Nobody move or the museums get hurt!

From the Evening Standard:

Fears that Britain’s flagship museums will be forced to scrap major exhibitions after Brexit can be revealed today.

Famous names including the V&A and the Natural History Museum believe they could be hammered with import taxes, the loss of key staff and huge cuts in vital research funding.

Some think they could be forced to temporarily close their doors in the case of a botched Brexit deal...

Etcetera etcetera.

As older readers will remember, there were no public museums or galleries in the UK prior to the mid-1970s...

Nobody move or the museum gets it!

Emailed in by MBK, from Museums Organisation:

The artistic director of the Southbank Centre, London, said that leaving the EU would be harmful for museums.

Speaking at a debate at the British Library yesterday evening, Jude Kelly, who is part of the Stronger In campaign, said that arts and culture would be “more driven on pounds, shilling and pence” if Britain was to leave the EU.

“Europe is looking at our museums, galleries and investing in these more and more,” she said. “To pull out would be to lose all of that at a time when we have maximum influence over it.”

Kelly said that even though the amount of EU funding is small compared to the overall amount of funding given to the UK’s cultural sector, this funding is vital in supporting new innovative projects.*

I suppose this is what makes life easy for Stronger In. It is fairly easy to identify people on the EU/taxpayer-funded drip who are more than ready to speak up for Bremain out of naked self-interest. It is much more difficult to identify those sectors which would provably and directly benefit from Brexit.

* In plain English: we can't be bothered working out what the public really wants to see and is prepared to pay for. Those ghastly plebs might not want the highbrow stuff that we like lavishing somebody else's money on to boost our own egos. The Stigler specialises in skewering this sort of behaviour.

The Statue of Sekhemka

From the BBC

A 4,000-year-old Egyptian statue expected to raise about £6m has sold for £15.76m at Christie's of London.

Northampton Borough Council auctioned the Sekhemka limestone statue to help fund a £14m extension to Northampton Museum and Art Gallery.

However, Arts Council England had warned the council its museum could lose its accreditation status.

The Egyptian ambassador to Britain said the council should have handed the statue back if it did not want it.

Someone grabbed it 100+ years ago. We have no idea what was involved in that. And having been to Egypt and seen how little respect the guides have for the paintings in the Valley of the Kings (offering to allow me to take flash photographs in a "no flash photography" area for a few dollars), I don't have much sympathy with "giving anything back" to Egypt.

Protesters gathered outside Christie's before the sale said they wanted the statue to be returned to Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities.

Sue Edwards, from the Save Sekhemka Action Group, who travelled from Northampton to the auction, said: "This is the darkest cultural day in the town's history.

Really? You don't think maybe the fire at the Royal Theatre in 1887 might score a bit higher?

Sorry, but I was born and raised in Northampton. I lived there 20 years. My father has lived there 50 years. He's into all sorts of history. And I'd never heard of this statue before this auction. And the Save Sekhemka Action Group has something like 1100 "likes" on Facebook out of a population of 200,000+, which suggests it's not exactly highly culturally valued.

Loss of Arts Council England accreditation would make the museum ineligible for a range of future grants and funding, however the leader of the council David Mackintosh said he did not see why this should happen.

But as it then shows, Arts Council England grants have been something like £250,000 over 3 years. £6m is going to cover a couple of decades of losses.

The statue has not been on display for four years, and no-one had asked to see it in that time, he said.

"It's been in our ownership for over 100 years and it's never really been the centrepiece of our collection," he told BBC Look East.

Oops. That's a pretty good test of how much interest something has.

Personally, I think museums should either be about local history, or about a subject. Swindon has a town museum, and some of it's good, showing things like roman and iron age finds nearby, but some things in it are just junk, like a stuffed crocodile. It's nothing to do with the town, it's just something that was a rarity once, given to the museum and no-one's got rid of it.

It seems to me that Northampton is doing the right thing: sell off something that's really nothing to do with the town to pay for making a better museum that is.