Why do people go to museums? It's not easy to find out. Frankly, there's a lot
of waffle. I've spent the past week in them, trotting up to people and
saying: “According to the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, museum
and gallery attendance is rocketing in Britain. Why are you here?” Everybody
is polite, because people always are in museums and galleries, but nobody
really knows. “I was interested in the exhibition,” they might say, not all
that helpfully. Or, “the kids like it”. It's hard, at first, to see the
thread. People go for all sorts of reasons. Or so they think.
A friend and I, for example, once went to the Saatchi Gallery, drunk, to
understand how our other friend Jez had ruined his shoes. He'd been a few
weeks before, also drunk, and he'd blundered into Richard Wilson's 20:50. Do
you know it? Big room full of reflective engine oil, with a walkway down the
middle. Totally disorientating. Amazing. Jez had flailed around, bewildered,
and scooped the stuff on to his feet. Art all over his Nikes. We went to see
if we could replicate it. It sounded, like, mind-expanding. Hey, we were
students.
It turns out that this was actually a very old-fashioned way to behave.
According to the various histories of museums into which I have delved
(Giles Waterfield's Palaces of Art is particularly good on this), I was
buying into the German Romantic idea of the museum as a temple, in which the
visitor “should enjoy a quasi-mystical experience”. Sounds about right. None
of the many museum-goers to whom I spoke in the past week was doing anything
like this. So, here's theory No1: museum numbers are up, because, quite
suddenly, museums aren't much like museums.
I've a few theories to come, but this one makes a lot of sense. It certainly
does in Liverpool, which, as 2008's EU Capital of Culture, saw museum and
gallery attendances soar by something like 400 per cent.
“We decided to take a real look at the audience,” says Phil Redmond, who was
the creative director of Liverpool 2008 and also, just so it clicks, the guy
who created Grange Hill, Brookside and Hollyoaks. He says: “If you have
people who are used to bright and breezy entertainment with TV, you have to
make the venues a lot more bright and breezy too. You make them more
kid-friendly. Have a kid zone. Education workshops. Follow the dinosaur
prints.”
Redmond adds that you need to balance this with the ability for people to sit
quietly in museums and reflect, and that some things should be
family-friendly and some perhaps not. It's notable, though, that when it
comes to attendances, family-friendly is what works. Consider: Tate
Liverpool (bright, breezy) up 67 per cent; Merseyside Maritime Museum
(likewise) up 69 per cent; The Lady Lever Art Gallery (austere, heavyweight)
down 16 per cent.
You could call theory No1 the “dumbing down” theory, only none of the punters
I met was dumb. There was Sean Barron, the bar manager from Brighton, who
was up to see the Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery and was
“particularly pleased to see Picasso's interpretation of the Las Meninas”
because he liked the Velásquez original. There was the Carter/House/Downing
family from Woking and surrounds, all three generations, who were in the
British Museum only because little Abigail, 8, was doing a project on the
Egyptians, but knew their stuff about the mummies and had been to St Albans
the other week when she was studying the Romans.
Quite un-dumb, in fact, which allows me to sluice neatly into theory No2, as
expounded by the likes of Melvyn Bragg, the broadcaster, and Neil MacGregor,
the director of the British Museum. This is what you might call the “dumbing
up” theory. In other words, museum numbers are up because people are getting
cleverer.
There's a lot to be said for this. This is the Britain where everybody loves
watching Stephen Fry on QI, and more people listen to Radio 4 than Radio 1.
“There is a huge desire,” MacGregor says, “to understand and to address
complexity, and to spend the time that it takes to do so.” For the museum's
Babylon exhibition (which ends tomorrow), the average dwell-time was an
hour. For Hadrian, it was an hour and 40 minutes. For the current exhibition
on Shah Abbas, it is about an hour and a half. It is not true, MacGregor
says, that we live in an era of dropping attention spans.
Nicholas Kenyon, formerly the controller of the Proms and now managing
director of the Barbican, reckons that there is something very British about
the pace of a museum: “There is something in our culture that is
free-flowing. People can take as long as they want.” He notices it
particularly, he says, coming from a background in the performing arts.
The British Museum, perhaps, sits bang in the centre of competing notions
about what a museum should be. There are cafés and a restaurant, and it's
certainly family-friendly. But there's a dose of mystery here, too. In
Liverpool, Redmond insisted that the whole point of collections is that
“they are there to contextualise our past”. We have to view them, he said,
“in terms of the stories they can tell. People often think that collections
themselves are the point, and don't need to be explained.”
This sits uneasily with more oldfashioned notions of custodianship, which many
still feel is the purpose of a museum. Still, he has a point. I thought of
his words when I went through to the Duveen Gallery to see the Elgin Marbles
and hunted in vain for a sign to told me that, yes, these actually were the
Elgin Marbles.
I walked through the V&A on a Monday afternoon, and in some sections -
South- East Asia, Japan, European Textiles - I didn't see a soul. This is
your proper quasi-mystical museum experience. Take your German Romantic
friends, if you have any. They'll love it. To stand alone in half-light on a
polished floor, staring up at a 16thcentury tapestry of men with crazy
beards, lambs in armour and a soldier shaking the hand of a bear is a
bewildering experience. You can feel the ticking in your head. It's not what
crowds want. The V&A was down last year by 15 per cent - although
perhaps that's because they did so well the year before with the Kylie
exhibition.
You might be alone, but you don't worry about getting mugged. The V&A says
that it rarely has more than a couple of security incidents a year. The
National Gallery is bang on Trafalgar Square, but even they need to kick
people out only every couple of months. That brings me to theory No3. Museum
numbers are up because museums are safe. “They attract only a certain type
of person, let's face it,” says Margaret Child, 79, from Essex, visiting the
National with a group of older ladies and then heading off to see Sunset
Boulevard: “In any museum, do you ever hear the F-word? You hear it up and
down every high street. In the cafeteria, all ages, all denominations, no
one swearing.”
I meet Debbie Norton and Sarah O'Connell, both from Haringey, in the Museum of
Childhood in Bethnal Green, which is part museum, part playground. They are
with their respective two-year-olds, Jessie and Leila. “It's a safe space to
play,” Debbie says: “We can have something to eat, they can entertain
themselves.” Sarah says that the kids can run off and she can wait a minute
or two before having to chase them. “It's also safe as in health-and-safety
safe,” she says. In Tate Modern, I was struck by the number of disabled folk
in buggies.
Aside from me and my drunk friends, people really do behave themselves in
museums. Redmond jokes that this is because there is “more security per
square metre than anywhere else on Earth”. He agrees, though, that there is
something about museums that people respect. Neil MacGregor , at the British
Museum, agrees. “The Great Court has become London's village green,” he
says. “It's where you bring the children. It's where you meet a friend. It's
the space that belongs to everyone.”
Free entry has a huge amount to do with this. That should probably be Theory
4, the credit-crunch theory. People are going to museums because museums are
free. Most of Britain's biggest museums have been free for years, but, as
MacGregor puts it, it's the rhetoric of free admission since 2001 that has
had an impact, as much as the fact. When the Tory culture spokesman, Hugo
Swire, spoke of reintroducing entry charges in 2007 there was national
uproar, and a few months later David Cameron sacked him.
When I asked Redmond his best tip for getting people into museums, he snorted
and said “create a recession”. Everybody going to a museum approves of free
entry, even if (and this is the crucial bit) they are then paying extra to
see a special exhibition, such as Picasso at the National (£12.50) or Shah
Abbas at the British Museum (£12). Free admission to museums has given the
public a sense of ownership over them. This ties into Theory1, and the way
that many museums no longer feel like somebody else's country house. They
feel like they are ours.
And so to Theory5. They're coming thick and fast now, these theories, but
this, I think, is my favourite. People are flocking to museums because
museums are the best public space we have. Britain is too secular to value
its churches and too divorced from local governance to give a damn about
town halls. Schools are not the social hubs they once were. Museums fill a
gap.
All the other theories, I reckon, trickle into this one. Museums are as much
about activities, these days, as collections. Debates at the British Museum.
DJs at the Royal Academy. The Museum of Childhood, as discussed, being used
as a playpark. In East London, galleries stay open late every Thursday, as
nightlife. The V&A does the same on Fridays. Cafés. Restaurants. Places
to go.
The National Wool Museum in Wales had 24,344 visitors last year. That's a bad
Saturday morning for the British Museum, but it is 11 per cent up on last
year. Ann Whittall, the museum's manager, tells me why. “We've got a very
successful family trail,” she says. “The Woolly Trail. It helps families to
understand what they are seeing. It's interactive and you get thread at the
end. We've a café that sells local produce, and mills. We're 16 miles north
of Carmarthen, so in the winter we rely on our local audience. We have a
carol concert and a craft fair at Christmas time. We have a knitting club,
and nursery groups meet here, too.”
That's almost every theory, in a single tiny package. See how they all work?
Only the German Romantics need feel left out.
