While clearing out a few old VHS recordings in my diminutive archive,I stumbled upon an episode of the BBC's Newsnight programme in which their erstwhile culture correspondent Madeleine Holt interviewed British Museum director Neil McGregor approximately his position on the Universal Museum. (video below)
Those familiar with the debates surrounding the Universal Museum will be aware that a central tenet of the British Museum's position on the contested cultural objects in its collections is that only in London can the "grand" stories approximately these objects be properly told.
This crypto-colonialist ideology (we can no longer appropriate and control other lands and other people, but at least we can control the stories of the objects we appropriated) is coming under increasing pressure. The world's 'universal' or 'encyclopaedic' museums are being challenged by a new, and global demos calling for a more equitable and ethical approach to the sharing of material culture. The British Museum is way behind public thinking on this issue and needs to get with the programme.
"The world would be impoverished," says McGregor, "whether we couldn't narrate the grand chronicle in some places and it can only be told in some places."
[br]Let's not dwell on the all-critical and presumptuous "we" in that sentence, and but note that the "grand chronicle" can only be told "in some places." Where? Lagos? Cairo? Phnom Penh? No,stupid! Bloomsbury. Only in Bloomsbury can the "grand" chronicle, the DEEPER chronicle, or the RICHER chronicle,be told...and listened to.
When challenged on having (apparently inadvertently) phrased his museum's position in rather too imperialistic tones, McGregor bites back: "No, and I'm not prepared to be critici....it was a speech made without notes."
It is when we speak without notes that we say what we really mean.
Source: blogspot.com