[MSN] St.Neil MacGregor's plans for the BM and the Parthenon Marbles (The future lies in the past)

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 Below is another adulatory article – or ‘sycophantic guff’. This is only
one of a series of articles designed to put a stop to the request for the
reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures all inspired and probably written
by MacGregor himself. The need for all these spurious articles is the fact
that MacGregor knows that the new Acropolis Museum is reaching completion
and once it opens its doors it will be impossible for the British to
continue with their assertions that they are ‘theirs’ and will never go
back. So they are now publishing a series of articles with the latest
argument that the Marbles are staying in the British Museum because Neil
Macgregor is such a wonderful man –in fact already some refer to him as
St.Neil (this is absolutely true) that depriving him of the presence of the
Parthenon Marbles will be absolutely cruel and unacceptable.

An interesting article about some of Neil Macgregor's plans for the British
Museum over the next few years.

I can't see the conversion of he reading room to an exhibition space
happening without a lot of fuss from English Heritage.

From:
http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/060712-NL-past.html



The future lies in the past

By Norman Lebrecht / July 12, 2006

If a week is a long time in politics, four years is an eternity in the life
of a cultural institution. In August 2002, when Neil MacGregor took over as
Director, the British Museum was facing a £5 million shortfall, a rash of
strikes and a level of public apathy so dire that not a media peep was heard
over a crippling 30 percent shrinkage in its government grant. So weakened
was the Museum that the Greeks mounted a huge campaign to get their Marbles
back for the 2004 Olympics.

Today, queues snake round the perimeter for major openings, the Greeks have
lost the argument and the Museum recently stayed open until midnight to
accommodate the rush of interest in its second most successful-ever
exhibition in successive years – after Ancient Persia, an eye-opening show
of shavings from Michelangelo’s drawing board, his masterpieces in sketch
form.

To effect these attitudinal changes, MacGregor, 60 last month, was obliged
to transform himself from the rather austere art scholar who ruled the
National Gallery on Trafalgar Square into a shirt-sleeved powerhouse of
public enlightenment, beaming around his courts and galleries morning, noon
and night, tweaking everything from the tenebrous prints room, just opened
after relighting, to the dreary restaurant, now in the hands of an
outstanding Viennese caterer. Adjust and charm has been MacGregor’s motto
for the past four years. Now he’s going for the big idea.

In 2007 the BM will stage the greatest exhibition outside China of treasures
of the First Emperor, the tyrant who unified the country and established its
script and civilisation some 300 years before Christianity. Qin-chi, known
to the world for the 8,000 terracotta warriors that were entombed to protect
him in the afterlife, was not a man receptive to contradiction. When the
Confucians opposed him, he had ten philosophers buried alive. His rule, says
MacGregor, ‘was a choice between central autocracy and warlord chaos - and
that is central to our understanding of China in the modern world. There has
been very little public thinking on this.’

That statement contains the core of the BM’s revival - the synergies that
MacGregor finds or artificially draws between ancient objects and current
affairs, whether in Iran and Iraq (where he led the drive to protect the
Baghdad Museum) or in China where he is running a one-man mission of mutual
edification. ‘You may not be aware,’ he remarks, ‘that the national
curriculum is due for revision in 2008. Every child in Britain learns about
ancient Egypt, but for some reason there is no requirement to teach this
other great civilisation, of which there are traces in every museum in the
land. Everyone says China is the future. We cannot afford to ignore it.’

Shuttling back and forth, he is setting up ‘Britain meets the World’ in
Beijing’s Palace Museum next March, an exhibition requested by the Chinese
to demonstrate how Britain became a world power. The BM’s Assyrian
collection has just opened in Shanghai. When Beijing’s Capital Museum staged
‘Treasures of the World from the British Museum’, everything from Chinese
hand axes to David Hockney, it drew quarter of a million paying visitors at
£7 a head. The Chinese appetite for culture is intense, says MacGregor, who
is busily organising behind-the-scenes curatorial exchanges – their experts
to catalogue our Chinese art, our horologists to wind up their 18th century
English clocks and navigation aids, the biggest set on earth.

The Chinese, says MacGregor, have an acute awareness of British achievement
and the importance of London. ‘They know that the Eurostar opens at St
Pancras next year and the British Museum is the nearest venue. They expect
us to attract visitors from all over Europe. This exhibition shows, after
all, the greatest discovery since Tutankhamun.’

Under prevailing conditions, the Museum has no room for a blockbuster show
and would have to turn thousands away. Its ground-floor exhibition area
admits 200 people at a time and, though both Persia and Michelangelo topped
100,000, China will need twice as much space and will draw much bigger
crowds. MacGregor has a solution which is as radical as it is logical and,
inevitably, controversial.

He will be telling museum staff today (Wed) that he plans to take over the
circular Reading Room, where Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital, and by dropping a
false ceiling over the famous reading desks, create a temporary gallery of
1,000 square metres for the China show. The cost will be £1.5 to £2 million
(Morgan Stanley are the lead sponsor), along with the disappearance of a
sentimental relic that has been, in MacGregor’s words, ‘tragically
underused’ since the British Library’s departure to Euston a decade ago. It
sole purpose is as a place where visitors can consult books about BM
collections. ‘The public are terrified by it,’ says the Director.

At noon on a typical weekday, I find the room deserted yet still imprinted
with that prohibitive aura which, to me among many researchers, made prison
seem infinitely more welcoming. The Room was neither loved by users, nor
conducive to creative thought. English Heritage has signalled its consent to
the proposed submersion and Camden Council has no obvious grounds for
refusing planning permission.

Few, however, expect the plan to pass uncontested. Curators at the BM are
resistant to disturbance and backwoods traditionalists and backbench MPs
will doubtless rally in support of the dodo. Stand by for a tabloid outcry,
the anti-literate in defence of the unread, before the Reading Room is
finally submersed.

MacGregor, with the guile of a lawyer long experienced in public affairs,
insists that the adaptation is temporary. His ultimate aim is to create an
exhibition wing at the right extremity of the building, presently a storage
depot. But by the time the China exhibition closes, the Reading Room will
have passed into history and the public mind will have moved on to the next
big idea - a Hadrian exhibition for 2008. MacGregor cannot resist the
observation that the Roman Emperor shipped troops from Basra to pacify the
English north.

It is with such symmetries that the world comes full circle at the British
Museum. In contrast to President Jacques Chirac’s embarrassing new Museum of
Four Continents at the Quai Branly, a lame excuse for displaying primitive
collections, the glory of the British Museum in a multicultural world is
that it does not pit one civilisation against another: all human history is
there, without precedence or preference. As the Chinese pack their clay
warriors in padded coffins for a leap into unintended afterlife, the BM has
begun gearing up for its biggest venture in two and a half centuries.