Museums of engagement

February 14th, 2009

Neil MacGregor, is director of the British Museum.

He believes in the civic power of things, objects “that speak of inter-connectedness”.

In the year 2007-2008, a record 6m visitors came through its doors, including 35,000 on one day alone to celebrate Chinese new year. It was, the 62-year-old MacGregor noted drily, the first time the museum had to shut its main gates in Great Russell Street since the Chartist riots of 1848.

Its a curious thought, that a museum still has a role to play in the early 21st Century – for some that is.

The greatest modes of cultural expression in the Middle Ages, for example went to the service of religion. In the Renaissance, they focused largely on the re-creation of the city on the service of princely power. By the Enlightenment, the emphasis switched to the development of knowledge in the service of establishing an improved citizenery and society. Out of that grew the 19th Century cultural institution: the museum and gallery, the public library and the symphony hall.

At the heart of the 19th Century cultural institution lay the notion of the democratisation of knowledge, whose purpose was to uplift and improve the broader public to suit the emerging conditions of the industrial era and nation state.

Writes Marc Pachter and Charles Landry, in Culture at the Crossroads. Culture and media have bled into each other – fusing like neon.

The notion of blended reality expounded by William Gibson, is something that we must address. By this I mean that, those that are only focused on and, or, only interested in digital culture, are missing a signpost. I personally love museums, I love the space, scale, its own unique sense of pace and time, but I also know that they must stay relevant, they must have context, and, they must have meaning. Are there interesting and relevant examples that we can point to?

The exhibition on Shah Abbas that opens this month is the third in a series on great world empires (coming after the hugely popular show featuring the terracotta army of Chinese emperor Qin Shihuangdi, and one on Roman emperor Hadrian, and before an exhibition on the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II. MacGregor’s overall concept for the series is to study the “instruments of cohesion” that held those empires together and ask what the consequences of their dominance have been in the long term.

The fifth ruler of the Safavid dynasty, Shah Abbas, who came to the throne in 1587, is a perfect subject for MacGregor’s imperial project. A key figure in the development of modern Iran, a master of trade, patronage and diplomacy who managed to foster good relations with Europe, he was responsible for a golden period in the arts.

Fascinating – great world empires – and the “instruments of cohesion”. What comes out of this is to me is; culture and the sharing of culture creates social cohesion. Question : who is doing the sharing in the modern age? And so where does cohesion come from?

What does this say for organisations? They don’t want to be a dusty museum, however they could, and might like the very best talent lining up outside their doors?

Is the British Museum connected the other way into the digital sphere – could it create even greater context, meaning and experience for its audiences?

Is the crisis for many businesses, in fact the crisis of meaning? And if so, how do they engage with their customers and those that work for those organisations

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