 | ||||||
 | ||||||
 | ||||||
 | | | | | | |
Figures of Convenience The latest set of annual attendance figures for museums and other ‘leisure’ spots reveal that the British Museum (6.04 million visitors) has overtaken Blackpool Pleasure Beach (5.5 million, down ten percent) as the most attended resort in Britain. Tate Modern snatched bronze with 5.2 million. Regular readers of The Jackdaw will know that I don’t believe any of the figures put out by museums. They have good reason to lie, whereas the likes of Blackpool Pleasure Beach, privately owned and with an auditable admission charge, can furnish actual evidence in the form of daily gate receipts. When there is no way of verifying the accuracy of figures and when there is a political incentive for museums to exaggerate attendance, the published result is sure to be make-believe. Do these numbers matter? High or low, no they don’t. Not even a little bit ... unless, that is, you are an arts minister eager to demonstrate the efficacy of your philistine attempts to inflict high culture on an otherwise blissfully indifferent mass. As someone who has visited both the British Museum and Blackpool Pleasure Beach every year for decades I can testify to the unique marvels of both places. The Pepsi Max, higher than the Tower and on which I rode five times in one afternoon last autumn, is right up there in exhilaration with the carved column drum from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in the British Museum. And it doesn’t matter a fig if you like either, neither or both. The same applies to Blackpool illuminations and the Xanthos nereids, each seductively marvellous in its way but neither essential to a fulfilling life if, that is, you don’t want them to be. There is a telling difference in the respective audiences on the Fylde and at Bloomsbury. At the former, they are all dyed-in-the-wool, bog standard working class, whereas at the BM nearly all are tourists. Just think of the rosettes MacGregor would win from the Culture Department if he could claim for his museum the demographic of the Pleasure Beach: believe me, this is the level of imbecility prevailing at the Culture Ministry over the last decade. Sadly, those poorer people (who are, incidentally, still prepared to shell out £35 for a day pass to the Pleasure Beach) wouldn’t be seen dead entering the British Museum, free or not. There is no point in pretending otherwise: it would be a waste of time for them because they don’t have the basic education to derive any benefit from it. Yet the alleged swelling attendances at the British Museum are claimed to demonstrate what an increasingly cultivated country we are. This is deluxe bollocks: only an idiot would believe it. The mass of British citizens are no more cultivated now than has ever been the case in my lifetime. Working people of my acquaintance in the north of England who never went near ‘Culture’ in the 1950s when I was growing up, still don’t. This is certainly true of my own family who enjoy a range of alternative fascinations: the gamut of sport, climbing, model railways, shooting, allotments, stock car racing, magic, restoring old cars, carpentry and (mainly) drinking. It is an unavoidable conclusion to anyone who has visited the BM that nearly everyone there is a foreigner; and foreign of the most irritating and museum-illiterate sort. Just as our own plebs, who wouldn’t dream of exploring Housesteads or Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall, will traipse grimly and frying around Ephesus when they go for a fortnight’s beer and sand in Kusadasi, their Japanese equivalent will pack the BM in order to have their photos taken beside Mausolus and a host of other eminences they’ve never heard of. How weird is this? All Government meddling to engineer public participation in the arts is patronising, and it has failed. It is also irrelevant. In my view there is no qualitative difference in aesthetic experience between, say, the thousands of delighted faces who witnessed the recent unveiling of a restored Royal Scot 4-6-0 (in its later William Stanier-designed clothes and livery) at the Carnforth Steam Festival and the contentment derived by those who pay the same amount to see a Cy Twombly retrospective at Tate Modern – it seems to me unlikely that the two audiences will have overlapped. Our message to the Government should be: stump up the cash for all of our heritage and then mind your own business – we’ll decide for ourselves, in our several ways, what we consider to be culture and what is right for us. Curiously, attendance at the British Museum has risen over the last year by almost exactly the same number, 850,000 it is claimed, as those who alone attended the Terracotta Army exhibition. Was I the only one who thought this decidedly fishy? I have been informed by its chef-de-spin that visitor numbers at the British Museum is computed by electronic clickers at the main and north entrances. I don’t care how they are ‘counted’, I will never believe that the British Museum receives fifty percent more visitors than the Vatican, because my own physical experience of both places tells a different story. The BM’s unverifiable attendance figures are widely reported as testimony of Neil MacGregor’s great success in transforming the museum’s fortunes since he arrived from the National Gallery five years ago. These predictable quarterly paeans to his genius are written by those who plainly have no intimate knowledge of the museum and its collections, except perhaps for attending the press view of his annual blockbuster. Well I’m sorry to spoil the consensus but as a weekly regular at the British Museum I can testify that the appointment of Mr MacGregor has had no effect whatsoever on the frequent visitor to his museum. On the contrary, he is quite as useless as his predecessors. The Museum is neither more nor less crowded than before. It remains an unpleasant, noisy place for a lover of art. The aesthetic vandalism of Norman Foster’s offensive courtyard roof is still there scattering its reticulations across every surface. The restaurants and cafés are still shockingly overpriced – it is embarrassing to stand in a queue and watch foreigners gasp when asked for four pounds for two small bottles of Coca Cola. Museums should at least have the decency to place themselves beyond the cheating, greedy commerce now ubiquitous everywhere else. The contrast here with Blackpool Pleasure Beach is marked. At Burger King, next to the wooden rollercoaster, you can buy a double burger and chips and a bucket of coke for far less than the price of two small fruit smoothies at the BM. If museums and galleries were as interested as they claim in attracting those to whom art is presently alien, they might start by employing decent caterers who don’t just satisfy the pangs of Islington’s Double-Income Yeomanry. And what is it with museums and ‘handmade’ biscuits? Do they think McVities make them with their arse? The biggest failing of MacGregor’s regime is the fact that half the main classical galleries are closed nearly all the time. To the weekly visitor the same rooms are inaccessible under MacGregor as were inaccessible under his predecessor. In my experience the dreamworld of the classical architecture galleries in the basement have been open twice in the last five years and extremely rare are the occasions when all the classical galleries of the main floor are open at once. During the week as I write I was unable on a Monday afternoon to see the Bassae frieze, the Hellenistic gallery or the Mausoleum of Halicarnassos. The situation was unchanged on the Thursday. Additionally, in the gallery in which the centrepiece is Aphrodite kneeling at the well, the caption of the ‘petite’ diadumenus figure is wrong. It refers to a neighbouring sculpture, the ‘butch’ diadumenus supposedly illustrating Polyclitus’s divine proportions, which was moved two galleries away six months ago. All of this makes a nonsense of MacGregor’s wishful thinking that the museum allows a unique view across a wide spectrum of world cultures, this being, according to his argument, the main reason why no object should be returned to its country of origin. This is true only in theory. None of the one-time visitors this Monday or Thursday benefited from such a world-view conspectus because so much of it wasn’t available to them. The first duty of a British Museum director should not be to be constantly seeking approbation from the media, or to mount publicity-seeking exhibitions, but to open all the galleries in his charge every day. The main purpose of the British Museum is not to supply the razzmatazz of temporary eye-catching initiatives, such as Hadrian or the Pot Platoon, but the comprehensive presentation of its core collection and the fine research and scholarship attending it. The irony here is that although all the main galleries are never open at the same time the museum is nevertheless now seeking £130 million to build a new exhibition centre designed by that Grand Duke of Ugliness himself, Richard Rogers. What possible reasoning can obtain for building an extension when you can’t even afford to open all of the existing building at the same time? Claims put out by a discredited Culture Ministry that British museums are a great success, would not ring quite so hollowly if one of the greatest repositories of human artefacts anywhere in the world was allocated sufficient money to open up properly. The perceived “success” of the British Museum is more to do with the present director’s gift for spinning his blockbusters, those dark arts to which he became addicted at the National Gallery. It is, therefore, entirely appropriate that hot on the heels of well-spun record attendances should arrive a display dedicated to virtually the inventor of spin himself, the Emperor Hadrian. As a amateur student of antiquity I was looking forward to this. Mostly disappointing, it is more illustrative than scholarly, the display suggesting the feel of a sales pitch. MacGregor’s spinmeisters having done a superb job in the months prior to opening, you will all be familiar, and probably bored to death, with the old stories about the Emperor’s eponymous wall, Antinous and death on the Nile, the Cyrene jew pogrom, the personal Pontins at Tivoli, the Greek beard and the mass-murderous tyrant of aesthetic sensibility, and les grands projets of the mausoleum that is Castel Sant’Angelo and the Pantheon, the latter of which the exhibition organiser apparently believes is the precursor of every round building built since, including the aesthetically quite different onion-dome of the BM’s own Reading Room. In fact, the only similarity is that both are round in plan. In short, the exhibition is school textbook stuff. There may even be some truth in some of it, for it is not possible to know much about Hadrian for certain, though you will never again confuse his appearance with that of any other Emperor, so numerous are the busts. One could have expected from the British Museum a more connoisseurial approach to the sculptures, comparing materials and relative skills from different parts of the empire while illustrating the industry built around the emperor’s likeness. Comparative material showing types and varying functions of sculpture would have been instructive. Sadly, little of the sculpture selected is more than factory fare – except in the rarest of cases the production line of Roman sculpture generally precluded refinement. There was scope in this exhibition for something more visually taxing than is provided. Indeed, it takes a long search to find here anything as impertinent as art. Neither does the exhibition make a convincing case for Hadrian’s piquant artistic sensibility. The risible statue from Tivoli reincarnating peachy boy Antinous as a pharaoh is Ben Hur Hollywood at its worst. Painted up, as it originally would have been, it might have been too naff even for P T Barnum. Only Prince Albert dressed as Caesar in Buckingham Palace cuts a more ridiculous figure. You will learn more about Hadrian walking from Wallsend-on-Tyne to Bowness-on-Solway, taking in every fort and little museum along the route, studying prospects before and behind the wall and considering each nuance of planning. From this, there is only one certain conclusion we can draw about Hadrian’s thinking: his political decisions were informed every time by solid, conservative common sense, which was significant advance over the blundering hot-headedness characterising the policies of his predecessors. Hadrian costs £12 to get in, which is excessive considering that many of the more involving and beautiful objects on display are from the British Museum’s permanent collection. David Lee | |||||
 | |||||
Leaders | |||||
 | |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
| |||||
Take me to All of this site is | |||||
| | | | | |