Museums are essentially phoney. Few of their objects were made for them but rather to be owned, used, enjoyed and traded. They were not meant to be wrenched from their context by fair means or foul, then put in a glass case or buried in giant state hoards, most of them never again to see the light of day.
The British Museum is such a beloved institution that no one ever asks what it is about. Little is about Britain – instead it has at least 8m mostly archaeological objects gathered from across the globe, barely 1% of which are on show. The fact that a few hundred of these appear to have vanished is hardly surprising. Nor is it shattering, given that no one seems to have known the objects ever existed.
The museum’s chair of trustees, George Osborne, suggested last week that this mishap was due to curatorial “groupthink”. He has asked a former trustee, Nigel Boardman, to see what went wrong. Osborne claims to need £1bn for urgent repairs and to reorder his tired permanent-display rooms. This sum is never going to come from the government’s capital works grant of just £75m a year for all museums. The museum has to find the money itself or it is bust.
No museum can curate millions of objects when its roof is falling in. It should indeed guard the world’s treasures for a scholarly elite, but that need not mean 8m of them. Dynamic museums in the US, like the Kimble Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, are switching to buying and selling to update their collections, a process known as “progressive deaccessioning”. In 2017, the UK’s own culture department published a report that questioned whether “effective collections management can be truly effective and efficient without some disposals”.
The answer has to be that, within appropriate boundaries, grownup trustees should be trusted to edit their collections, either to improve them or to meet a crisis. As the museum has found with its Parthenon marbles, a kneejerk refusal even to discuss such issues just makes enemies. Other, newer museums around the world are being told by the museum they can never, ever hope to display items from long-defunct empires, and that such items must forever remain in a Bloomsbury vault. It will not wash. At the very least museum objects should be sellable to other museums.
A more immediate source of funds is surely beyond argument. Free entry to the museum, except for special exhibitions, is not a moral issue but rather a device to keep its grant as a top visitor attraction. The New York Met now charges $30, the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum €22.50 and the Louvre €17. Are they immoral? Deals can be done for children and students, but free museum entry is simply a generous donation by British taxpayers, mostly to foreign tourists.
The British Museum used to boast that it was culture free at the point of delivery, like the NHS. Nothing is free, as I am sure Osborne used to say as chancellor – unless, that is, you are an artful dodger in his own museum. He should take a deep breath and charge.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist