Place of museums in today’s society

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32880, 1 April 1972, Page 13

Place of museums in today’s society

“Has the Past Got a Future?” This was the title of Nicholas Gamham’s documentary on 8.8.C.-TV in which he explored his own personal and controversial relationship with the British Museum.” “I suppose every major city in the world now has a museum,” he said, “and yet what strange institutions they are. Great warehouses stocked with the litter left by receding tides of dying civilisations. Why does our civilisation hoard the fragments of the past? What use to us are gods we no longer worship, or the personal trinkets of long-dead kings?” Two million visitors went to the British Museum last year. What drew them there? Was it anything more than sheer curiosity, the same instinct that drew them to see the bearded lady at the funfair? “It has been said," he continued, “that the only lesson we learn from the past, is that we learn nothing from the past Perhaps, then, museums tell us more about ourselves, about our own society." When Sir Hans Sloane, the

Royal Physician, died in 1753, . he offered his collection to the nation for £10,090. Parliament accepted and in 1759 the British Museum was opened to the public on' the present site in Bloomsbury, London. Nicholas Gamham sees the founding of the British Museum as the product of an age which believed in knowledge as power. Museums allowed us to leave our political and social morals at the door. The much-admired Assyrian reliefs were originally erected to vaunt hideous cruelties. Museums were hoards and it had always seemed to him that the act of Parliament under which the British Museum works, laid too great a stress on the sheer possession of objects. The British Museum was in part built to house the Elgin Marbles. Bought in 1816 for £35,000, the hushed, echoing atmosphere of a cathedral now surrounded them. Why did we worship these mute lumps of marble? They were beautiful but, originally, they were brightly painted and had deep religious and political significance. We were not seeing what the Greeks saw when the friezes were in their temple. He felt that the museum’s exhibits of Greek culture had created a false image of that culture. What we saw was a dream of Greece. Nevertheless, works such as these remained f or us the supreme example of an ideal world of art with little relevance to the world in which we live. No longer believing in a life after death, we had substituted a life in art. Once cultural arts lost their function and became just beautiful, they were all interchangeable. As their cultural value declined, their monetary value rose and museums were now forced to pay the prices of an art market they helped to create. Much of the aura surrounding works of art: depended upon their uniqueness. Today the postcard and the art book were replacing the original object and photography had weakened their impact. The British Museum contains not only the nation’s major collection of antiquities, but also its major library, in this it is unique and scholars come from all over the world. The library contains 7,000,000 volumes on 120 miles of shelving, growing at the rate of two miles of shelving a year. “If you solve the storage and conservation problems,” said Nicholas Gamham, “the biggest problem of ail remains. How can anyone possibly use all these books?” Well, that’s one man’s point of view.