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The incompetent mess of Government The long-term prospect for museums is bleak. New approaches to the acquiring of information, wholesale and contented ignorance of the past, and the need for ever faster and ever more catchpenny pastimes, are overtaking them. At precisely the moment when official resolution in support of museums is so urgently needed, the Culture Ministry is clueless. It has become either a forcing ground for Government newcomers earmarked for swift promotion to more ‘serious’ departments, or a dumping ground for loyal inadequates rewarded with a spot in the sun where their ineptitude can’t wreak too much havoc. In museums crisis follows crisis whilst quango after quango make their familiar raft of do-gooding recommendations which are accepted by ministers with a wise nod, before being ignored. This in itself is a problem, for the cause of real improvement is impeded by the bewildering directory of different organisations, each with its own hobby horses, claiming to represent the interests of museums and galleries. There is no single strong voice. This year’s Treasury settlement upon regional museums, £30 million extra on top of the usual £40 million, is little more than a tenth of what was proposed by museums’ bodies in order to stave off imminent meltdown. Meanwhile, the British Museum, running a £5 million deficit (or is it £6 million, £7 million, or a mere £3 million?), has been told that it will have to lump it and eat cake. The Tate Gallery is in no better shape, with Tate Modern, for all its success, never having been given a long-term guarantee of annual subsidy, whilst the Natural History Museum is threatening to start charging again unless the Government make it properly worth their while not to. There is no question about it, the Treasury suits ran rings round scholars and Trustees and got away with the abolition of admission charges on the cheap. The result is that museum finances are now a catastrophic, bewildering mess. Despite living in a period of unparalleled economic growth, under a Government which publicly attests to the importance of museums, there is still no financial plan in place guaranteeing that incomes of national and regional museums will keep pace with inflation. If the position of museums is as bad as this during prosperous times, there is little realistic hope that they will ever be better off than they are now. The will to correct the systemic deficiencies and neglect of decades is absent. Indeed, it could even be that we are living through a golden age; after all, shiny new extensions to allegedly impoverished museums, courtesy of the Lottery, are now two a penny. Recently published surveys of the first six months attendance at those museums where universal free admission was allowed a year ago have also been unhelpful to museums’ cause. These demonstrated that while the number of visitors increased, very dramatically in some instances and especially in London, new audiences, by which we mean those allegedly disfranchised groups beloved of our socially engineering Government, have not benefited. Put bluntly, the same (educated) people, usually middle-aged and middle class, are using free entry in order to visit museums more frequently than they did before. Meanwhile, the 50% of the population, which until recently all surveys revealed never visit museums and galleries, did not find free admission sufficiently alluring to cure their resistance. This will not please New Labour, whose suits already believe museums to be elitist, financially inept institutions which don’t try hard enough to entice the beloved grassroots up the steps. In a year’s time when the Treasury reviews the policy on free entry, bearing in mind that free admission was only underwritten by them for three years, this will weigh heavily against the case for prolonged free entry. New Labour are very Old Labour when it comes to paying for the free pleasures of the educated middle class. As we go to press, it now transpires that the situation in respect of the unpopularity of museums is even worse than we thought. Owing to the fact that the Arts Council gives its money to the same clients every year, thereby leaving its staff free to think up new surveys to conduct, it has commissioned another report in tandem with the Council for Museums. Inevitably, the findings delivered by the Social Survey Division of the Office for National Statistics are fanfared as a triumph for their enlightened art policies. Needless to say, the opposite is true. The results are extremely depressing and confirm the truth of empirical observation and experience of museums; that is, hardly anyone at all visits regional museums. Only 35% of those canvassed had been to a gallery or a museum in the previous year, once again with the graduate bourgeoisie heading the queue. Percentages are slightly higher in London and the south, where the richer and better educated are in denser concentration. This new finding is significantly lower than the figures of any previous survey and was even conducted after charges to national museums had been abolished for most categories. Such low attendance makes a mockery of the huge sums and resources which museums are now required to spend on “community outreach” and other ruses devised to “increase access”. If the latest survey proves anything it is that the cash lavished on such “initiatives” has been money down the drain. New Labour needs a dash of realism. The idea that those for whom museums are already an alien land will alter their errant ways and suddenly start making room in their busy eating, boozing, shopping and television schedules for a trip to the V&A is the stuff of Fairyland. The ill-educated don’t like museums – it’s a fact – and wouldn’t be seen dead wasting their time in such places when they might be out spending money they probably haven’t yet earned or, alternatively, have taken the passive option of sitting insensible in front of visually noisy television programmes supping from a tin can, for such is the reality in many a regional household. Thinking about it, not being allowed to drink whilst inside an art gallery is a major deterrent for the people of Hackney at least. If N16 is a microcosm of our country, large numbers of people can’t even walk down the street without a drink in their hands. Any visiting alien would suppose that the Gobi Desert was around the next corner. Another disadvantage of museums is that they are oases of meditation and concentration. Thus do they encourage reverie for its own sake. Senses accustomed to bombardment by earpiece and mobile phone, television programmes which are raucous even with the sound turned off, and the conversation-thwarting din and pulse of music in every public place, is quite naturally liable to experience sensory deprivation and withdrawal symptoms in museums, where stimuli are subtle to the point of near-imperceptibility. Unfortunately, many do not like being thrown back upon their own imaginative resources. The ability to reflect quietly has been bludgeoned out of people by too many competing media on which too much that is too superficial and too strident happens too quickly. In this gamut of modern recreations, museums are for those whose responses are still serviceably alert and receptive. The nature of the objects and artefacts found there, most often from periods before convenience entertainments arrived, means that they are ruined by silly attempts to make them appeal to a sensibility so injuriously calloused by brashness. A jobsworth from a museums’ organisation recently suggested that museums should keep changing their displays, for this would cause visitors to think they were shops introducing new lines. In order to prosper it was suggested that museums must echo “the shopping experience”. Barring an economic or terrorist catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions, the lives of those presently lost to museums, will never ever willingly change such that galleries feature in the itinerary of their lives. Even a television channel dedicated to the arts recently went bust. New Labour’s problem is that they refuse to recognise this simple and obvious fact. They persist in the fantasy that museums are doing a bad job, and that they need to be told as much as frequently as possible. The latest contribution, and a typical one, to this species of self-delusion came from the pen of sacked Culture Minister Chris Smith, who is educated enough to have known better. He wrote: “The [British] museum also needs to transform the way in which it relates to the public, presents its treasures and excites its visitors about the story of humankind that unfolds from room to room. Taking visitors by the hand and leading them through history that links the Assyrian kings with the Egyptian mummies, the Parthenon marbles, the Lewis chessmen, the Benin bronzes, the Burmese buddha, Henry Moore’s sketchbooks – this is a unique journey that only the British Museum can make possible. To ensure that this journey can entice, excite and educate the visitor, this greatest of all museums does need more treasury support. But it also needs to run itself well and to think intelligently about its public.” Isn’t that wonderful? Five million visitors a year – 6.5 million some years – and the British Museum needs to do more, and think more intelligently about its public. What a peremptory insult that is coming from a platitude-mongering failure like Chris Smith. This is the kind of speech-filling drivel Smith spoke and wrote whilst he was in office. And by the way, the only link between the Assyrian kings, the Lewis Chessmen and Henry Moore’s sketchbooks is that they’ve all got three s’s. If you go to the British Museum to find a link between these unlinkables you deserve the bafflement that will inevitably ensue. The idea that museums, whose very raison d’être is to feed the curiosity and educational requirements of its visitors, can be made easily consumable for people of neither education nor curiosity, is a piece of politically correct, dangerous nonsense. But this doesn’t stop New Labour insisting upon it almost daily in the newspapers. Which brings us to the great anomaly at the heart of New Labour’s museums policy. On one hand they claim to be devoted to education x 3. On the other, museums, the most valuable educational assets we possess, are laying off highly specialist staff and closing galleries. Their fundamental research function is seriously impaired. Museums are paying the price for New Labour’s double bind of disingenuousness; its desire to say one thing while doing another, and its compulsive need to meddle with matters of which it has neither real knowledge nor genuine appreciation. The next few years will be interesting ones for museums and galleries. The Times is already running a campaign for the re-introduction of admission charges, which it sees, wrongly, as a cure-all. Meanwhile, the Government must be disappointed that free admission hasn’t aroused its beloved mob’s curiosity in higher things. Something has to give: watch this space. David Lee | |||||
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