There is nothing more embarrassing than having a lot of old stuff in a collection that has been donated willy-nilly over the years. Like old family relics in an attic. They look untidy and when people look at them they imagine all sorts of things and you can't have the hoi-polloi doing that. I mean, they don't know what's good for them. Everything needs to be re-labelled and put in its proper context.
Imagine you've inherited a lot of grave goods from Peru or a batch of shrunken heads from Borneo. Well, to start off you don't show them--at all. You hide them in a warehouse and hope that someday they may be forgotten for what they are--spoils from a colonial era. Then you install a lot of touch screens with confusing buttons that will enthral all the seven year olds and baffle the adults. You start collating stories about all these diverse ethnic communities and they are all nice stories, which have been eviscerated and packaged for general consumption, so they have as much guts left inside them as those dented old mummy cases in the Egyptian side gallery.
Everything has its context and its label and is suitably dumbed down. Hmm, not so very different from the Islamic State bull-dozing it's own ancient artefacts, cleansing or smoothing out its historical timeline. Perhaps we are all at it, one way or another, Re-interpretation is the disease of the 21st century. We are not allowed to gaze on the cabinet of curiosities and wonder why any more. Children are encouraged to click buttons and turn over one word captions--history re-written as a baby board book. Museum curators have the last word. There may be a place to display your postcard of opinion. But those opinions are strictly curated. At times, I feel there is more 'telling' than 'showing' going on in Brighton Museum.
A prime casualty of this particular brand of curator's fallacy has been the fashion gallery, but I'll rant about that another day, perhaps, as it isn't really news. Nothing has changed in that gallery much since the beginning of this century. I'm waiting for an iconoclast to come along one laundry day and throw out all the safety-pinned punk as well as the Ben Sherman shirts, along with Norman Cook's donation. Just because I'm sick of the sight of them.
There has been a wholesale cleansing in the ethnographic gallery. Space has been cleared so that we can go down on our knees and beg forgiveness for what our misguided ancestors have done. I am missing so many beautiful artefacts in here. Artefacts that I used to like to sketch. Even the wonderful carved figures (early 20thc) of the colonial planter in his pith helmet and his sidekicks who once looked back at us through other-worldly tribal eyes and still had the ability to speak to us, have vanished from their glass box. They do not fit the labels any more. In fact the word 'tribal' has been banished to that shameful lexicon of yesteryear.
I do not remember much Islamic art in this collection, but now a third of the gallery is taken up with a display about Islamic culture. The only remotely old things on display are some fragments of tiles from a mosque with reproduction copies beneath that you are permitted to touch. The African section was dominated by a huge table football game and more touch screens. There was some connection being made between football and Africa which I didn't quite get. The other part of the gallery is taken up with a huge grey desk and seating area with some infernal machine that ought to be touch-screen but isn't--in fact you have to operate a weird qwerty keyboard that talks back at you in an alarming manner. Listed on screen are a considerable archive of resource materials about ethnic cultures and religions. Watched one film made about the Kachin diaspora from Burma. No doubt a persecuted sect in their own country, but there was no mention of this. Perhaps persecution is too political. All content here is presented in a strictly happy-clappy format.
The new 'Oceans' gallery, which replaces the rather muddled one about corsetry, body image and gender, is more of a success. Mainly because it utilises a lot of the stuffed birds/skeletons and eerily-preserved sea creatures from the Booth collection. Turtles wearing thick overcoats of 19thc shellac dangle from wires. Thanks to Hirst and those girlie taxidermists beloved by contemporary art buyers, stuffed animals have now become chic curiosities All the dubious animal world trophies blunder-bussed to near extinction by their original collector, are having a bit of a renaissance in this gallery. So that is something to celebrate, possibly.
I'm ending with a picture of a pair of gold ballet shoes. Possibly a relic from Les Ballets 1933, bank-rolled by the collector Edward James, for the sake of his promiscuous wife, Tilly Losch, but I could be wrong and that could be libel. On second thoughts, I should probably go back and look at the label.
