More on MA Museum Studies field trip to London

Thanks again to Dr Km Sloan, curator of prints and drawings, and curator of the Enlightenment Galleries at the British Museum for talking to the MA students about the development of the Enlightenment Galleries at the BM.

Here's the group, with Kim explaining the interpretation in the Enlightenment Galleries - we all very much appreciated having such an expert on hand at the BM!
Mark

MA Museum Studies Students London Trip

Hello All,

our current MA Museum Studies students took advantage of our Reading Week field trip to London last week.

MA museum studies students with Dr Kim Sloan at the Enlightenment gallery at the British Museum.

We had our usual exhausting time...starting at the Natural History Museum, then the V&A, the Wallace Collection, and the National Gallery (in day 1)...then off to the British Museum and Museum of London (in day 2). Pictured are the students talking to Dr Kim Sloan, Curator of Prints and Drawings (up to 1880) at the British Museum, and also curator of the Enlightenment Gallery at the museum.  We all had a fascinating time!
Mark

MA Programme visit to London

Hello All,

thanks to all of those who managed to make it to London during Reading Week, I'm sure you'll all agree that we had a great time. The visits to the museums were stimulating and it was fantastic that Kim Sloan, Curator of the Enlightenment Galleries at the British Museum was able to speak to us about the rationale and the process of constructing the display and interpretation....here's a few of the students relaxing in the Great Court at the British Museum after some hard thinking!
We are off to Manchester this week, to the Manchester Art Gallery and the Imperial War Museum North.....
more anon...
Mark

British Museum takes on The Archers

Here's a couple of pieces about the new radio series featuring objects from the collection of the British Museum, apparently it's going to 'hit the G-spot of the radio 4 audience', which is just about the most distressing sentence I've read all year.

'British Museum and BBC reveal history of the world in 100 objects'

'Neil MacGregor lifts British Museum's ambitions to new heights'

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