After six weeks of hearing bland soundbites, puerile mudslinging and the blatant avoidance of any detailed discussion about the deep problems facing the country, I finally attended a gathering in which knowledgeable people listened intently to each other, rebutted arguments firmly but courteously and addressed serious issues with wit and insight. It hardly needs saying that this event had nothing to do with the general election. Except that, occurring three days before Thursday’s vote, it did provide a reassuring counter-balance. At a time when public discourse in Britain seems alarmingly superficial and stridently uncivil, this was a reminder of what it could and should be like.
Held in the packed lecture theatre of the British Museum (BM), it was a debate, sponsored by The Times, titled “Who owns the past?” I don’t think we ever quite got an answer to that. But along the way we heard a riveting discussion expertly guided by Matthew Parris — “the Biden of chairs”, as he mockingly described himself, before going on to prove that he could very much finish a sentence and articulate a sharp riposte.
And the real focus of the debate? It was the institutions that carry so much responsibility for preserving and interpreting our past: Britain’s museums, great and small, all 3,200 of them. And especially the one in which we were sitting.
This is a challenging time for museums. In real terms their funding has decreased by anything up to 50 per cent since 2010. Regional museums, in particular, have been left in a precarious financial condition by the near-bankrupt state of so many local authorities. In Cardiff even the National Museum of Wales may have to close its doors because essential maintenance hasn’t been done. On top of that, and adding to the financial worries, is the increasing pressure on arts institutions not to accept funding from oil companies. Or Russian billionaires. Or American families who made their fortune in dodgy pharmaceuticals. Or investment banks. Or, it now seems, anybody with business links to Israel. The list of “tainted” potential donors and sponsors grows weekly.
I mention all this to get it out of the way, because none of it was mentioned in the debate. Indeed it was remarkable that those two incendiary initials “BP” were not uttered once, although accepting a £50 million gift from that company to kickstart a renovation programme has made the BM a prime target for environmental activists.
Yet it was refreshing that, for once, this was not a discussion about money. How museums get their funding is a vital issue, of course, but there are even more fundamental questions to be answered first. Why do we have museums anyway? And, more particularly, what are the reasons — scholarly, social, practical and ethical — for maintaining “universal” or “encyclopaedic” museums such as the BM, the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan in New York or the Hermitage in St Petersburg?
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As the historian Mary Beard pointed out in the debate, the words universal and encyclopaedic only started to be applied to huge museums in the 1980s. Non-coincidentally, that was also when people really started to look critically at these vast treasure houses, storing items that were often acquired during colonial eras when looting and dodgy transactions were rife.
But as Beard went on to say, the concept of a universal museum “actually goes back to the ‘cabinets of curiosities’ in the 16th century, where the idea of the world in a single room was the collector’s ideal”. So the universal museum was, Beard asserted, “absolutely not a creation of empire”. She did admit, however, that when a nation such as Britain acquired an empire this inevitably “changed the process” of how objects were obtained. In other words, it made stealing treasures from conquered foreigners much easier to do.
So, Parris asked Beard, if the BM is a “world encyclopaedia of material things” should it have “British” in its title? Yes, Beard replied, because “if you say that Britain is a wonderfully hybrid, motley, mixed kind of culture, then in a sense the British Museum is Britain”. This provoked the Nigerian-born British historian David Olusoga into a powerful response. Of course the British empire played a big part in shaping the BM, he said, just as it affected every other national institution from the Church of England and the universities to the railways and our maritime cities. For a start, Hans Sloane, the 18th-century naturalist and physician who was primarily responsible for founding the BM, derived his vast wealth (and therefore his collection of 71,000 objects) from his wife’s sugar plantations in Jamaica. In fact he was himself a slave owner. So from the outset the BM’s treasures were linked to colonial rule and exploitation.
“Does that matter?” Parris asked. It matters, Olusoga replied, because for centuries we avoided talking about this connection with empire, using euphemisms and evasions to hide where our wealth — and our museums’ collections — originated. “What we’re dealing with now is a backlog of discussions that we didn’t want to have in the past,” he asserted.
Munira Mirza, Boris Johnson’s policy chief in No 10 and cultural adviser when he was London mayor, put a more positive spin on this contentious issue, which in recent years has become politicised by the Black Lives Matter campaign and “culture war” bickering about how much our museums, our school and university curriculums and even our street names should be “decolonised”. She argued that the rise of museums such as the BM came during the Enlightenment when, perhaps for the first time in history, there was a genuine curiosity about other people’s cultures.
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It was admirable, she continued, that people such as Sloane used their personal fortunes to collect and study artefacts from other civilisations. It sowed the seeds for modern scholarship, something we forget now that we’ve “almost started to see these institutions as instruments of oppression and subjugation”. Mirza didn’t deny that, in the case of incontestably looted items such as the Benin Bronzes (mostly stolen by British soldiers in 1897 and now scattered across many museums), there was a strong argument for returning them to what is now Nigeria. “But if you believe that everything should be returned to its place of creation, you are emptying museums completely,” she said.
This assertion was challenged by Olusoga. Only a “tiny, tiny fraction” of any museum’s collection is affected by conversations about the return of contested items, he replied. “The great problem is not the risk of empty shelves in museums. It’s that they are groaning under the weight of historic over-collection.” He gave some jaw-dropping statistics. The BM displays 80,000, or just 1 per cent, of its eight million objects. A similar percentage is in storage at the Natural History Museum and the National Maritime Museum.
“Yes,” Beard countered, “but four million of the BM’s eight million items are less than one inch in diameter. We are not dealing here with loads and loads of Parthenon sculptures locked out of sight. We are talking about bags of boring Romano-British pottery. I’m sorry if anyone here loves Romano-British pottery. But they aren’t even complete pots.”
Olusoga also argued that, on the question of returning looted goods, there has always been one law for the rich (Europeans) and another, or rather no law at all, for the poor: Africans, Asians and the tribal peoples of Australia and South America. He pointed out that when the victims of looting were Europeans, considerable efforts were made to restore their possessions later. It’s what happened at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, when Spain and Italy successfully negotiated for the return of treasures stolen by Napoleon’s troops; and again in 1945 when the long process of returning Nazi-looted art and artefacts to their previous owners was started.
That, Olusoga said, was in glaring contrast to the protracted and largely unsuccessful attempts by non-European countries to claim back objects created on their lands. “We think between 3,000 and 4,000 objects were taken from the royal palace of Benin,” he said. “I’ve never met any Nigerian who wants all of them returned, but the problem is that hardly any of them have been, even though Nigeria has been requesting their return since it gained independence.”
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Rory Stewart, the former diplomat and politician, made a slightly different point. Why is it that huge campaigns are mounted for the return of certain contested objects — the Elgin Marbles, for instance — but not others? Is it because some countries carry more clout, internationally, than others?
He cited the tangled history of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which, since Victorian times, has been the most dazzling gem in Britain’s crown jewels. Of the four nations that are demanding its return (Afghanistan, India, Iran and Pakistan), Stewart said, “the Afghans have a good claim to it, but it’s India that is dominating the argument”. Why, Stewart asked, should that be? “Presumably because India is more prestigious, more powerful. We like India. Afghanistan, not so much.”
Some have argued that when deciding whether a UK museum should return a dubiously acquired item, one factor should be whether the claiming country has the resources to conserve and display that item properly — for example in a secure, temperature-controlled gallery with expert curatorial care. Beard mocked this condescending notion. “It would be like saying, ‘look, I did steal your overcoat and I will give it back to you, but it wasn’t in very good condition when we stole it so you’ve got to promise you’ll take it to the dry cleaners every two months’ .”
And as Olusoga pointed out, in some very famous instances the supposed experts in famous European museums didn’t look after their prized exhibits very well. “Take the Elgin Marbles. They were damaged by the pollution of Victorian London. They were damaged again by disastrous cleaning attempts in 1858 and 1938. In 1961 two schoolboys knocked the leg off one of the statues. And, famously, the roof leaked a few years ago.”
Beard put forward a robustly pragmatic view about the whole issue of contested artefacts. “I don’t give a stuff about ownership, actually,” she declared. “What I want to get sorted is making sure people can see this stuff.” She would like to “get away from this idea that the BM is a great temple in Bloomsbury where, if you are a foreigner lucky enough to be able to pay for an airfare and get a visa to enter the UK, you can come and see our treasures”. Instead, she suggested, the way forward was loaning far more of the collection to museums across the world, as well as to those in the UK regions (as the BM is already doing). The BM would become, in effect, a lending library.
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That idea of museums spreading their collections far beyond their own walls also appealed to Olusoga, who pointed to “a lot of brilliant thinking and innovations” in this area. “I was recently in Schiphol airport in Amsterdam feeling guilty that I was going home without having been to the Rijksmuseum,” he said. “Then I discovered that the museum has a beautiful display actually inside the airport.”
A member of the audience asked a question about using advanced digital technology, such as 3D printing, to create perfect copies of priceless objects. Would this not solve the dilemma of disputed items such as the Elgin Marbles? We could send the Greeks an exact replica and keep the original in London.
Olusoga was sceptical. “If I stole your car and emailed you a link to it, I don’t think that would sort things out between us,” he quipped. Beard raised another point. Confronting visitors with “the real thing”, rather than computerised visualisations (no matter how realistic) is what gives museums their “wow factor”, she said — especially at a time when there is an increasing interest in authentic, live experiences rather than digital reconstructions.
With public services under such pressure and a mood of strident anti-elitism apparent in Britain, are our great museums still able to justify their existence? For Stewart this was less a philosophical question than a matter of judging how well museums are performing. “How good are they at looking after their collections, or do objects go missing?” he asked pointedly, knowing that George Osborne, the chairman of the BM who has had to deal with the theft of 2,000 objects, was sitting right in front of him. “How good is the museum at displaying and explaining its objects? Are the displays interesting or just dull things that schoolchildren trudge round dutifully?”
Bravely, Nicholas Cullinan, who has been director of the BM for barely a week, stood up at the end of the debate and responded to the points raised. He “gladly accepted the gauntlet” that Stewart had thrown down, he said, about the BM being judged by its scholarship, its stewardship of its collections “and the way they are explained to audiences”. And he also “loved the idea that this ‘universal museum’ is not universal enough” — that it should send its treasures out into the world rather than expecting the world to come to Bloomsbury.
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The task facing Cullinan — revitalising a vast, venerable institution that has come perilously close to humiliation in the past couple of years — won’t be achieved by fine words alone. But that was an encouraging statement of intent to end a stimulating debate.
The debate can be heard on Times Radio on Saturday July 13 at 7pm, or watch it now on The Times YouTube channel
