In an age when people increasingly define themselves by what they do, rather than what they have, do museums represent the last gasp of high culture? Christopher Beanland looks to the future.
It's a Sunday afternoon in October at the British Museum. Everyone comes to museums to look at the stuff on display, but looking at the people doing the looking is often as interesting. There are excited kids and bored teenagers, nonplussed parents and not-fussed couples. There are also huge groups of Chinese tourists crocodiling from Norman Foster's covered courtyard into the museum's new extension – a sober £135m box by Graham Stirk – to see the current blockbuster exhibition filled with Ming vases whose plinths should definitely not be leant upon, Groucho Marx-style.
Our museums seem to be booming. Visitor numbers rise and rise. It's open season for new openings, and for the big-name architects who nowadays spend most of their lives knocking up anodyne towers for overseas tycoons, building a museum extension must seem like a rare laugh... Read more in The Independent
It's a Sunday afternoon in October at the British Museum. Everyone comes to museums to look at the stuff on display, but looking at the people doing the looking is often as interesting. There are excited kids and bored teenagers, nonplussed parents and not-fussed couples. There are also huge groups of Chinese tourists crocodiling from Norman Foster's covered courtyard into the museum's new extension – a sober £135m box by Graham Stirk – to see the current blockbuster exhibition filled with Ming vases whose plinths should definitely not be leant upon, Groucho Marx-style.
Our museums seem to be booming. Visitor numbers rise and rise. It's open season for new openings, and for the big-name architects who nowadays spend most of their lives knocking up anodyne towers for overseas tycoons, building a museum extension must seem like a rare laugh... Read more in The Independent