OpenCulture

As I may have mentioned before, the next few years look set to be challenging for museums. We don’t yet know what proportion of the impending public sector spending cuts will fall on museums. But we do know that the cuts will come, and with them a different way of working for museums and museum professionals across the country.

Times like these call for big ideas. No matter how harshly the winds of political favour turn against Culture, the interests of museums and their audiences are best served not by protecting what is, but by reimagining what could be.

The past decade of museum policy has been less about the intrinsic value of museums in their own right, or about the central value of cultural memory to a stable society, but more about what museums can do in addition to being museums. An essentially instrumentalist policy has focussed more explicitly on the contribution museums can make to social policy, to formal and informal education, to sense of place and to social cohesion.

As Alec Coles once vocally pointed out to me, these are good and necessary functions of museums in society, and museums must indeed continue to perform a social function. But they are only the most externally-visible outcomes of museums, and in some sense have been artificially extenuated in response to the prevailing political climate of the past 13 years.

Yes, there will be cuts, but in the constellation of Government expenditure, Culture and the Arts are marginal, and the value of national-level cuts in museum budgets is more figurative than fiscal. Some parts of the sector may even see increases in revenue, for example as the dampening effect on currency leads to increased tourism. More likely to have a lasting effect on the provision of culture to people in this country is the long-term squeeze on Local Authority expenditure.

Part of the problem is that the severity of the damage done by underfunding culture is felt not at the next Election, but by the next generation. The cumulative effect of not being able to acquire things and not being able to afford to conserve things is that we start burning up our culture without renewing it. And that, as with any other resource, is a disservice we do to the future.

So, beyond the world of more initiatives, more research and more reports demonstrating the economic value of museums to UK Plc, how might we really construct a defense of Culture in the new Economy?

Well, one idea is to look at how other countries have done exactly that. Even though, as one overseas visitor said to me today ‘the UK invented museums’, we must guard against the idea that we know best about how museum policy should be made. And one way that other nations have defended their culture is to implement a legislative provision for museums – a Museum Law.

Consider the following benefits claimed for the French Loi de Musees, implemented in 2002 and operating successfully for almost a decade:

• It defines, under Law, the social function of a museum as an agent of cultural democracy and representation, and makes it a statutory function of Government to protect this for the electorate.
• It harmonises and unifies the National and Local Government frameworks for museum provision.
• Defines, inalienably, the status of collections as part of the public domain, and hence the obligation of Government to ensure their protection.
• It makes special provision for the VAT and tax status of museums.

Now, forgive me if I am oversimplifying (and the French Loi de Musees is certainly not perfect, and has many opponents in France) but don’t those benefits sound pretty tempting for UK museums right now?

Legal frameworks for museums are particularly prevalent in Francophone countries – Canada, Belgium, Switzerland (whose new Museum Law came into force on the 1st January 2010)  - a legacy of the Code Civil de France (also known as the Code Napoleon). In most of these countries the effect has been positive and fast. In Belgium, for example, the cultural heritage sector has experienced significant advances in recognition of their value because, some argue, the Museum Law has brought them into political and public awareness.

Nor does a Museum Law necessarily just work in favour of the museums. In several cases, they have presented an opportunity for Governments and the public to state their expectations of their museums, and for museums to respond to make a formal commitment to delivering value for people.

Of course, creating a Loi de Musees for UK museums would not be easy. The plurality of funding sources, for example, has always worked against clear, concerted action on a national basis. Museum Laws work best where the Government is the majority funder of culture. But the principle, that a UK Museum law would present a newly-structured museum sector with a clear opportunity to renegotiate terms with society is surely worthy of consideration?

Think, too, of the other benefits. There can be little doubt that we need to reconnect our leading National museums with the rest of the museum sector, and at a level more meaningful than national/local loans or the export of museum superbrands to the provinces.  But National museums are of a different nature to other museums, which creates a disconnect and a kind of political myopia about the broader picture of cultural policy. But if the two ‘halves’ of our sector were united under a common statutory framework, which balanced out London-centricity with the idea of a genuinely distributed national cultural provision?

And what of Accreditation? Respected the world over, our excellent Museum Accreditation Scheme holds no legal or statutory status. How much more effective would it be as a mechanism for defending against asset-stripping, forced disposals or closures if backed by a clear legislative framework.

As I say, times like these call for big ideas. They call for reimagining how things could work. We need a new contract between museums and society. Maybe it is time we started thinking about a Loi de Musees of our own.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 6th, 2010 at 11:41 pm and is filed under General, Nick Poole. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.