Museums should stay shut

It’s been a promising week for museums. In Denmark, Germany and Australia some of their most famous galleries – Potsdam’s Museum Barberini, Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum – will all be open within a week. In the UK, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport established a taskforce ‘paving the way for reopening’ and Arts Council England have declared that ‘helping the sector to reopen is a priority’. The Museums Association issued a statement: ‘We believe that it is possible for many museums to reopen to the public in the first phases of lifting the current lockdown. Many museums are well-placed to introduce social distancing measures similar to those currently used in supermarkets.’ Museums in England will be encouraged to unbolt their heavy doors next month.

These early visits won’t look like any of those made before Covid-19 closed down our cultural institutions, almost overnight. Visitors will wait patiently in taped boxes marked out on the marbled floors until the adult in front of them moves on from admiring the cut-out Matisse. The gallery will seem a little empty; all the hands-on activities, dressing up boxes, and art carts and corners for kids will be packed away. Paper maps, pamphlets and trails to help navigate a path through the modern masters will be kept in the store cupboard. They’ll have to entirely rely upon their own previous knowledge of the Pre-Raphaelites. They won’t be able to approach a gallery assistant for guidance as they’ll be cordoned behind screens as if you were a danger to them. These eager early returners to artistic enlightenment will stand respectfully back from not only the art, but each other, silently contemplating 16th century porcelain from behind a stanchion. Silence will ring out through the vast galleries. At home that evening, chatting with friends on Zoom, they’ll report how wonderfully quiet and empty the museum was. ‘If only museums were always like that,’ they’ll say.

If museums unlock before lockdown is completely lifted, this is exactly what a visit will be like – a treat for the culturally confident who’ve been clever and determined enough to pre-book a ticket and make their own mask. (Face covering will be compulsory.) But this misunderstands for whom and for what museums are. A socially distanced museum isn’t a welcome possibility. A socially distanced museum is an absurdity.

Museums aren’t for quiet contemplation by the few, but loud conversation with the many. Only the most culturally conservative will argue they’re essentially there to serve those who boast a scattering of limited edition prints in their hallway and a heavyweight, highly-illustrated catalogue on their coffee table bought at the last Great Masters exhibition they attended. With the added delights of the digitalisation, including the National Gallery’s online curators’ talks and the British Museum’s revamped Collection Online containing over four million objects, this handful has plenty of access to art already in their own homes. Let them spend a morning taking a virtual tour of British Surrealism at Dulwich Picture Gallery on their Apple Mac. They don’t need our museums to open up just for them.

It’s exceedingly expensive to do so. The newly-developed online booking systems, the increased staff to visitor ratio and all that plexiglass makes the cost per capita of early re-openings extortionate. This is at the expense of developing programmes for those who rarely, if ever, visit. Already in the United States, education departments in museums are being decimated as a result of coronavirus costs. If the culturally confident might be the first to come back, the culturally deprived are the first to be cut.

We can’t allow our museums to open under circumstances that go back to what a museum once were – ‘If only museums were always like that.’ The threat to our museums isn’t being closed, it’s opening up to a tiny number for no good reason at all. It’s that, as much as the loss of income, which risks their very future, for then museums will have no value at all. Their conversational core, their welcoming and inclusive heart, would be missing.

So museums should stay online and stay shut. And when social distancing has departed, and only then, open up for everyone.