What is a museum? Culture wars row erupts over new definition
A PROPOSED change in the international definition of a museum risks putting curators under pressure to rewrite history, it has been claimed.
A consultation to replace a 44-word definition of a museum with a 99-word one by the International Council of Museums closed last week. The final definition will be announced next year but there are fears that if the draft is adopted it will turn museums into a culture wars battleground. The change could lead to museums being forced to rewrite descriptions of artefacts under pressure from interest groups. One museum source said: “It will allow anybody with a political axe to grind to put pressure on museums and institutions to follow fashionable political ideologies rather than serve humanity as a whole.”
Since 2007 the council’s definition has said: “A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.”
However, part of the new definition proposes: “Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.”
Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum, gave a cautious welcome to the proposal: “In an increasingly globalised world, I believe the museum plays a vital role in helping us to understand our human history in all its complexity and contradiction, in its unity and diversity. However, Tim Loughton MP, chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on the British Museum, said: “Our great museums are next in the firing line for the virtue signalling woke activist nonsense that is engulfing so many aspects of society.” The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport declined to comment.
Archivists who jump on the woke bandwagon should beware: they’ll not only see their collections reimagined but returned to whence they came
Since 2007 the International Council of Museums (Icom) has offered – as if it were necessary – a definition of a museum. Few reasonable people would disagree with it: platitudes about a non-profit institution serving society and the public by acquiring, conserving and exhibiting examples of heritage, and conducting research. Its purposes, again universally agreed, are that it should exist for “education, study and enjoyment”.
Education and study, if undertaken in a spirit of enlightenment and curiosity, are indeed enjoyable; learning and the enrichment of the mind ought to be inherently uplifting. But a new definition of a museum Icom is proposing to adopt next year abolishes enjoyment. Instead, museums are to be “democratising, inclusive and polyphonic [sic] spaces for critical dialogue”. Worse than that, the dialogue is to be about “the pasts and the futures” ( sic iterum). Museums are to be weaponised in the so-called culture wars that a vocal, unrepresentative, bullying and extremist minority are determined to inflict upon a harmless majority who merely want to get on with their inoffensive lives and, out of natural intellectual curiosity, learn something.
So instead of learning some objective truths about the past, the visitor to the museum of the future will have to cope with an institution “acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present”. The purpose of a museum is to aim “to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing”. In such a world, manipulative curators will feel empowered to pander to every cause that radical leftists and anarchists choose to espouse. Museums would become a means of imposing the will of such minorities on to everyone else – something self-evidently a million miles from “democratising” the experience of heritage. This prepares the way for demands by minority groups to force their interpretations of history and culture on a museum’s exhibits, irrespective of the legitimacy of those interpretations or of the facts.
The nonsense in this new definition about “pasts” and “futures”’ gives an indication of the direction of travel. It is rather like the Duchess of Sussex’s patronising and delusive assertions about her “truth”, in which anything she asserts to be true must be so. Now museums, if this new definition is adopted, are to be expected to put into suspense the objective truths of history and replace them with the truths according to the Meghan Markles of politics. If one should seek a taster of the future, one needs only to look at the absurdity the National Trust has inflicted upon itself with its “report” on the links to slavery and colonialism that some of its properties have, which start from the assumption that the British Empire was in every respect inherently wicked.
Culture should not be politicised; it should speak for itself. If the “pasts” of some groups – as defined by those who claim, usually dishonestly, to speak for them – do not coincide with an objective view of history then under this new rubric that would be too bad for the objective view of history. Then museums would cease to enrich the mind and become purely propagandistic. It is depressing that Hartwig Fischer, the director of the British Museum, and no doubt terrified of the obloquy he would attract if he dissented, should have said that “it is perfectly right that we ask questions of our collections; how they entered the museum…” He should brace himself not just to have his collection “reinterpreted” as part of the brainwashing of the museum’s visitors, but to see much of it returned to whence it came. He can kiss goodbye to the Elgin marbles and to anything “looted” or “stolen” from Africa. In the end, he’ll need an exhibition space the size of a car boot.
Like, it appears, every other public utility in the Western world, museums are ripe for hijacking for the purpose of re-educating and radicalising those young or naïve enough to be susceptible to such grotesque manipulation. The hijacking will be helped by our public life having reached the stage where it has become career-ending to question assumptions such as that all white people are racists, all males are rapists, all who believe in capitalism are exploitative, and that we are all destroying the planet: though what museum artefacts can do about that will be beyond most of us. To seek to destroy part of the civilising process to further this intolerant, bullying cult is bad enough; that too many in authority are afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes is terrifying.
Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary, has said it is nothing to do with him; but museums are to do with him. He cannot play Pontius Pilate on this. Otherwise he is raising the white flag not merely on the role of our heritage but on what we think is our way of life.