​In the wake of this week’s announcements that the Globe Theatre and the Royal Albert Hall may have to close, Sir Nicholas Kenyon (Managing Director of the Barbican Centre and former director of the BBC Proms) stated on BBC Radio 4 this morning that the survival of the arts can no longer be a side issue. He believes - and rightly so - that different approaches to recovery will be needed for the different sectors of the arts.  Social distancing is being relaxed to enable sport to resume, so why, when more people go to the theatre than attend a premier league football match, is there such disparity in funding and political support? If more government support is not forthcoming, so much of our culture and heritage will be lost.

​This was the stark headline of an article in The Times yesterday (1 May) by its arts correspondent, Richard Morrison. Without the influx of foreign visitors the national museums will suffer. University museums will face funding losses as international students fail to enrol. Many museums and galleries are facing the possibility of permanent closure because of the Coronavirus pandemic and not just the smaller ones: the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth and the Postal Museum in London have already signalled their imminent insolvency. Moreover, the culture secretary seems to be more interested in getting top-level football played again rather than opening any aspect of the arts. As Morrison states, if it’s deemed acceptable for footballers to stand side-by-side in a defensive wall, why shouldn’t dancers be allowed to perform? If we’re allowed to visit supermarkets, why can’t social distancing be applied to our cultural assets? Museums and galleries will need to be creative in what they offer and how they make it available to us. So we must all do our bit to support our cultural heritage once re-opening starts. After all, with the drop in foreign visitors, social distancing will be easier to impose and we’ll be able to enjoy some of our best loved sites without huge crowds. But, above all, we need to lobby government to provide financial support for the hard-pressed smaller museums and galleries that simply may not survive this crisis otherwise.  

Restaurant menus are “curated”, fashion shows are “curated”, playlists are “curated”. So, when everything is “curated,” what does the word even mean? The term has become a fashionable buzzword, but its ubiquity has left it almost devoid of meaning. It is used to suggest reassurance, implying that the thing curated is meaningful yet, mostly, its use in these contexts is meaningless. Even worse, is use of the phrase “carefully curated”, which is tautological.

The origins of “curate” lie in the Latin word “curare”, meaning “to take care of”, which is what traditional users of the term, in museums and galleries, have done for a very long time. But, the idea of curators as creative agents in their own right is new, signified by the move from vocational work to independent and critical engagement and reflected in the move in recent years by museums to credit the curators of their exhibitions. According to Hans-Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of Serpentine Galleries in London “The current vogue for the idea of curating comes from the proliferation and reproduction of ideas, processed information and images in the digital age [and that] this contemporary resonance risks producing a kind of bubble where the word in itself loses meaning.”

For me this has parallels with the archive sector and the hijacking of the terms “archivist” and “archiving”, initially by IT, but now used in a wider context to simply mean collection or storage, and not just of documents, whereas the classic definition is of records selected for permanent preservation for their historical and informational value. With the dilution in meaning and value of this professional terminology, what then can those working in the arts and heritage sector use to reflect their skills and training?
​
Inspired by an article - “These days, everyone’s a curator” - in The New York Times, 3 March 2020. 

Wentworth Woodhouse is an amazing Grade 1 listed country house in South Yorkshire. It has the longest frontage of any building in Britain and, reputedly, has 365 rooms. For years this incredible house was in danger of collapse due to coal mining that had weakened its foundations until, in 2016, the then Chancellor, Philip Hammond, made a grant of £7.6 million for restoration work. Although an estimated £42 million will be needed overall, Wentworth Woodhouse goes from strength to strength. The Preservation Trust has recently reported that phase one of the emergency works programme is almost at an end with like for like replacement of roof slates on the south-east wing, known as Bedlam, the Riding School and the Chapel. The chapel's ceiling has also been restored its the chandelier, that was discovered stored away in a dusty box, has lovingly restored. Work on phase two, to re-slate the east front State Rooms, is already running ahead of schedule.
 
The Camellia House, which is home to some of the oldest and rarest camellias in the Western world, is still roofless and in dire need of restoration, but has received a National Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £1.5 million to transform it into a daytime café and evening events venue. The grant will help to develop proposals for the 18th century menagerie, the Riding School and the southern range of the Stables. Meanwhile, the first donation to the newly-launched Wentworth Woodhouse Wishlist was by local company Spear and Jackson who donated their top-notch trowels, spades, forks and garden loppers to help the site’s volunteers.

https://wentworthwoodhouse.org.uk/ 
 

A rotting 19th century oak sculpture of biblical hero Samson that once served as a nightclub ‘doorman’ in Norwich has been restored and is now on display at the city’s museum. Carved columns of Samson and Hercules were commissioned by the mayor of Norwich in 1657 to guard the entrance to his home. From the 1930s to 2003, the building functioned as a dance hall and nightclub. The decaying Hercules was replaced in the late 19th century, but Samson remained in situ until his right arm fell off in 1992, sparking a local campaign for the preservation of both figures. Fibreglass replicas took their place outside the building in the unusually named Norwich street, Tombland, and Norfolk Museums began a programme of painstaking restoration.

Plowden & Smith were commissioned to preserve and restore Samson, a process that took many years as he was covered in about 60 layers of poisonous white lead paint and had fungus growing on him. Water had caused such extensive rot that his interior was like a sponge, requiring weeks of consolidation. The restored Samson was unveiled at the Museum of Norwich in April after a crowd-funding campaign raised £15,000 for a bespoke, environmentally-controlled display case.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/conservators-help-samson-of-norwich-regain-his-strength?utm_source=daily_june7_2019&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email_daily&utm_source=The+Art+Newspaper+Newsletters&utm_campaign=386c53503c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_06_06_02_38&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c459f924d0-386c53503c-60910665 

Following on from the story that Northamptonshire County Council planned to severely restrict opening hours at the Record Office and introduce charges to use the archives, comes the news that councillors have voted to close 28 of the county’s 36 libraries. Three options were tabled but all involved closure, none to retain the status quo. Being a rural county, many of the libraries offer a community service way beyond that of lending books and with a poor public transport system people will lose access to food banks, children’s clubs, issuing of bus passes and so much more. Petitions have been launched and the campaign to the save the libraries has high profile supporters like authors Alan Moore and Philip Pullman. Here’s hoping that that campaign is as successful in overturning the council’s decision as was the reversal of the proposed cuts to the record office following the public outcry.

You can read more in this article in The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/28/northamptonshire-may-close-up-to-28-of-its-36-libraries

Currently enjoying the “Museum of Lost Objects” series on BBC radio 4, which is tracing the stories of ten artefacts or sites in Syria and Iraq that have been lost through damage or looting, including the winged bull of Nineveh, the temple of Bel in Palmyra (see also my post of 12 September 2015) and the minaret of the Umayyed mosque in Aleppo. Having visited both Palmyra and Aleppo I found this particularly poignant. 

​

Fantastic news for the continuation of heritage and tradition, and for William Cowley, the last vellum makers in the country, that British acts of parliament will continue to be printed on vellum after the Cabinet Office agreed to pick up the cost. The House of Lords had argued that using archival quality paper would save £80,000 – surely that’s a drop in the ocean compared to their and MPs expenses! And from a preservation point of view, conservators will tell you that parchment and vellum have a much greater chance of survival than paper, even archival quality paper. Abandoning the use of vellum was raised in parliament back in 1999 but thrown out. Let’s hope the battle has been won for once and all and won’t be resurrected in another 15 or so years time….. 

Great to see Sophie Clapp, the Boots archivist, featuring on this BBC2 programme and such a natural in front of the camera! The concept of the series is that a family give up all their modern technology and live life as if in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and so on, where they find, of course, that their lives – and roles – would have been very different. Sophie talked about the revolution in makeup and how it started to become a necessity, rather than a luxury, for women.  

​

Can the situation in Iraq and Syria get any worse? Not only have ISIL extremists spread fear and terror amongst the population of those countries and elsewhere, they are now destroying culture and heritage which belongs to the world. In February they released videos of ancient statues being smashed in the museum at Mosul, and later bulldozed Nimrud, the ancient Assyrian capital. Since overrunning Palmyra in May they have started to systematically destroy that beautiful and impressive city. The murder of Khaled al-Asaad was unbelievable. This renowned scholar of antiquities was interrogated for a month – probably tortured – but refused to tell them where valuable artefacts had been hidden and was brutally killed in retaliation. He was a brave and honourable man. How many of us would be prepared to give our lives in such circumstances? And the irony is that ISIL claims that such sites are idolatrous yet it does not destroy everything for it is happy to sell looted artefacts to fund its murderous activities. 

​