The case for not burning dodos
Charles Saumarez Smith
TREASURES ON EARTH: MUSEUMS, COLLECTIONS AND PARADOXES by Keith Thomson Faber, £12.99, pp. 114, ISBN 0571212956 Professor Keith Thomson, the Director of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, begins his brief tract about the virtues of getting rid of objects from museums with a psychologically revealing anecdote. He describes how, when he was a child, his father refused to take him to the British Museum on the grounds that it was too academic and his mother refused to take him to the Natural History Museum because she didn't like stuffed birds. In the event, he went to work for the Natural History Museum, which he describes with passion and regards with affection for what he probably thinks are all the wrong reasons — its mahogany cabinets full of fish, its slightly dotty experts, and the faint smell of formaldehyde. But he seems to have transferred the fundamentalism of his parents to a deep suspicion of all other types of museum, particularly those devoted to historical artefacts.
Professor Thomson's argument is that all those objects which have been preserved in museums for purposes of study and historical documentation and which museums are generally (and for extremely good reasons) reluctant to sell should, instead, be regarded as assets of the bottom line, to be disposed of where necessary in order to pay for a new car park. He would happily consign to the rubbish tip the American flag which survived the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1812 and which is now a sacred icon in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. He is baf
fled that photography should have become a medium which people want to preserve, regarding it as of roughly the same order of historical interest as soup tureens and jelly moulds. He was clearly immensely irritated that a public outcry prevented the Historical Society of Pennsylvania from selling off its collections of paintings and historic artefacts. And the only art museum which he admires is the Kimbell Museum of Art in Fort Worth which operates like a private collection, constantly trading up in order to better its holdings.
Just like his father, a Baptist minister, Professor Thomson is absolutely convinced that he is right and everyone else who has wanted to preserve historic artefacts into the future is a sentimentalist. He presents himself as a hard-nosed pragmatist, one of the few people in the museum profession who knows what the future holds, And what does the future hold? He quotes his grandmother: The Lord helps those who help themselves'. The answer is, as Matthew Evans described in his notorious lecture for the Association of Independent Museums, 'more creative use of the skip'. Small museums should be encouraged to flog off their treasures, Larger museums could sell a few Renoirs. This will permit, by a Malthusian principle, the survival of the leanest.
The problem with this strategy, as Professor Thomson ought to know, having worked all his life in museums, is that museums were founded precisely in order to ensure the survival of objects and works of art, They were not established in order to behave as businesses worrying about profit and loss. If they could have operated as businesses, then they would have been established as businesses. Instead, they were founded with a clear eye to the future, in which those charged with their operation in any one generation are expected to act as guardians of their future survival. Most people who work in museums are reluctant to sell works in their care because it would break this trust. There are portraits in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery which could, in theory, be sold. It would raise a certain amount of additional income. But it would, at the same time, break the integrity of the collection and its sense of archival completeness. Short-term profit would be achieved at the expense of the fundamental purpose of the institution, which is to record and preserve portraits on behalf of the public both in the present and the future. It is not always predictable in the present what will be regarded as interesting in the future, as has been demonstrated many times by those institutions which have — nearly always to their subsequent regret — adopted Professor Thomson's precepts.
The problem which lies at the core of his thesis is that Professor Thomson clearly thinks that the mission of a museum is separable from its collection, that museums exist to teach the public and not to collect and exhibit things. This may, indeed, be the case for natural history collections, but I doubt it. Indeed, I notice that, throughout his book, he never actually makes the case for the disposal of collections from natural history museums. In fact, he is genuinely grateful that someone managed to save from a bonfire the remains of the last dodo, which is now the star exhibit in his own wonderful museum. This shows the extraordinary contradictoriness of his attitude, for what he is advocating is precisely that museums should get rid of their dodos.
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