Museums don’t win awards or get rave reviews for their security systems – but they should. I have seen for myself how lax British Museum security was. It needs to stop living in a fantasy world
few years ago, I was involved in removing a priceless treasure from the British Museum. Ian Jenkins, the museum’s senior curator of Greek antiquities, was my co-speaker at a Guardian event and he brought along a small bronze divinity, more valuable than any of thefrom the museum’s vaults. This was something senior staff could do, he explained, so long as they returned the item before midnight. We shared a taxi afterwards, and I saw him go into the darkened museum with it.
has failed at: to preserve and protect the objects they contain. Interpretation, debate, critique – these all come second, and don’t really have to be done by the museum at all. Rapley came from the Met’s art and antiques unit and made security a systematic, central aspect of the way the V&A works. When I go to that South Kensington museum to see an exhibition before it opens, I have to enter through a special entrance with a sentry booth. This feels like a place that even a curator would be scared to try to rob.
Is it fair that Hartwig Fischer has had to resign? Yes, because there isn’t anything more important for museums to do than safeguard their collections. It may be that Fischer and his colleagues naively failed to follow up an antique dealer’s report of seeing artefacts online two years ago, and then tried to discredit him.
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