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September 4, 2008

Should Museums be Free?

Waldemar Januszczak is having second thoughts. He goes to the Imperial War Museum in London and finds a paid admission special exhibition on, of all things, James Bond.


So, I hope the question I want to ask here is predictable. It should be. It's a damned obvious question: why is the Imperial War Museum celebrating James Bond, when Bond and his Aston Martin and his girls and his gadgets have nothing to do with the terrible realities of war, and when our young men are having their legs blown away in Afghanistan and Iraq? If the question is obvious, so, alas, is the answer. We all know exactly why the Imperial War Museum has put on a Bond show. It's as clear as a vodka martini. Bond is popular and, by devoting a display to him, the organisers hope to attract wagonloads of fee-paying visitors to their museum. He'll bring a younger crowd. The kidults will love him. Seats are sure to be settled with bums.

. . .

There are, in fact, two tragedies being enacted here. One is the continuing collapse of cultural values that leaves us unable to tell the difference between Kylie's dresses and the rightful terrain of a museum. The other is an unfortunate side effect of a well-meaning gesture - the abolition of museum charges. Making entry to national museums free, thereby reversing the policy of charging brought in by Margaret Thatcher's government, is the biggest feather in new Labour's cultural cap. Having marched outside the V&A in the 1980s, protesting against museum charges, I was as delighted as anyone by the Blair government's determination to push through free entry.

Seven years on from the abolition of charges, however, things are no longer so clear. When that dreadful old Etonian, the then shadow culture secretary Hugo Swire, popped up in the papers last year suggesting that the Conservatives might reexamine the free-admissions policy, large barrels of ordure came down on his head, persuading him to beat a hasty retreat. Yet the cruel truth is that free museum entry has turned out to be a mixed blessing. Yes, the number of visitors going to galleries has increased dramatically, but the figures are not what they seem. A Mori poll conducted in 2002 discovered that, although numbers had increased, the make-up of the typical museumgoer had remained unchanged. What was actually happening was that the same people were going more often. And those people were, as before, the middle-class, the educated, the culturally involved.

. . .

The most serious effect, however, of the scrapping of entrance fees has been the impact it has had on exhibition policy. Unable to charge visitors for entry, museums have had to rely on special exhibitions for large chunks of their income. The talented among them have duly found ways of putting on shows that are both popular and proper. The British Museum's tribute to the Terracotta Army is a perfect example: the most successful show of the year, but ambitious, thoughtful, enlightening. Yet it takes a rare museum talent to pull off that approach. Which is why the Imperial War Museum has resorted to waving [Halle] Berry's bikini at us. [my emphasis]

Posted by CrankyProfessor at September 4, 2008 9:11 AM