Museums like the Wellcome Collection miss the middle ground in the culture wars

Final Friday (25 November) the Wellcome Assortment, a free medical museum and library, opened and closed a Twitter thread with the query: “What’s the purpose of museums?” Its personal reflections on this query are partly why the museum determined to shut its “Drugs Man” exhibition after 15 years. It argues that “the show nonetheless perpetuates a model of medical historical past that’s primarily based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language”, telling the story of a “man with monumental wealth, energy and privilege”.

Many have argued, rightly, in opposition to this choice: that that is yet one more instance of historical vandalism, empty moral posturing or a stab at trendy progressivism. Many have argued nonetheless, additionally rightly, that that is a part of the pure technique of museum curation: museums promise permanence however are perpetually “in flux and in contention”.

It may be exhausting to listen to among the many cacophonous tradition wars, however there’s a center floor out there, a centrist place between venerating the crimes of the previous and condemning any exploration of historical past that doesn’t align with our modern-day values.

The secret’s context. The issue is that museums, the Wellcome Assortment included, are so very unhealthy at it.

Take the “artist interventions” that have been used to try to “give voice to the narratives and lived experiences of those that have been silenced, erased and ignored”. These ought to be informative, accessible, balanced, thought-provoking – but they’re something however. One among these was a message written a few fragment of Jeremy Bentham’s pores and skin by Dan Hicks, creator of The Brutish Museums and curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. As my Yr 8 historians would say: not probably the most dependable supply.

At greatest, Hicks’s placard, as George Orwell places it, “consist[s] largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”. I’m undecided most adults, not to mention younger folks, would know the right way to interpret the statements Hicks makes use of, reminiscent of “written on the pores and skin is whiteness” or “decentre Bentham” or “dismantle Wellcome’s enduring colonialism, its white infrastructure”. At worst it’s traditionally inaccurate: did the 1832 Anatomy Act that Hicks invokes actually usher within the new scientific period of “‘race’ science”? He argues that “simply rewriting labels isn’t sufficient”, however possibly if we rewrote the labels in order that they made sense to the typical particular person, they could possibly be.

Just lately I had a dialogue with my Yr 9 class in regards to the Channel 4 programme Jimmy Carr Destroys Artwork: a intentionally provocative present by which a reside viewers voted on whether or not or to not destroy controversial artworks by chainsaw, blow torch and paintball. We held our personal vote on whether or not the present ought to have destroyed a watercolour portray by Hitler; the category unanimously agreed not. When questioned on this, their solutions have been nuanced, balanced and attention-grabbing, and finally got here all the way down to this: we have to protect the previous so we will acknowledge and be taught from it, however that the portray ought to be stored in a museum fairly than personal possession.

Related arguments have been made about statues: for instance, fairly than destroy the likenesses of Cecil Rhodes and Edward Colston, we also needs to put them in a museum. Time and time once more we put our religion in museums to not solely be preservers of the previous however to interpret and show historical past so we will be taught fairly than choose.

The director of the gathering, Melanie Eager, has mentioned that they’re closing the gathering as a result of it’s “very a lot a product of its time”, however I can’t assist however suppose that the choice is a product of our time, when apparently no quantity of commentary can counteract potential controversy. Apparently we should conceal the previous, in any other case we’re complicit in condoning it.