Digesting Museums

Please sit back - and relax - and let your food digest.

I want to talk to you about digesting museums.

If the very idea makes you suddenly feel constipated - don't worry!

I have a little pill - that - in just a quarter of an hour - will enable you to think about museums and digest your food with perfect equanimity.

But first, I'm afraid, I have to give you a little discomfort. I want you to think about museums as they are - not what they could become.

What could be more indigestible than a museum?

Have you ever seen your visitors leaving with smiles of contentment on their faces, as they feel the mental food they've just received stimulate their hungry minds? They're more likely to look exhausted and slightly dazed - glancing around to see where they can sit down and have a nice cup of tea.

Museums are about nothing if they're not about mental stimulation. But today they're more about mental constipation. That's hardly surprising because the food they serve is almost always unprepared.

Who cooks the food museums give their visitors? Who thinks of the menu - let alone whether or not it offers a balanced diet? Who thinks of the appetiser, the main protein, the vegetables, and the pudding, let alone the liquid refreshment that will help it go down - and turn the whole meal into an inspiration?

Instead, all most museums do for their visitors is to open the door to the larder.

There's a very contemporary, Reality-TV, egalitarianism about this approach - just open the larder and let anyone who wants to make their own food. But I have to ask, would you want to eat what they make?

Of course there are some visitors to museums who know exactly what to do - like I do and like I should imagine most of you. When I visit a museum I haven't been to before I very quickly get a feel for the whole cupboard - no matter how small or big - and choose what I want to look at - what will give me most mental stimulation. I then look at it in the order I want - and leave. I don't feel I have to look at everything - I'm that well fed.

Or well bred? Middle-class children in Britain used to be taught to leave a little food on their plates - in the days when there were plates - to show that they didn't need to eat everything. In working-class families, however, it was a public disgrace not to eat everything you were given.

But when people like us go round museums, we're not just upper middle class - we're bloody aristocrats. Rembrandt? - Oh, I'm not in the mood for him today.

As for starting at the shelf nearest the door, and reading every label - do you mind? Can't you see? It's only a bloody larder!

The vast majority of museum visitors start looking at everything - they quite reasonably think that's what museums want them to do. But they soon get indigestion - so would you after the tenth helping of different varieties of carrot.

Then they begin to drift - searching, often in vain, for something to alleviate their mental constipation. Failing to find any, they usually fall back on a trip to the cafй. Now there's a thought! Could the degree of a museum's failure be measured by the size of its cafe?

But I'm talking here about food for the mind, not the stomach.

I'm trying to make museums mentally digestible.

First we need to check that what museums have on offer is actually food.

Museums might have every type of wine glass - but they've not a drop of wine. Their larders are full of things whose use has been drained out of them - beached shards left by the tide of history.

Museums want to hold onto these objects still because they give us glimpses into - into what? The objects in our museums can only be valued for the mental stimulus they provide.