[CPProt.net] Let your treasures see the light of day, museums told

[Ellie Bruggeman]

Let your treasures see the light of day, museums told

TOO many museum collections are stashed away in storerooms, according to 
a damning report published yesterday.

Museums are failing to realise the full potential of their collections 
and must ensure that they really are for everyone, a study by the 
Museums Association concluded. Jane Glaister, chair of the report’s 
steering committee, said: “If an object sits in a store for ten years, 
without anyone looking at it, and if it is not published or made 
available on the internet, can that museum be realising its 
responsibilities towards the object and towards the public?”

The report said that if museums do not address the problem, they are 
going to have “unwelcome solutions” imposed on them.

Collections for the Future is published after an 18-month inquiry by the 
association, an independent organisation representing the majority of 
Britain’s 1,500 museums. Its president is Charles Saumarez Smith, 
director of the National Gallery. The report broaches the sensitive 
subject of “deaccessioning”, the selling off or disposal of objects from 
public collections, an option dismissed by most in the British museum 
world. They point to the vagaries of fashion and cite examples such as 
the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Merseyside, which in 1958 sold an 1880s 
Fantin-Latour painting for £10,000 when nobody wanted a Pre-Raphaelite 
picture, only to see it sell in the early 1990s for more than £1 million.

But the report concluded that it will become increasingly difficult to 
justify spending public money on caring for public resources whose 
potential is never seen to be realised.

The report also found that many museums are not developing their 
collections with the “vibrancy and rigour” needed to ensure that they 
serve the needs of audiences: “There are too few significant loans, and 
too few opportunities to see important temporary exhibitions in the UK 
outside cities.”

The Museum of Reading is applauded for sending parts of its collection 
to community groups, prisons and schools because it only has room to 
display 1 per cent of its 500,000 objects. The museum has set aside 
20,000 objects for 1,500 “themed boxes”, ranging from ancient history to 
biology, that are sent into the community.

The British Museum has long dismissed the notion that its storerooms are 
filled with unseen treasures. Of seven million items in the collection, 
75,000 are on display.

But Maurice Davies, deputy director of the association, said: “Many 
people in the museum world believe that simply holding collections for 
the future is an end in itself. We’re arguing they must promote their 
collections and actively use them. There are many things in museum 
collections that haven’t been looked at by anybody.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk