There are six floors in the British Museum, three above ground and three below. In terms of the crisis that has exploded into public view since the summer – the alleged theft of up to 1,500 artefacts – it has felt, a curator recently told me, as if the institution’s standing had finally risen above the very lowest possible level, and was moving slowly upwards. But, the staffer added, it had not yet risen to the ground floor.
This week it feels as if the lift has hurtled back down to the adamantine depths. The British Museum’s decision to accept £50m from BP is, aside from the profound ethical objections to receiving support from one of the world’s biggest polluters, a decision remarkable in its tone-deafness. It has already been widely condemned, and, in practical terms, this will lead to years of protests by campaigners. To many who love the museum, it feels like a betrayal.
It is true that the BM’s ageing fabric urgently needs to be repaired. It also needs to bring weary-looking galleries into the present century, and find a new way to express its own history, inextricably intertwined as it is with Britain’s imperial past. But even in a world of diminishing funding possibilities, accepting this donation should not have been an option. It is telling that the rightwing press has hailed it as a victory against “wokery” in the arts. Believe me: the last thing the British Museum needs now is to be made a weapon for the right in the culture wars.
Put this calamitous decision together with the story of the thefts, and what transpires is an institution gone dangerously off the tracks. That thefts were able to occur is, of course, scandalous. Security protocols were allegedly ignored, including a rule that staff members should not enter a strongroom alone. Registration and cataloguing of objects – a titanic task in a museum of 8m objects – had been deprioritised in an appallingly underfunded institution.
But matters were made much worse by the museum leadership’s missteps when informed of the disappearance and damage of what turned out to be thousands of Greek and Roman gems. The recommendations of an independent review into the matter were published last week; these, along with (albeit obfuscating) minutes of trustees’ meetings, make obvious how far the blundering went – how toxic the museum’s culture, how deep the malaise.
Take, by way of example, the museum’s initial response to the thefts. This was at best an example of wilful institutional ignorance, at worst an attempt to hush things up. It is already well-known that a dealer, Ittai Gradel, had, acting responsibly, contacted the museum in early 2021, after he had come to suspect the source of certain objects for sale. When the reply eventually came, he was brushed off and told there was nothing to worry about.
The following year, a museum researcher, by complete coincidence auditing the strongroom contents, found anomalies: damaged and missing items. To give him credit, George Osborne – chair of the British Museum - put together the Gradel allegations with the internal alarm calls. But, bizarrely, senior management and the HR department still did not act to suspend the suspect. The staff member (now dismissed) stepped back only after the board insisted on action.
Hence the final – apparently insipid, in reality damning – recommendation of the report: “Management should review their approach to suspension of employees to give due weight to the protection of the collection, the integrity of its records and the wellbeing of staff.” Translated: internal whistleblowers were driven to ill-health by managers ignoring them. Also: allowing a person to come to work while being investigated by close colleagues was at best absurd, and at worst could have offered the employee a chance to cover their tracks.
The director, Hartwig Fischer – a basically honourable man who never got a grip on the knotty institution he was appointed to lead – resigned this summer. One of his deputies, Jonathan Williams, who “stepped back” in August, will not be returning. I have been told by sources at the museum that Fischer was deliberately kept out of the loop on many matters. “Don’t tell Hartwig,” was a frequent refrain. Staffers were also instructed not to speak to trustees directly, and were too terrified to raise concerns about the museum’s culture. There was, I’m told, a “climate of fear”.
Despite Osborne’s boosterish press statements and claims of a new era of openness, the truth is that many of the problems persist. The temporary director, Mark Jones and temporary deputy director, Carl Heron, are competent and well liked, but they can’t fix everything at a stroke. This is also an institution, by the way, in which highly qualified, academically expert staff members are so badly paid that at the height of the cost of living crisis, I was shown screenshots in which details of food banks were posted on its intranet. What a grim, shaming fact that this should have been needed.
When institutions fall into crisis, they fall hard. I’m old enough to remember the crisis at Covent Garden in the 1990s, when the Royal Opera House acquired three general directors in a year, ran up staggering debts during a redevelopment, was castigated by a Commons select committee, and had the entire board resign en masse – with quite a lot of the drama captured in a fly-on-the-wall documentary. I’ve watched other organisations brought to their knees, too.
What I know is this: if you recognise the name of the chair, it’s bad news. Functioning institutions operate with their trustees in the background, quietly supporting and challenging. Not, like Osborne, becoming the story. The trustees’ most important job – one that the BM’s are currently undertaking – is to appoint the right director and then let them get on with it. In this case it must be someone who understands museums in their every cell, and someone, too, with the guts and skill to turn the BM’s broken culture around.
I love the British Museum, despite everything. I have had my eyes opened, my imagination set on fire, my intellect challenged by it too many times to mention. There are exhibitions – I think of Ice Age Art a decade ago, and The World of Stonehenge last year – that have changed the way I understand the world. A fortnight ago, I stopped by to admire the beauty of the Parthenon sculptures, the galloping horsemen and reclining gods innocent of their role in a diplomatic feud. The museum was full of schoolchildren. The place was vibrating with the energy and excitement that comes from the encounter with glorious, awe-inspiring objects. But taking £50m from a polluter? It fills my heart with dread that the museum should take so wrong a turn.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
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