The Natural History Museum has an important job – and it isn’t agitprop
What is it about those running Britain’s museums and galleries? Being custodians of some of the world’s greatest collections is seemingly no longer enough. Increasingly they feel duty bound to be agents of change – and inevitably the change is all in one direction. We are still waiting to hear from the museum director who says the public has perhaps an inadequate grasp of Britain’s great achievements – and their institution will do its best to enhance it.
The Natural History Museum (NHM) in South Kensington is planning major redevelopment at a total cost of £550 million, around £400 million coming from the taxpayer and £150 million still needing to be raised from donors. The task will be tougher as the museum, in tune with the current fashion, will not countenance support from the previously generous oil companies and others now stigmatised as environmental villains, or worse.
Parts of the NHM indubitably are in need of a revamp. The Great Hall – gloriously restored via a £5 million gift ten years ago from the pro-enterprise, Tory donor Sir Michael, now Lord, Hintze (would the museum shun his philanthropy now for espousing such Jurassic causes?) – will hopefully still inspire any child with its 25-metre long blue whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling as an oceanic mobile and its nearly 130 million year-old intact Mantellisaurus fossil.
But other spaces are rather less distracting; plasticky-looking effigies of elephants, giraffes and gorillas may have been just the thing when I first visited as a small boy circa 1980, but perhaps not quite up to what today’s computer-addled cohort expect.
But obviously an update is just too prosaic an ambition for our age. No, the South Ken institution is seeking “a step-change from being a catalogue of natural history to a catalyst for change”. Enthralling their young visitors marvelling at the dinosaurs will come with a compulsory dose of climate alarmist agitprop.
The museum’s director Doug Gurr – previously country manager of Amazon UK and president of Amazon China – boasts that “our revitalised museum will be the heart of a global mission to create 100 million advocates for the planet, powered by our scientists’ work to find solutions to the planetary emergency”. I suppose that is a rather loftier ambition than pleasantly distracting children for a rainy few hours before their afternoon tea.
But the oddity of this approach is that it seems to imagine children need an extra nudge in the direction of climate apocalypticism – a message that is not exactly absent from the school curriculum. The NHM can do wonders in kindling an enthusiasm for science and the natural world, but this one aspect of the message is emphatically not under-catered for.
The NHM is far from alone. The incoming director of the National Portrait Gallery, Victoria Siddall, also wants to play her part in the great green struggle. And the messaging of London museums is not just about greenery, but the whole gamut of progressive causes – as anyone foolish enough to read the latest captions at the Tate will soon discover. The talk is of the Brixton uprising (a.k.a. the 1981 Brixton riots) and the profits of slavery.
The Just Stop Oil zealots are targeting museums for accepting tainted money or their alleged climate acquiescence (meaning something akin to, “how can you look at a Rembrandt or Van Gogh when the world is burning?”) are largely pushing at an open door.
Those running many of these institutions share much of the protestors’ outlook. But it has done them little good – the righteous rage is not deflected to other targets. So Mr Gurr and his peers might as well return to their primary task of maintaining and hopefully augmenting their stupendous collections. BP and the other oil companies who have such a long history of being generous to London’s cultural institutions could even be invited to once more help underwrite the task. Sadly, that won’t happen, and the capital will be all the poorer for it.