Don’t take our buzzing, plucky museums for granted

Last Sunday afternoon was the classic start to February half-term: the rain was sheeting down outside, and we’d already played every game in the cupboard and watched too much TV. My sons, aged five and eight, were beginning to squabble and whine, and I knew from experience that if we didn’t leave the house in the next five minutes things were going to get ugly.

Happily, we were visiting relatives in Liverpool – a city with a fine selection of museums, many of them free to enter. Within a few minutes of shoving the boys out of the front door, we were standing in the magnificent lobby of the World Museum, wondering what to do first: explore space? Check out the leaf-cutter ants? Take a trip to ancient Egypt? The place was buzzing with families escaping the rain, and with visitors to the opening weekend of an exhibition of terracotta warriors. By the end of the afternoon we had lifted a meteorite, found out about the eating habits of sea cucumbers (gross), learned about female pharaohs and watched Tim Peake drink water in space.

It’s so easy to dismiss museums as worthy and boring: dusty, fusty places that we’ve all been dragged around on school trips. At a time when disabled people are losing their benefits and young people are being made homeless in droves, it can be difficult to work up much passion about the funding crisis facing them and many other arts organisations. Last week a report from the Art Fund set out just how bad things have got, describing the state of museums and galleries funding as “deeply depressing” and “shocking”. But if this doesn’t make you want to run for the barricades, just try a little thought experiment: imagine what our cities and towns would feel like without them. Imagine that the only option on a rainy Sunday afternoon was to wander around a shopping centre, and that there was no space in your nearest town centre dedicated to culture and education.

This is not so far-fetched. Across the country, local museums and galleries are facing a funding squeeze. The Mendoza review of museums in England found that the UK now spends less on culture, in percentage terms, than Denmark, France, Hungary or Latvia. This means that institutions are no longer collecting (and if they can’t collect, they are in danger of sinking into irrelevance. The Art Fund report quotes an American observer from the 19th century saying: “A finished museum is a dead museum, and a dead museum is a useless museum.”) In some cases, even keeping the doors open is far from guaranteed: in Brighton, where I live, our largest contemporary art gallery, Fabrica, is facing a funding shortfall after local authority cuts; a crowdfunding campaign has been launched to save it from closure.

If you have grown up in this country, you may be in the fortunate position of taking museums and galleries for granted; their grand porticos, marble floors and gold-framed oil paintings feel so authoritative and permanent, it’s hard to imagine that they could ever not exist. We forget that, actually, these are radical places that celebrate cultural exchange and the spirit of inquiry. They link us with people, places and values that are not our own. Most importantly, many of them were founded on the principle that these riches should be available, not just to a few people with money, but to everyone.

“For most of human history, acquiring art was primarily the private hobby of the rich and the powerful,” writes the Art Fund report’s author, the historian David Cannadine. “Only during the 19th century did collections displayed for public benefit become widespread across the western world.” Now, as austerity bites, and a new generation of billionaires buys up art at stratospheric prices, culture is being funnelled back into the hands of the few.

There is, however, some good news. Some institutions are managing to acquire thought-provoking new exhibits, even on shoestring budgets. The Manchester Museum’s new strategy of “collecting life”, for example, has led to it acquiring immigration-themed objects including a life jacket that had been abandoned by a refugee in Greece, and a spider that came to the UK from Colombia in a box of bananas. The Ulster museum in Belfast has acquired more than 1,200 objects related to the Troubles through “community collecting” events – including an archive of photographs, badges, letters and leaflets.

Such plucky and imaginative initiatives are no substitute for decent funding, of course, but it is cheering to learn that the sector is innovating to survive. That is going to be essential if our regional museums and galleries are to outlive the age of austerity.

• Alice O’Keeffe is a freelance literary critic and journalist