A War on the Past? The Creeping Politicisation of Museums

Abstract

A fresh examination of assumptions of neutrality in the museum sector is needed following the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement into the political mainstream of Anglophone societies, most notably the United States and the United Kingdom. This has given greater prominence to calls from postcolonial activists for institutions to “decolonise” their collections, up to and including returning artefacts to their countries of origin, a course of action which has previously led to high-profile disasters like the disappearance of Berlin’s Benin Bronzes. Some heritage organisations responded to the BLM movement and postcolonial calls for action by disavowing political neutrality. Far from “democratising” heritage, as was claimed during attempts to broaden social access in the 1990s, such a rapid change in stance continues to put institutional opinion before public opinion. This perception is further entrenched by the way in which heritage organisations have used social media to claim support for questionable initiatives. This research finds that there is evidence to suggest a steady politicisation of the sector which has increased social exclusion among traditional core audiences who do not see themselves represented.

Introduction

The emergence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement into the political mainstream in summer 2020 in the United Kingdom and the United States raised serious questions over whether heritage organisations should take political stances on contemporary issues which provoke controversy. Various British and American institutions argued that they must reconsider how their displays are represented and re-evaluate the treatment of certain themes in response to the BLM movement. Critics, including government institutions, have maintained that heritage organisations, particularly those receiving public funding, should practice political neutrality to best serve the public. This research aims to show that museums have made little attempts at centring and acting on public opinion, with curatorial staff instead interpreting ‘inaction’ (i.e., not endorsing the return of artefacts) on contested collections as a political stance.

Impact of BLM on Museums

In response to the rapid emergence of the BLM movement following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, British and American museums abandoned their previous positions of political neutrality and issued public statements promising to reinterpret and re-evaluate controversial collections. Institutions such as the National Gallery and the British Library took political stances, while the British Museum and the Science Museum Group did not. In disavowing political neutrality, heritage organisations that have taken political stances are not “democratising” heritage but are instead privileging institutional opinion over public opinion. These policies predominate in considerations of the political role of heritage organisations. Some heritage organisations, in their efforts to re-evaluate themes such as race and empire after the BLM movement, seemed to endorse a viewpoint that differs from mainstream public discourse around heritage.

The BLM movement must be viewed in the context of a wider campaign to “decolonise” heritage organisations to make them less Eurocentric. Statements made by institutions which took a political stance referenced this objective. The head of the National Gallery, Gabriele Finaldi, suggested that “the climate had changed so that silence was now viewed as being complicit” (Sanderson, 2020). This echoes the belief of BLM activists that “silence is violence”, or that failure to support them is tantamount to outright racism (Aaronovitch, 2020). In Anglophone societies, particularly the UK and the US, BLM sought to impose an understanding of race relations rooted in critical race theory, proclaiming both countries to be uniquely unjust societies for ethnic minorities. Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, it rejects Enlightenment rationalism and posits that race is the predominant structural element in western societies, and that any legitimate analysis of race must account for systemic power and racism that is hidden, but visible to the critical theorist (Gaztambide-Fernández, Kraehe and Stephen Carpenter, 2018, pp. 4–7). Using standpoint epistemology, which suggests that the best way to achieve objectivity is to include marginalised voices (Harding, 1992, 1995), critical theorists purport to identify oppressive societal mechanisms which operate through systemic power. In this view, race and racism “is normalised to the point of invisibility” (Price, 2010, p. 153). Rather than looking for isolated examples of racism, according to critical theorists we should ask “Where is the racism in a situation?” (Adams, 2017, pp. 290–1). Critics contend that this thinking is unfalsifiable, highly illiberal and unrepresentative of modern society (Murray, 2019, pp. 121–6).

American recording artists Beyonce and Jay Z used the music video for their single “Apeshit”, recorded in the Louvre in Paris in 2018, to critique western art history and to present the museum as a space in which minorities were formerly excluded and in which black bodies now have power (Smalls, 2018). The aim of “spatialising” modernity “has been precisely to de-centre Europe”. Space is both geographical and related to power between the colonial nations and the colonised spaces and bodies (Massey 2005, pp. 62–4). Ideas around decolonising western spaces originated in postcolonial theory and were heavily influenced by texts such as Orientalism by Edward Said. Recent scholarship has criticised Said’s construction of “the Orient” and “the Occident”, as well as his principal methodologies (Said, 1978, p. 20). The eighteenth-century Eurocentrism of the Enlightenment was inclusive, with paintings and engravings by artists such as Thomas Daniel and William Hodges showing appreciation for Asiatic literature and art (Masani, 2018). Said dismissed these developments as colonial appropriation. Only in the nineteenth century did Eurocentrism become exclusive. It is not the case that such “Western” concepts are automatically invalidated, as Said’s model of discourse assumes (Osterhammel, 2018, pp. 10–12). Nor was colonisation a tool that only Europe forced onto the world, with the Ottoman Empire subjugating large parts of the Middle East, North Africa and south-eastern Europe in continuous territorial expansion from 1300 to 1683.

Institutions are facing renewed demands to repatriate items in their collections. The current debate on restitution focusses heavily on alleged colonial wrongdoings and questions of ownership, as opposed to best-practice curatorial decisions on storing collections. Removal could result in serious damage to artefacts that are being currently carefully and adequately cared for, and in cases such as the Elgin Marbles and the Benin Bronzes, it is unclear whether the countries of origin have adequate facilities to care for the artefacts upon their return (Moody, 2023). During his term as director of the British Museum from 2016 to 2024, Hartwig Fischer advocated for compromises involving close collaboration (Gompertz, 2020). Additions to the record and giving people their due and proper place in history should be prioritised over strident assertions about colonial violence and the alleged complicity of a particular museum (Blatchford, 2020). To make victimhood the moral basis for claims of ownership and repatriation (Jenkins, 2018, pp. 284–7) is to turn the past into a morality play and to invite counterclaims of moral equivalence, which are themselves grounded in history. When the Benin Bronzes were created, Benin was an empire. The Bronzes were created from brass bracelets which were exchanged by Portuguese traders for ivory, pepper and slaves. Perhaps African nations which possessed empires in the African interior before the arrival of European traders should apologise for the enslavement of white Europeans in the internal and external slave trades that undergirded those empires (Milton, 2005), similar to previous apologies issued for their own role in the transatlantic slave trade (BBC News, 2009; Sieff, 2018).

Public and Government Responses

Attempts by institutions to increase their contemporary political relevance is a short-term strategy which does not command majority public support. When asked “do you believe that museums should have something to say about social issues?”, only 27.5 per cent of Americans agreed (Richardson, 2017). Similarly, a UK poll of 13,000 people found 97 per cent believed that museums should not remove controversial objects to avoid offending people (Knell, 2020). The British Government’s then culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, warned major museums and galleries that they should “continue to act impartially in line with your publicly-funded status” (Dowden, 2020). In their response to Dowden’s letter, the Museums Association (2020) agreed that “we should seek to contextualise or reinterpret them in a way that enables the public to learn about them in their entirety”, but raised concerns that the government was undermining the operational independence of museums. Government intervention in the heritage debate has been criticised as an attempt to ferment a false culture war (Hicks, 2020), with the precarious economic situation of volunteers and heritage professionals used to deflect criticism (Mitchell, 2020). Curatorial shifts in both countries over recent decades, as well as the furore surrounding revisionist histories of empire (Ferguson, 2004), have called into question the operational independence some organisations are citing. A survey of British museums conducted in 1993–4 indicated that “curatorial staff are responding to the general climate of change within the profession” with increased sympathy towards issues of repatriation and inclusiveness (Simpson, 2001, pp. 224–5). Inaction on contested collections is now seen by curatorial staff as a political stance.

Since the 1990s, heritage organisations have seen themselves as agents of social inclusion committed to widening access (Sandell, 1998). Social inclusion strategies developed largely in reaction to the idea that heritage promotes a backwards-looking culture (Hewison, 1987), a thesis which explicitly coupled heritage with the concept of decline. The shift from a modernist to a postmodernist epistemological understanding, in which identity is central, has undermined the authority of museums to give a definitive account of a historical period. Drawing on the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, postmodern epistemology suggests that culture has been neglected in analysing capitalist societies. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony prescribes that in order to seek radical social change, an alternative cultural hegemony is necessary before institutions can be controlled through a “complete” revolution (Adamson, 1980, pp. 149, 163–4, 170–1). In this context, heritage is a battleground of cultural contestation in which education is understood as a project “fundamentally concerned with the centrality of politics and power” (McLaren, 2014). This postmodern epistemology was influenced by constructivism, an approach which suggests that normative truths are not fixed by normative facts; rather, meaning is constructed by the “public, social character of language” (Hall, 1997, p. 25), allowing museums and other heritage sites to construct new meanings of the past. These intellectual shifts have created a climate in which traditional working-class identities and their attendant socioeconomic concerns in regions like the North East of England and the Rust Belt of the US are denigrated and rejected in favour of superficial commitments to greater “diversity” in the wake of globalisation and mass migration (Haylett, 2001). Far from addressing issues of social exclusion, these approaches have increased social exclusion among traditional audiences as they do not see themselves represented.

The prominence of social media and its creation of an artificial “public voice” (Mellon and Prosser, 2017) has led institutions to pursue questionable initiatives. This is precarious because institutions risk accusations of dishonesty (Kidd, 2011, p. 64–8) as well as losing members or funding if they are deemed to have expressed organisational views outside the standards imposed on them as public bodies (Malnick, 2020). Polling for the think tank Policy Exchange found that 77 per cent agreed that “we should try to learn from history rather than rewrite it” and 69 per cent believe that British history is “something to be proud of” (Gray, 2020). These public opinions are not reflected in the political stances that heritage organisations pursue. The uncritical support of the National Trust for the “decolonisation” agenda can be seen through its decision to include Chartwell, Sir Winston Churchill’s former country home, in a report of sites which it claimed were linked to colonialism and slavery (Simpson, 2020). The report was heavily criticised as an exercise in historical simplification which conflates colonialism with the slave trade and which was intended to give the Trust synchrony with the BLM movement (Heffer, 2020). It should also be considered as an integral part of the Trust’s ten-year strategy to “dial down” its role as the custodian of the English country home and to close most of its properties (Grosvenor, 2020). The Trust claimed that it is important to “research, interpret and share the histories of slavery and the legacies of colonialism at the places we care for” and that it is committed “to exploring a wide range of histories” to better reflect “changing times, changing attitudes, and changing demographies” (Bailey et al., 2020, pp. 4–5). The disdain shown towards public opinion and public conceptions of heritage repackages older attitudes, separating visitors into the “discerning” few and “ignorant” many. A perception that “the demands of the public and those of collections are somehow mutually exclusive” (Mason, Robinson and Coffield, 2017, p. 27) has been a central part of the failure to democratise heritage organisations (Lang and Reeve, 2007, p. 37).

Conclusion

Museums, galleries and heritage organisations should not take political stances relating to contemporary issues. Intellectual, curatorial and technological changes which took place over several decades contributed greatly to decisions to abandon political neutrality, suggesting that they privilege institutional opinion over public opinion despite attempts to democratise heritage. In linking their response to the Black Lives Matter movement to campaigns for “decolonisation” and restitution claims founded on victimhood, heritage organisations have revealed that they increasingly take political stances according to changes in demographics and social attitudes from a small and unrepresentative segment of the population active on social media, putting them at odds with wider public opinion and their traditional supporters. These changes have led to an increasingly politicised heritage industry at odds with their statutory duty as publicly funded institutions, necessitating government interventions. Future studies could examine the long-term impact of these curatorial changes on public trust in heritage organisations by applying insights from political science and sociology, using the extensive literature on political bias to develop methodologies which go beyond current polling data.