What are museums for?

The Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust Award 2005
"What are Museums for?" was the question set by the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust Award in 2005. The winner of the annual essay prize established in honour of the former Editor of The Times who died in 1985 is James Delingpole, a novelist, freelance journalist and regular contributor to this paper

Why is it that so often when I visit a museum these days, I leave feeling ever so slightly cross? I'm thinking, say, of those wretched animatronic dinosaurs we parents have to queue for at the Natural History Museum, completely ignoring the genuine prehistoric skeletons either side. And of that display cabinet at the National Maritime Museum where nautical objects have been plonked apparently at random in the same glass case in order to illustrate a curator's trendy post-modern point about the hopelessness of trying to extract meaning from artefacts so far removed from our own time and place.

But, hey, why pick on those two? Pretty much everyone in the museum world is at it these days and has been for some time: the exhibition at the Horniman, which proudly claimed - though with no supporting evidence, that voodoo was one of Africa's "great contributions to world culture"; the Gainsborough exhibition whose curator presumed to judge the mores of 18th century society by the PC standards of modern Britain; the decision by Manchester City Art Gallery to hang its paintings lower, the better that they might be enjoyed by children and the disabled; Palmer Majority Report (of which more later); the National Gallery's campaign to the keep Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks apparently less on the grounds of its artistic or historical merit than on its subject's status as a single mother; almost anything containing the words "access", "relevance" or "inclusivity."

What all these diverse irritants have in common is that they are part of the same worrying, hidden debate. "Hidden" because its arguments, though familiar to the point of cliche to anyone who works in the museum industry, are pretty much unknown to the people outside it. "Worrying" because the conclusions reached by these self-serving guardians of our national heritage are so often dangerously at odds with the needs of the public they claim to serve.

Someone in the audience of scholars, curators, directors and other museum professionals made this point rather well at an Institute of Ideas debate at the Wallace Collection last year on the subject Should We Junk Collections? "Most of us here are quite used to this sort of talk," she said, "But if it were to be overheard by the people who actually visit our museums a lot of them would be quite horrified."

She was referring in particular to the argument put by Maurice Davies - deputy director of the Museums Association - that museums ought no longer to consider it their primary duty to preserve their collections in perpetuity. Rather their main job should be to engage audiences with evangelical zeal, taking their collections out of the galleries and storerooms and into hospitals and schools, letting them be experienced and enjoyed by as many people as possible. And if one or two objects got damaged or even destroyed in the process, well, so be it.

To those of us reared on the fogeyish assumption that a museum's collection is sacrosanct - that the British Museum will always have its Elgin Marbles and the Pitt Rivers its shrunken tribal heads - the idea of ancient vases being mauled and chipped by mobs of primary schoolchildren or Roman coin hoards being flogged off to fund the acquisition of a more socially relevant collection of graffiti art is indeed a pretty shocking one. But for the new breed of museum professional, this line of thinking is very much the fashionable orthodoxy. Indeed, if you consult the Department of Culture, Media and Sport's strategy documents Museums For The Many and Understanding The Future, you'll find it's actually new Labour policy.

As the former Labour arts minister Mark Fisher argues in his introduction to Britain's Best Museums And Galleries there has in the last decade or so been a potentially disastrous shift in attitude among those reponsible for governing our museums. Where once museums were valued as repositories of objects they are now increasingly judged not by what they are but by what they can achieve; by how effective they are as agents of social change.

At the vanguard of this new movement is David Fleming, formerly of Tyne & Wear museums, now director of Liverpool Museums, and bete noir of traditionalists everywhere.
"He really is the anti-Christ," one told me, "At Tyne & Wear he made it his mission to replace his middle class visitors with politically approved C2s and D2s and this he did very successfully. How? By ditching half the objects and turning it into a sort of amusement arcade with buttons to push and flashing screens."

Fleming replies that under his stewardship Tyne & Wear's attendance figures almost trebled and that he gained working class audiences without alienating his core middle class one. "It irks me immeasurably when people say I don't care about objects," he says. "I fully accept that a museum's job is to collect, preserve, record and pass on unimpaired to future generations things of value." But just as important, he argues, is that a museum should be used as a "powerful tool for learning", especially for the socially disadvantaged. The sort of person who stands most to gain from a museum, he reckons, would be a child with little interest in education, from a family background where parenting skills left something to be desired.

This sounds to me more like a job for a decent primary school teacher but perhaps - as I'm sure Fleming would see it - I am irredeemably out of touch. And maybe he has a point. Why, in heaven's name, should publicly-funded museums pander to an educated elite? And why shouldn't they be used to help pick up the poor and needy by the bootstraps and change society for the better?

To help make up my mind, I went to look at two very different institutions: one, a museum of the old school, the Lady Lever Gallery in Port Sunlight; the other, Fleming's pride and joy, the former Liverpool Museum, recently refurbished and expanded in a pounds 35 million development programme and now trendily renamed in the approved definite-article-free style (cf Tate Britain; Tate Modern) World Museum Liverpool,

From the outside World Museum, Liverpool still exudes the fading Victorian civic grandeur of its neighbour the Walker Art Gallery. Stepping inside, however, the impression I got was that I'd entered some kind of super-primary school, possibly a lavishly funded co-project with the European Union: a soaring, modern five story atrium with each department represented by illiteracy-friendly pictures - a fish, a bug, a dinosaur, a hand, a star. ("Children from St Vincent's Primary School and their artist in residence Alan Murray produced these banners," said a sign).

I visited the Clore Natural History wing, a sort of state-of-the-art school biology lab with lots objects (silicified wood; ammonites; skulls; shells) for visitors to paw and molest. A microscope was focussed on a stinging nettle. "Ouch!" said the caption. An exhibit on sea spiders asked "Are the spiders in mum's bath going to get this big?" A class of seven-year olds milled about, opening and closing specimen drawers, pushing and prodding but without focussing on anything in particular. Two or three young, friendly curators were trying to engage their attention. "Do you get much time to do any research?" I asked one. "Not as much as we'd like," he admitted.

Upstairs, in the Ethnographic galleries, a video of a man dressed in tribal robes introduced the African section with a lame rap number. "You might think of them as a simple people/But in essence they were truly complex," it went.

If you wanted to be annoyed by this sort of thing, you didn't have to look hard. A section on weapons seemed to think that their main purpose was for "dancing and initiation rites" rather than fighting. The one on masks claimed: "These objects show how important identity is to us and how we make identities for ourselves and for gods and spirits." Ancient Egypt, it is stressed, "was an African culture". The Roman Empire was "multicultural."

And besides the glib pacifism, woolly cod-sociological gobbledegook, cultural relativism and political correctness, the texts seemed designed to insult the intelligence of anyone past primary age. This is no accident. Museums are advised by local authorities to couch their labels in language no more complex than can be understood by a child with a standard reading age of twelve.

"I do worry that there's nothing there for those people who have that bit of education, who would like to know more in depth," a Liverpool curator said to me. But as he went on to admit, middle class museum goers are going to keep coming no matter what you do. The key to expanding audiences is concentrating on the C2s D2s and Es. "It's why all our promotional leaflets are in simple language and done in reds, yellows and blues like the world Barney [the horrible purple American TV dinosaur] lives in. You see in lower income households, it's the kids not the grown ups who decide whether or not visiting a museum is a worthwhile leisure activity."

A tunnel journey away on the other side of the Mersey, the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight could hardly be more different. This fabulous collection of pre-Raphaelite painting and decorative art, amassed by the soap powder magnate Lord Leverhulme, is most definitely not the sort of place you'd want to entertain a child. It's fusty, unglamorous and object-rich; the labelling is austere to the point of dullness. "The Lever does tend to attract the blue rinse brigade," admitted its curator of paintings, Julian Treuherz, as we took lunch in the subterranean museum cafe thronged with elderly matrons.

Treuherz was far too politic to tell me what he thought of his boss across the river, but it seems unlikely that he and Fleming would find much to agree on. His worry is that marketing-led, access-driven policies are having a dangerous effect on scholarship. "A lot of museums pay lip-service to it but their staff are too busy on access-type projects to do any serious research. If all our museums end up with is interpreters and presenters without any primary experience of the paintings or ceramics in our collection, then we're not doing our job properly."

Symptomatic of this, he argues, is the new trend for hanging paintings lower so as to make them more accessible for children and the disabled. Thus are politically correct considerations given a higher priority than scholarly or aesthetic ones. "A lot of paintings were made to be hung at a particular height," Treuherz says, "hanging them lower just spoils them." But if - as is so often the case among young curators these days - your MA is in Museum Studies and not Art History, how can you possibly be expected to understand such nuances?

And if you're going to keep pandering like this to perceived public needs, he wonders, why stop there? "A lot of people might say: 'Oh it's very off-putting having art in these big buildings with columns and steps.' Are we supposed to scrap those as well?"

This question is not altogether a rhetorical one. Those "big buildings with columns and steps" are an example of what the Department of Culture, Media and Sport's latest consultation document - Understanding the Future: Museums and 21st Century Life would probably term "intellectual barriers to entry". By this it means those qualities in a traditional museum - the grandeur of the building, the way everything is arranged and labelled, perhaps even the other visitors' middle class accents - which the people who generally don't use museums might find off-putting.

Of course it never occurs to the document's authors that these "intellectual barriers to entry" might actually be a desirable thing. Rather, it is taken as a given that these are problems which must be overcome at all costs. A museum's job, in other words, is to make itself equally attractive to every single member of the population. And until it has done so, it might be said to have failed.

The flaws in this access-for-all argument, are nicely exposed by Josie Appleton in her paper for the Institute Of Ideas - "Museums For The People?" By endlessly trying to second-guess the needs of their audiences, she argues, museums are failing in their primary function of preserving, displaying, studying and where possible collecting the treasures of civilisation and nature.

Resources that might have gone into the maintenance of collections are instead being diverted to fashionable "access" projects; curators are now so busy interacting with the public that they barely have time left for study; and the harder they try to make themselves more user-friendly and socially relevant, the less they fulfil their purpose as wholly distinctive institutions which provide a refuge from the mundane cares and concerns of ordinary life.

What's more, these changes have been imposed on museums without any obvious justification. "Nobody outside the cultural elite ever demanded that museums become more accessible, relevant, inclusive, diverse and interactive," she argues. "All these views were hatched within government and the museums and then projected out on to the public."

But just how serious is this crisis in our museums? Is it, indeed, a crisis at all? During the course of my research I visited all sorts of institutions from tiny local museums like the one in the castle in Haverfordwest to trendy, state-of-the-art ones like the Baltic exhibition space in Newcastle ("Well that was a complete waste of money" I heard one elderly Geordie complain to another, walking out of a conceptual art exhibition for which admission was free) to cherished classics like the Natural History Museum. And I have to admit that on the surface, I found little suggest that the picture wasn't rosy. Even World Museum, Liverpool, for all my quibbles, has been quite beautifully lit and displayed with a magnificent collection which is well worth a detour.

And I did love the well-deserved Gulbenkian Prize-winner - The Big Pit, Wales's museum of coalmining history, where you get to put on a helmet, lamp and battery and travel in a cage lift 300 feet underground to inspect a seam. Everything about the place is first rate, from the genial ex-miners who act as your guides to the deft way in which the labelling manages to negotiate such fraught subjects as the Miners' Strike and the nature of the relationship between miners and mine-owners without sounding horribly chippy or political.

Nearer home, I never tire of the Imperial War Museum, the very model of the well-balanced modern museum. What I admire - most of the best museums manage this I think - is the way it manages to appeal simultaneously to so many different interest groups without compromising the needs of any of them: small children can use it as a form of giant adventure playground climbing in and out of bombers and mock-ups of submarine bunk beds; older ones can immerse themselves in the sights, sounds and smells of the Trench Experience; while tragically-obsessed war buffs like me can can tour each gallery very slowly, poring over every letter in the display cases and listening to the archive recordings made by War Veterans.

The two Tate Galleries perform a similarly brilliant all-things-to-all-men trick with their marvellous Art Trolley, run by volunteers at weekends. Your children are handed out high-quality crayons, clipperboards and project sheets based on specific works of art; and while your brats are temporarily distracted - and learning to look closely at a painting or a piece of sculpture for perhaps the first time - you, the culture-starved parent, manage to snatch a rare and precious moment in which to gawp at some decent pictures.

These are the sort of things, I suppose, which the DCMS would cite as proof as the success of its access-and-education-first strategy. I'd counter that they're no more than any intelligent, reponsive museum director would have encouraged to happen even without the pressure of heavy-handed government directives. And that in any case, just because our museums seem healthy on the surface and positively abrim with sexy, modern, access-friendly initiatives doesn't necessarily mean there isn't something rotten going on behind the woodwork.

A good example of this rottenness - one which I doubt even one in ten museum visitors has ever heard of - is the 2003 Palmer "Majority" report by a Blair-government appointed Human Remains Working Group. The subject it discusses - the disposal of human remains from museum collections - may seem quite harmlessly esoteric. But what it says about current thinking on museums, both in the government and among curators, has extremely worrying implications for all of us.

It was called a "majority" report because one of the only two scientists on the working group, Sir Neil Chalmers, refused to associate himself with its findings (some of which were subsequently enacted in the 2004 Human Tissues Act, which led to a new Code Of Practice for the profession). Museums, it argued inter alia, should be allowed to release human remains; and researchers should obtain consent from biological or cultural descendants.

All pretty harmless stuff, you might think. And anyway, why shouldn't oppressed native peoples be allowed the comfort of seeing their ancestors taken out of the storerooms and display cabinets and buried with dignity? But this is just the sort of sloppy, touchy-feely, post- colonial-guilt-induced thinking which has created such havoc in anthropological departments across America. It has led idiocies like the repatriation to Mexico, by Harvard's Peabody museum, of two thousand bodies which had already proved themselves vital in an important study of osteoporosis; and the case in Idaho of a 10,000-year-old woman discovered by archaelogists and then ceremonially re-buried by local native Americans (Shoshone), despite the fact her ancestry, beliefs and religion, if any, were completely unknown.

Thus have the shrill cries of a few vocal minority groups successfully stalled the march of progress. For, as Tiffany Jenkins so brilliantly argues in her Institute Of Ideas paper Human Remains - Objects To Study or Ancestors To Bury?, this is more than just a cynical, bien-pensant sop to the grievance industry. It represents, in fact, a wholesale disavowal of those very Enlightenment values for which museums were first established. The pure search for knowledge and scientific truth has given way to relativism, postmodernism, post-colonialism, superstition, and the politics of victimhood.

But then this is of a piece with developments not just in the world of museums but in culture across the board. It has to do with a strain of leftist counter-cultural thinking which has been with us since at least the Sixties and was partly inspired by the generation of French philosophers like Foucault and their notions that there is no such thing as empirical truth, merely a succession of equally valid viewpoints and that authority is no more than the brutish creation of the reigning hegemony which should be questioned at every turn.

If you subscribe to this version of reality clearly you're going to have major ideological problems with the very idea of museums. Not only do they tend to be rigidly hierarchical and based on collections amassed at the very height of white male European imperialism, but they are also informed by fairly rigorous notions of what is historically important and what is not; what is worth preserving for posterity and what is dispensible.

Museums are, by definition, bastions of tradition and connoisseurship. If only all the directors and government apparatchiks responsible for them acknowledged this simple truth, museums would not be in the trouble they are in today. Unfortunately, these noble institutions have fallen victim to the cant of the age: on the one hand the market-driven utilitarianism of the right which has forced them to justify their existence in crude economic terms; on the other, the guilt-ridden orthodoxies of the cultural left.

Are the people of the North East really so culturally illiterate that they cannot relate to a museum unless, as at Tyne & Wear, it includes works which "may not necessarily be famous or highly regarded but instead have been chosen by members of the public simply because they like them or because they arouse certain emotions or memories,"?

Would the British public really have begrudged the National Gallery's purchase of Raphael's Madonna Of The Pinks, if they had not been reassured by the presence in the next room of single mums from Waltham Forest modelling their own related images of mothers and children?

Does anyone really think when they enter a museum: "Goodness me. All the curators and staff here look hideously white. If only the museum could enforce some kind of positive discrimination programme in order that people from ethnic minorities might redress the balance?"

In themselves these are minor details. And you might say the same of those handsome - but surely counterproductively distracting - animatronic dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum; or the trend for more simplistic labelling; or the slightly shabby look so many museums have nowadays because the only money available is for large capital projects or access- and education-driven ones, not routine maintenance; or the push-button gimmicks by the labels at the V & A which always seem to be broken; or the way, at the Tower of London, you're not allowed the chance to contemplate or imagine any more because of the plethora of busy labels directing you exactly what to think. All these things in themselves are indeed no more than trivial distractions. But put them altogether and what emerges is a picture of an industry which has lost its sense of purpose.

Not even our foremost directors have remained quite immune to this new strain of muddled thinking, as I noticed during the course of a fascinating interview with the British Museum's director Neil MacGregor. Sprightly, charming and impossibly erudite he may be, but when I asked him what he thought museums were for, I could almost have been listening to the trendy PC orthodoxies of his counterpart at Liverpool Museums.

Yes, he said, a museum has to act as a form a library and to be "about serious engagement with objects and the ideas that they embody", and to inspire a sense of wonder. But at heart, he argued, a museum's job is to serve a far more radical function: to create the "right level of doubt" in its audience, to cause them to question the very nature of their society and ultimately to "change the citizen."

This, he argued, is the function museums used to perform up until the mid-Nineteenth century when they mutated into the "aesthetic and intellectual laagers"we remember them being for most of the Twentieth century. Originally, they were "intensely political" places, enabling free citizens to make up their own minds on such issues as the battle between geological evidence and scriptural "truth."

"As we get back to a world where there are more and more people in positions of higher authority saying there is one revealed truth, the need for the Enlightenment insistence on truth as the best hypothesis to date is greater than ever," he said. But does this not smack, rather of that Foucaultian world where there's no one authority, only a number of conflicting versions thereof?

MacGregor describes himself as a "relativist – and proud of it." When he displays an object, his constant worry is which of the "many truths" about that object he should "privilege". Should he favour the poetic truth over the historical one? Just how reliable is that historical one anyway? And should it be addressed towards the university-educated audience or should it be expressed in much simpler language when, after all, over 50 per cent of the museum's visitors do not have English as their mother tongue. "No solution is right," declares MacGregor, sagely.

Oh really? While I wouldn't for a moment question the sincerity and essential decency of MacGregor's Weltanschauung – he sees it as part of the greater cultural battle against fundamentalism in all its forms, and he does put his money where his mouth is, viz the Museum's recent bridge-building collaboration with Iran –it nevertheless seems to me symptomatic of the intellectual decadence that has afflicted our culture.

It reminds me of the dispiriting way history is taught in school now where instead of the teacher giving you an idea of what actually happened you're handed a variety of different texts and accounts of the same event and invited to make your own mind up. A nice idea: creating a nation of free thinking intellectuals. The problem is, it's predicated on the lamentably optimistic notion that our ailing education system has given the nation sufficient intellectual grounding on which to form such subtle judgements. It hasn't.

And if even the director of our oldest and greatest museum is uncomfortable with the idea of the museum as a superior form of authority, is it really any wonder that the whole system is in such trouble? How, after all, can the very real problems facing our museums - what, if anything, they can afford to collect for future generations; how to safeguard those collections they have when their maintenance budgets are either frozen or dwindling; how far they should capitulate to politically correct nostrums like "education" and "access"; the issues of deaccessioning and repatriation - be sensibly dealt with unless the people in charge of them have consistent, unembarrassed sense of museums' absolute, immutable, cultural importance?

At the very beginning I set out to answer the question: "What are museums for?" To me it seems blindingly obvious. They exist today, just as they did 250 years ago, for the preservation, collection, display and study of precious objects. If in the process they also manage to create some kind of beneficial social change be it bolstering its visitors' education, self esteem or sense of community, then all to the good, but these are no more than side effects, not a museum's raison d'etre.

What I realise now, though, is that the problem isn't the many different answers the museums industry is finding to answer this question. The problem is the question itself. To ask it is already to presuppose that a museum can only justify its existence in some form of utilitarian value; it implies that culture can be measured; that a museum can be submitted to cost benefit analysis; that it ought to be micromanaged by the state if, according to the political precepts of the moment, it is found wanting. But museums are above all this nonsense. At least they should be.

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