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Stop Thief! Am I referring to the curator who allegedly stole a staggering 2,000 treasures from the British Museum collection over the last 30 years or the monumentally privileged white men who filled the collection with appropriated treasures in the first place?
Well, both. Let’s start with the recently caught (alleged) thief — the curator who was finally caught by a dealer who noticed the antiquities for sale on eBay for a fraction of their value. Outrageous! However, unfortunately, not surprising. What is surprising is that this doesn’t happen more often, because although the public perception is that the number one job of museums is to protect and care for their collections, the sad truth is that budgets for that purpose have been cut and cut and cut, until in many cases, they no longer exist.
Instead, over the last generation, the museum focus has shifted to loans, blockbuster exhibitions with content borrowed largely from other collections, acquiring yet more artifacts they can’t afford to care for, and building new galleries. With this focus, 90% of any given collection remains largely untouched — gathering dust in some warehouse. The Met has around 2 million objects and to give an example. The curator of the Met’s Islamic rug collection, one of the best globally, could not, after two years, gain direct access to the collection due to it being buried too deep in storage.
Why? Ticket sales, and a belief that donors will only want to fund new acquisitions with their names on the wall label and new galleries with their names on the walls. Raising money to care for artifacts in storage just isn’t ‘sexy’ enough. At the same time, museums have become bloated bureaucratic behemoths — with 10 or 20 times more staff than they had 20-30 years ago, from my experience — and yet, arguably more got done back then.
So what happens when you follow a model to keep growing and growing your collection and build new buildings but forget the fundamentals of cataloging and collection care? A ticking time bomb.
Fortunately, there are solutions. Technology, for one, makes cataloging exponentially faster. Though most museums are neither tech-savvy nor up for workflow change, this is an area they could work on. Another is modernizing fundraising. At the Art and Finance Conference hosted by Deloitte at the Vatican last year, wealth managers discussed the new trends in museum philanthropy. Instead of donating a painting or collection, families are auctioning off work to give cash to museums or social causes they care about. Time to pitch projects beyond the name on the wall.
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Now we come back to the colonizers. Recent articles on the theft have brought up the Elgin Marbles controversy and other repatriation requests. The argument that the Elgin — let’s call them Parthenon Marbles? — were ‘legally acquired’ by Lord Elgin from the conquerors of Greece, the Ottoman Empire, who allowed Elgin’s staff to chisel out the choicest parts of what many consider the best sculpture of European history for today’s equivalent of around £8.5m (sounds a little thin). The greater fear by those who know better is how far will this slippery slope go? Would the whole collection end up repatriated?
Well, good news — we can kill several unsustainable and unjust birds with one systems change stone: Start paying people properly to attract more diversity, leading to true social change. Currently, museum staff are largely made up of white people with family money that affords them the ability to take low-salaried positions, in exchange for the prestige that comes with the association. I noticed this mostly over my years of working in museums.
The consequence of this would be to have fewer staff per museum, and this would reduce bureaucracy. It may also mean museums have to accept doing fewer exhibitions and possibly even reduce the number of new acquisitions, which would mean lowering their carbon footprint.
With a more diverse staff, people of color could control or at least contribute to their own narratives, and we could then properly decolonize our cultural institutions — these monuments to colonialism, educators of society and cathedrals of imagination and possibilities all rolled into one provide a unique opportunity for change making. Some museums and social practice artists have already done amazing work to expand perspectives and raise up their communities, such as Yinka Shonibare and Theaster Gates, but they are still the exception and not the rule.
A further consequence would likely be the repatriation of looted collections. Aside from the ethical and social considerations, this could reduce costs and burden associated with caring for collections too big to care for. And for that 90% in storage, what meaning does an object have that is never seen? This certainly goes against current museum culture. Malcolm Gladwell compared museums to the dragon Smaug, hoarding treasure in storage, not to use or for anyone to see, but just to have it. If another institution can better value and care for an object, display it and actively lend it to others, doesn’t it better serve society by going there?
