Read on Twitter
1/ In the early evening of Wednesday Feb 26 the crowd thronged the opening of âYoung Rembrandtâ at Oxfordâs Ashmolean Museum. We shook hands and brushed shoulders, air-kissed or embraced our friends, and leant in to continue conversations as the directorâs welcome rang through
2/ the thick atmosphere of wine and canapĂ©s. Todayâto our immense collective sadnessâthrough the time-warp and culture-shock effects of lockdown, our sociality of just a few weeks ago feels like a half-remembered dream of some distant ancient culture: one with radically different
3/ attitudes to bodily contact, public health, and freedoms of association and assembly. In our absence the galleries have gathered dust, reduced to mere storerooms. When we come to unlock the museums, how will be find them transformed?
4/ From comparable parts of the economy â the tourism, aviation or hospitality industries for example â we learn that the COVID-19 era may tend to accelerate certain structural changes that were already in train. The weekend before âYoung Rembrandtâ opened its Oxford chapter,
5/ Meta Knol, the director of the Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden, which had hosted the first stage of this traveling exhibition, published her reflection on the so-called âYear of Rembrandtâ in 2019. Knolâs assessment of this celebration the 350-year anniversary of
6/ the painterâs death, titled "Blockbuster Addiction," was unequivocal. âThis was the last time," she wrote. âIt really canât go on.â https://www.museumnext.com/article/blockbuster-addiction/
7/ These past weeks, as culture sector workers have variously adjusted to self-isolating, home-working, furlough, home-schooling, and generally trying to keep body, soul and mental health together, have also been a time for reflection. Knolâs words have often come to mind.
8/ The future of many museum operations â events, volunteering, education, outreach, the museum shop â could hardly be more uncertain. Jobs are on the line, and with them, peopleâs careers and livelihoods.
9/ Uncertainty is not unfamiliar for museum workers who were already living through austerity, Brexit, casualisation, an ABC of precarity. But long before this health crisis, the scepticism about whether commercially-driven blockbuster exhibitions could ever plug the
10/ widening gaps in public funding for museums was already part of a much bigger existential question: Is the dominant model for 21st-century museums sustainable?
11/ The concept of the âuniversal museumâ was thought up as a coping mechanism for a prior crisis, at the start of the millennium, by a small group of museum directors. In November 2002, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Declaration of the Importance and Value of Universal Museums
12/ recast the most powerful cultural institutions of the Global North as custodians of world heritage, instruments of cross-cultural contact, and engines of destination tourism as the aviation industry sought to get back on its feet. As preparations for the 2003 Bush-Blair
13/ invasion of Iraq advanced, the British Museum forged a new âcorporate partnershipâ with oil giant BP, and a light was shone on forgotten connections between extractive industries, militarist colonialism, and the public display of cultural property.
14/ In the COVID-19 era, a different, more forensic light is now being shone into these vast storehouses, the self-styled âuniversal museumsâârevealing fatigue in their shallow ideological foundations. First social distancing throws into relief the absurdity of the
15/ hyper-concentration of cultural heritage in just a handful of metropolitan galleries in the name of accessibility to "an international public". Second, travel restrictions expose the short-termism of a financial model based on infinite growth in international visitor numbers.
16/ Some have even suggested that budgetary pressures will lead to deaccessioning and sales of artworks by museums, which would in a stroke remove the third remaining leg of the universal museum stool: their claim to safeguard culture for all humanity.
17/ Social distancing and travel restrictions have exposed this fatigue, and are precipitating processes of rupture, but here coronavirus is a catalyst rather than a cause. A diminished airline industry and a revolution in homeworking may have arrived sooner than expected â but
18/ neither comes as a surprise.The model of the universal museum has failed. This is a failure in economic resilience but also a loss of social legitimacy, as we see most clearly in the field of colonial restitution, where the shaky moral justification offered for exhibiting
19/ world culture in a few Euro-American capital cities, disintegrates as people stop flying. Over two decades our most powerful institutions have promoted the hyper-centralisation of the arts and heritage sector, . In the UK, sustained cuts to local museum services have served
20/ to lock in an unsustainable reliance on domestic as well as international travel. The hubris of the richest institutions has maximised, rather than mitigated, the museum sectorâs vulnerability to finding itself on a disorderly front line, alongside the airlines and the oil
21/ industry, as the world catches up with the reality of Net Zero and starts to reassemble a new green economy. The immediate pre-COVID moment was far from a Golden Age for Europeâs museums. In fact it was already a period of reflection and scrutiny. Indeed, one major outcome
22/ of the "Rembrandt Year" was for the very notion of the Golden Age to be called into question, since it serves to whitewash the ongoing legacies of slavery and colonial violence. Then, just days before the Rembrandt opening in Oxford, on February 7-8 the British Museum
23/ witnessed the largest protest in its 267-year history. #BPMustFall climate activists staged an extraordinary peaceful occupation with a wooden Trojan Horse, opposing BPâs sponsorship of the Troy: Myth and Reality exhibition, and thus joining the dots between decarbonisation
24/ and decolonisation. The universalist model of blockbusters was being questioned: the green-washing of disaster capitalism that bankrolls it, the carbon footprint that lies behind it, and the ongoing geopolitical history of inequality and dispossession that sits beneath it.
25/ The world has never needed museums more that it does today. Before the present crisis, a new kind of humanism was already emerging as curators sought to reframe their role as caring for people, communities, places and environments rather than just conserving and displaying
26/ objects for fleeting global audiences. In her article Knol called for museums to start âtelling local stories with a universal appeal, not as an expression of provincialism, but explicitly because we need to find new ways to understand the world. The Ashmoleanâs
27/ "Young Rembrandt" closed within its first month, but it can now be visited online. Such digital innovation will doubtless proliferate and evolveâbut thatâs just one part of the story. The improvisations now required of us are not dress-rehearsals for https://www.ashmolean.org/youngrembrandt
28/ the changes that climate emergency demands, but the urgent and necessary first steps in navigating structural change. We can no longer justify these concentrations of art, heritage and culture in just a handful of metropolitan institutions, with so much not even on display.
29/ Cultural funding, as well as cultural objects, must now be equitably shared and re-distributed, away from propping up the most powerful museums. At this tipping point let us rebalance the importance and value that we afford to smaller museums, away from the capital cities,
30/ through the regions, and across the Global South where museums are already being reimagined as human processes rather than end-points or bank vaults.
31/ Let us learn from and invest in those non-universal museums that sustain different human worlds, environments and communities, those âmultiversal museumsâ that that care for people before caring for objects, unique public spaces for building communities. [ENDS]
Read the whole thing with @artnet here https://news.artnet.com/opinion/dan-hicks-humanism-museums-1853346
Hopefully relevant for ongoing #MuseumWeek conversations 
