like a Bond Street shop, and then you surround it with information boards, films and painted narrative scene settings as if it were playing a walk-on role in a period soap opera, it will come alive and be instantly worshiped by an idiot. Such treatment actually achieves the opposite: it more often kills artefacts stone dead, because their special aura of mystery is neutralised and our imagination is prevented from working with their peculiar secrets.This theory is doubly flawed because art is not truly understood or appreciated, or loved, because of what you read about it but because of the enigma of what it is and what it signifies beyond words. The way to encourage a fascination with history and a precious appreciation of the beautiful is not achieved by ‘context’ or ‘explanation’ but by looking; hard looking pure and simple. Filling visitors’ heads with parrotable sound bites impedes the slow-burn of appreciation. Deciphering for oneself is the springboard of all genuine enquiry and enduring interest. Following on from that comes naming, further discovery and, perhaps eventually, scholarship. A great work of art will always speak for itself more eloquently than the words of any
Museums should not spoon-feed visitors: they should encourage discovery and lifelong interest through observation and the arousing of curiosity. To aim the displays of museums at the hitherto uninterested is wasted effort. Those from any background who want genuinely to be involved in art will first catch on and then catch up. In the meantime the quiddity of the object must remain sacrosanct and unpolluted.
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