This post is prompted by an outstanding and thought-provoking book about museums.
The book is The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it by Alice Procter (Amazon page here – but do order from your local bookseller if you can).
Two thoughts that the book provoked for me were about the British Museum.
This post sets out those two thoughts and where those thoughts then led me.
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The first thought was a recollection of this eloquent and plausible 2004 justification by the museum’s then director Neil MacGregor of the museum’s position relating to controversial items in its collection.
The passage in that piece that struck me at the time and has stayed with me was this about the founding of the museum back in 1753 (and I have broken up the paragraphs for flow):
‘To ensure that the collection would be held for the benefit of citizens, and not the purposes of the crown, Parliament hit upon a solution of extraordinary ingenuity and brilliance.
‘They borrowed from private family law the notion of the trust. The decision that the museum would be run not as a department of state, but by trustees had – and still has – crucial implications.
‘Trustee ownership confers duties rather than rights. Trustees must derive no benefit for themselves, but hold the collection exclusively for the advantage of the beneficiaries.
‘The collection cannot be sold off.
‘The museum was set firmly outside the commercial realm, a position epitomised by the principle of free admission.
‘Even more astonishingly, it was in large measure removed from the political realm.
‘Trustees are not allowed by law merely to follow government orders: they have to act as they judge best in the interest of beneficiaries, including, crucially, future and unborn beneficiaries.
‘Who are the beneficiaries for whom the trustees hold the collection?
‘Startlingly, they are not just the citizens of Britain.
‘The British Museum was from the beginning a trust where the objects would be held “for the use of learned and studious men [in 1753 they were mostly men], both native and foreign”.
‘In his will, Sloane had declared his desire that his collection should be preserved “for the improvement, knowledge and information of all persons”.
‘The rest of the world has rights to use and study the collection on the same footing as British citizens.’
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I have often thought about that passage.
It is convincing as far as it goes – once an item is part of the collection it is safeguarded and retained for the benefit of all.
But.
There was something missing.
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Here we come to the second thought provoked by the book.
This is a legal principle – known to lawyers and also normal people – which is known in its Latin form nemo dat quod non habet.
In plain language: a person cannot have a greater property right (‘title’) in a thing than the person who provides them with the thing.
So if I provide you with a thing – but I do not own it to begin with – then you will not own it either.
Applied to the British Museum, it seemed to me that it was all very well the British Museum boasting of how well an item in its collection will be looked after under the terms of its trust – but that was no answer if the original acquisition was unsound.
