The British Museum regularly makes much of the fact that the Elgin Marbles in their collection can be seen free of charge – but never enters into a debate about whether this is really to everyone’s benefit or not. The admission to the Acropolis Museum for instance is set at a level that it is easily affordable to most, yet this is somehow automatically seen by the British Museum as a bad thing.

Brian Sewell is not someone who is generally seen as a friend of the campaign for reunification of the Parthenon Marbles looked in previous articles at what the price of free admission to museums is – and whether resources could be better utilised across the culture sector if charges were introduced.

He now looks further, at whether some deaccessioning should be allowed. Traditionally, the UK has had very strict laws in this regard compared to the US, but there are arguments for allowing museums to refine their collections & reduce the cost of storing worthless artefacts.

From:
Evening Standard

It’s time to sacrifice some sacred cows
By Brian Sewell
09.12.10

The great (but not necessarily good) artists who put themselves forward as spokesmen for their profession have this year been very loud in their objection to cuts in state funding for themselves, for galleries, museums and all other institutions of the “creative industries” in which their work is exhibited. To these august orators and signatories of open letters in the press, their art is a sacred cow never to be fed short rations, never to be slaughtered; to others, however, they — and never mind their art — are fat cats in feather beds, or pigs with snouts in troughs, and short rations must be borne by them as well as by the rest of us.

Both views have some merit but neither represents the truth. Those of us who hold the middle view see the nation’s crisis as one from which the arts must not be exempt — we cannot go on fiddling while Rome burns — but must survive it in a fitter state than now. Heaven-sent may not be quite the suitable term, but the crisis has brought us an unexpected opportunity for radical revision of the way we run and fund the arts and we should take advantage of it to think what has hitherto been quite unthinkable.
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