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WHY WE ARE CELEBRATING MUSEUMS

AUTHORS ON MUSEUMS | September 29th 2008
Museums are not the groan-filled dungeons of our youth, writes Tim de Lisle, editor of Intelligent Life. He goes on to explain a new series in the magazine, "Authors on Museums", inaugurated by Julian Barnes ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Autumn 2008

To a London child of the 1970s, museums were mostly dreary places: dusty, fusty, impenetrable, introverted. On rainy Sunday afternoons, when you would have been quite happy playing Mastermind or taping your new LP, your parents dutifully insisted on dragging you out. "We're going to a museum," they said. "Groan," you replied.

If you were lucky, it would be the Science Museum, where you could at least push some buttons and make a few things happen. If you weren't so lucky, it would be the V&A (frumpy old frocks on headless mannequins), the Imperial War Museum (noisy, confusing and tedious, in a doomed attempt to re-create its subject), or the Natural History (one damn skeleton after another, disproving the notion that all small boys like dinosaurs). The best bit was always the shop, and even that wasn't great: all too often, you emerged clutching a souvenir pencil.

Somewhere in the 30 years between my childhood and my children's, the groaning stopped and museums came to life. They were now welcoming, with friendly menus in the foyer, clear signposting throughout, and the occasional trace of humanity passing across the faces of the security men. They reached out to the visitor rather than facing inwards: at the British Museum, the staff car park was converted into a lawn for the public to loll or picnic on. It even occurred to the administrators that there might be a case for opening in the evening.

They didn't just put old stuff in cases: they told stories. Just as the publishing world woke up to the need to show as well as tell, so museums spotted the need to tell as well as show. They allowed their stern old buildings to be rejuvenated by bold new additions: the Louvre sprouted glass pyramids and the Great Court at the British Museum turned into a glass doughnut. In these stolid stone worlds, glass was just what was needed, opening them up, letting in light. Now, at the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, even the floor is glass.

Other museums reinvented themselves, like the Getty Museum, a stunning building which presides over Los Angeles like a Parthenon. Or they opened new branches with vast invigorating spaces, like Tate Modern. The permanent collection there may be thin, but the one-offs are riveting. I've taken almost as many pictures of the kids in the Turbine Hall as on the beach: lying down beneath Olafur Eliasson's artificial sun, wandering among Rachel Whiteread's hills of boxes, poking their trainers into Doris Salcedo's mysterious crack in the floor, and bursting out of Carsten Holler's upmarket helter-skelters with expressions of delighted alarm. Whether all this is art is arguable, but it is definitely fun. The shop is still sometimes the best bit, but narrowly, and only because it too is much improved--enticing and engrossing, a toy shop without the junk.

Museum bosses can be forgiven for being backward-looking, and they certainly shouldn't lose their sense of history. But lately they have learnt to engage with the present. Where they might have been wary of technology, they have made it their friend. Rare is the museum without a well-organised website, and audioguides have gone from clunky cassettes to slick little digital things that allow you to hop from one exhibit to another and even show you it on the screen.

In February, my daughter and I went to the Chinese New Year day at the British Museum. The main attraction, the Terracotta Army, was a sell-out, but there was still plenty of entertainment to be had, following a trail of specially commissioned lanterns, watching a 20-minute performance by a mildly baffling Chinese theatre troupe, and browsing the stalls in the Great Court, which had been transformed again, from a doughnut to a wok.

That day has now gone down in British Museum history. It was the single best-attended day they have had (as far as they know: in the bad old days, they didn't even keep count). The ticker on the turnstiles reached 35,000 and the main doors had to be shut for the first time since the Chartist riots of 1848. And this success is no one-day wonder. When the Art Newspaper asked the world's major museums just how many people they admitted in 2007, the answers were monumental: the Louvre topped the chart with 8.3m, the Pompidou Centre came second with 5.5m, and there were three London museums in the next six--Tate Modern third with 5.2m, the British Museum fourth with 4.8m, and the National Gallery eighth with 4.2m. So the Louvre is drawing 159,000 people a week. When I was there in April, it felt as if every single one of them was pressing in around the "Mona Lisa", but even so, the figure is formidable: two Old Traffords, one and a half Wembleys. And some of these numbers were rising even as they were published. In July, the British Museum announced that it had hit 6m visitors in a year, breaking its own record.

All this lies behind our new series: Authors on Museums. The idea is simple. We ask a leading writer--not an art critic, not a specialist--to pick a favourite museum and tell us what they love about it. Or don't love. We begin with Julian Barnes choosing a small museum in Sicily that has some of the faults of the big ones before they transformed themselves--but also two masterpieces and two other items of great charm. In our winter issue, the baton passes to the short-story writer Helen Simpson, who makes another unexpected choice. 

Picture credit: Chris Warde-Jones

(Tim de Lisle is editor of Intelligent Life magazine.)