Time for that school trip to the museum again? Get out the worksheets, phone for a teacher’s pack, book a lunch room, make sure parents understand the travel arrangements. Later, exhaustedly recalling chaotic scenes worthy of Just William - lost children, lost coach drivers, overcrowded toilets, confusion over the booked guided tour plus a sudden, crippling headache - you may well wonder if it was worth it. Take heart, for many in the museum world share your quandary.
Professor Keith Thomson, with a career spanning a professorship of biology at Yale and the directorships of two natural history museums in the United States, now runs the Oxford University Museum. A fitting home for a man who passionately enjoys museums but questions their proliferation and funding in a world where digitisation has made many forms of knowledge-storing obsolete.
In Treasures on Earth: museums, collections and paradoxes (Faber pound;12.99) Thomson paints a picture of huge national institutions collaring all the public funding, of private collectors who finance specialist houses to store their own obsessions, and of small local outfits which are pushed to the wall.
He calls for museums to reassess not just their mission - are they meant to educate, to provide material for research, to delight the eye, simply to entertain? - but their collections. Thisnbsp; will cause gasps within the museum world, where “de-accessioning” (getting rid of stuff) is regarded as worse than incest, but may seem sensible to many who have dutifully walked past too many 19th-century paintings.
But one visitor’s piece of clutter is another’s joy. Rooms full of old farming equipment may leave some cold but will thrill those who can remember their old dad using much the same 50 years ago.
The nub of Thomson’s argument is that museums should focus on their core constituencies, forget the merchandising and cafs, display as much of their collections as is genuinely thrilling, be it the whole of the fauna of Madagascar or Van Gogh’s razor, and disperse the rest. Education, the saleroom or scholarship are suggested as destinations.
- Picture: Jaw dropping, should museums educate or entertain?
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