“Good morning,” said the survey, “I’m a social researcher at a London-based policy research company. We have identified you as an academic or researcher working in a field which might interact with cultural heritage and would like to invite you to complete a short survey to help us understand your views and attitudes towards cultural heritage collections – such as those held by museums, galleries, libraries and archives across the UK. This survey will feed into research helping to inform the development of the unified digital culture and heritage infrastructure currently being explored by Towards a National Collection. If this sounds like something you’d like to contribute to, we encourage you to have your say!”
And so I did…
Q: How often in the past 12 months have you visited museums, galleries, libraries, or archives?
I can’t say I visit museums much at all – there’s something at once so ossified and commoditised about the contemporary museum experience: you both enter and exit through the gift shop; you can’t handle the artefacts – which is surely the only point of having something real rather than virtual – and the obsession, again, with the virtual, means the exhibitions resemble bad CGI from the early 2000s, and are aimed at people who’ve come, for the most part, because they’re constitutionally incapable of opening a book and reading about a subject.
As for the major galleries: same shit, different frames and vitrines – with the added irritation that as, like some abject convict, you shuffle round for your allotted exercise period (sorry “timed entry slot”), some epsilon semi-moron is bound to be obscuring the Virgin of the Rocks as they take a photo of it, closely followed by one of the info panels beneath it.
I use libraries and archives all the time. The British Library does have a gift shop – but it’s reasonably discreet. They let you handle the books in their collection. Ditto Brixton Library, which doesn’t have a gift shop at all.
How often in the past 12 months have you engaged with digital collections of cultural heritage assets – for example, by exploring a virtual exhibition or accessing a digital archive? Not at all, apart from library archives. See above.
I really don’t get the point of virtual exhibitions, since so many current exhibitions have succumbed to the tyranny of the virtual. What this country needs is to be returned to the auratic, the haptic, and the enduring – our culture is typified by the mass-produced, the immaterial, and the ephemeral. Making all digital collections interoperable and accessible via a simple search engine will do nothing to combat this whatsoever, while still further banalising and canalising what’s left of any originality anyone whosoever might possess, by means of the Almighty Algorithm. (Praise be to it, and pass the subscription fee on to my host institution.)
Q: Are you a member of any cultural heritage organisations?
A: I’m a member of English Heritage (have you heard, no one does English heritage better). But I’d far rather visit sites managed by bespoke groups: contrast Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole’s little Gothic gem, overseen by a group of volunteering locals and enthusiasts, as against any of EH’s botanical gin boutiques (that incidentally happens to be adjacent some stately pile or other).
Q: To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements? Preserving cultural heritage collections for the appreciation of current and future generations is important to me…
A: Oh, man – when we get to this point in the survey, and you yourself ask me to reduce the infinitely fine grain of my value judgments to the crude 3-D printed social science paradigm within which you’re compelled to operate by reason of your funding structure, I throw up my hands… and they just keep on rising. Yes, of course, we’re all signed up to this to some degree – but not to some whizz-bang digital add-on. It’s all about horses, water, leading and drinking, matey.
Will greater and easier access to digitised culture result in a better, um, culture? Well, such access to collections and archives has generally improved and been consolidated consistently in the postwar period. That’s why we’re in the midst of a new Renaissance – hadn’t you noticed? OK, I shouldn’t be facetious – but there seems no direct correlation between presence of water and quantity drunk (let alone quality of resulting horse).
If you’d told me in 1981, when I was 20, that when I was 62 I’d be living in a country where everyone around me had the equivalent of a professional-level film camera in their pocket, and an editing suite at home, idealist that I was I’d have told you that the future will – indeed, must! – be replete with beautiful visions. Look around you…
