Neil MacGregor saved the British Museum. It’s time to reinvent it again
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Version 0 of 1. It is hard to remember how irrelevant the British Museum seemed before Neil MacGregor saved it. There was something dowdy and confused about this treasury of world art. Its collections were splendid – at least when the room you wanted to see happened to be open on the day you went. But its exhibitions were often dull or silly – there was even one that looked at Agatha Christie and archaeology. Such desperate attempts to popularise the past revealed a museum whose experts had no idea how to communicate their knowledge. Related: British Museum director Neil MacGregor to step down Death on the Nile was averted when MacGregor took on the fading Bloomsbury institution in 2002 and gave it a powerful public agenda. Archaeology is not just about the past, he demonstrated. He immediately launched a series of powerful and sometimes provocative exhibitions that told the history of the world in new ways, from arguing that the ancient Persian empire was greater than classical Greece, to celebrating the Hajj. This has been an incredible period for the British Museum. Neil MacGregor has led from the front. His Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects, told a subversive multicultural history of humanity using the museum’s collection. This complemented blockbusters like The First Emperor and Moctezuma that didn’t just bring fabulous treasures to London – including some of China’s terracotta warriors – but always advanced bold, clear, thought-provoking arguments. MacGregor redefined what a global art and antiquity collection can and should be. The old joke about the British Museum is that it doesn’t have much that is British in it. Historically, its rich displays from all over the world originated in the British empire. MacGregor stood this legacy on its head to make the BM a multicultural meeting place, telling a history that is not Eurocentric. Is it a national tragedy that he is leaving? Surely Neil MacGregor will go on playing a huge part in British life. He’ll have more time to write books and present radio series. It’s no surprise that he also wants to work with museums abroad, including in Berlin. That internationalism is at one with the messages he’s been pumping out for years. We, too, should not be nationalist about MacGregor; he belongs to the world. And in truth, his agenda for the British Museum has run its course. Perhaps a museum can be too successful; so effectively has MacGregor created a multicultural institution that it now probably needs to pursue more traditional approaches – there are lots of aspects of archaeology that really are about the past, not the present. The problem with turning history into an argument about our world today is that you risk hammering the past into your agenda. Worse, it’s tempting to create a fictional version of world history. Absolute relativism about world cultures is fine, until you try to understand the origins of the modern world. Why did Europe, not China, conquer the globe from the 15th century onwards? Why did Islam lose power from the 1600s? These are awkward questions that recent British Musuem exhibitions have avoided – in a way that made Ming, for instance, a curiously dull show. MacGregor has found brilliant new ways to tell and show the past – but they are not the only ones. He leaves a formidable legacy, and a good argument for keeping controversial works such as the Benin bronzes and the Parthenon marbles in Britain as part of a multicultural museum. But with IS attacking world art and antiquities with unprecedented barbarity, perhaps it is time for museums to start speaking up for civilisation in less diplomatic ways. What is it that makes civilisation worth defending? |