July 12, 2008
The British Museum and the Universal Museum
I’m getting a sense of deja-vu here, having read another ridiculously sycophantic piece on the British Museum followed by a response by Dr Kwame Opoku who points out the various flaws glossed over by the first piece. Clearly the British Museum’s Public Relations department has been particularly successful in the last few weeks (to the extent of appearing too obvious?). I see no other reason to explain why there should be three such congratulatory articles about their institution in the press in a single week.
From:
The Times
From The Times
July 10, 2008
Let’s all have tickets to the universal museum
It’s pointless trying to work out who owns ancient art objects. We need to share them around the world
Ben MacintyreThe visitors pouring through the doors of the British Museum represent the triumph of an idea born in the white intellectual heat of the Enlightenment – as valuable today as it was 250 years ago when the museum first opened, but now under attack, despite its fabulous success, as never before.
The British Museum is the greatest universal museum in the world. On my first visit there, as a teenager, I remember feeling physically overwhelmed by the sheer scale and variety of the artefacts, art and ideas on display: Mesopotamian relics, Roman statuary, pharaonic carvings, Viking burial treasures.
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