The BM....The Universal Survey Museum...?

Hello All,


I thought I'd start the Blog rolling (do Blogs 'roll'.....unfurl maybe?)...anyway, I thought I'd start the Blog by directing attention to what's been happening at the British Museum lately...........you may have noticed the report in the Sunday Times last week (25th Jan)............
Neil MacGregor, Director of the BM, has suggested that the BM has refound its purpose by returning to its roots....MacGregor has (rather neatly, one could argue) pointed to the founding (Enlightenment) principles of the BM in 1753 as a rationale for a renewed contemporary purpose...(I thought this was quite a poetic rationale actually - the museum as a kind of legitimizing presence of it's own historical authority...but then I think MacGregor is aware of such a marketing poesis?)...............(here's the link to the article)

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article5566699.ece
Anyway... MacGregor's notion is that the collections at the BM are the 'private collection of every citizen in the world' and although he dosen't actually mention it, the implicit suggestion is that the BM is a 'Universal Survey Museum'. On the surface of it the idea of the BM as a kind of library, (a comparative collection, as MacGregor suggests), seems quite plausible....(almost a bourgeois comfort?)....but surely there must also be a space at the BM to articulate the contested histories of the objects on display....or does the 'idea' of the BM loom too large to effect such a project?




Mark