Dea Birkett

Museums should stay shut

Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images

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.

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