Museums

Before cheap flights, trains were the economical way to discover Europe and its foibles. Personally, I enjoyed the old fuss at border crossings. By the time I was 18, I had memorised those warning notices in the carriages: Nicht hinauslehnen; Defense de se pencher au-dehors; E pericoloso sporgersi. Those three different ways of saying ‘don’t stick your head out the window’, one bossy, the other pedantic, another gently pleading, summarised the nice subtleties of national borders that were philosophical as well as political. Europe is a marvel.

‘Celtic’ is a word heavily charged with meanings. It refers, among other phenomena, to a football club, a group of languages, a temperament, a style of art and a fringe, once the stronghold of the Liberal Democrats. But who are — and were — the Celts? The curators of the new British Museum exhibition are not at all sure, and that’s one of the reasons why the result is so enthralling. There is a familiar answer to this question: the Celts were an ancient people who moved into Europe from the east in prehistoric times and occupied most areas north and east of the Alps, together with northern Italy and much of the Balkans. They spoke a kindred group of languages and created a style of art that continued to evolve from the 5th century BC into the Middle Ages.

About six years ago the first section of the now celebrated High Line was opened in New York and made a palpable hit both locally and internationally. Locally it revealed what one might have guessed, that the inhabitants of Manhattan’s downtown suffered a severe lack of amenity. Every place to walk or run or ride a bike, every place to exercise the dog, is valuable and well used. This new and unusual park, restoring and converting the tracks of a disused overhead railway, was reserved neither for running nor biking nor walking the dog, but rather for strolling, sitting and sunbathing, and for the novelty of looking in on buildings old and new, from unusual angles and with an unusual degree of impertinence.

The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact contemporaries of department stores: the whole world acquired, catalogued, labelled, displayed and inspected. Only at the moment of consumer interaction do they differ. In a department store, everything is for sale. In a museum, everything is for edification. The V&A is the most complete example. From the beginning it had populist and didactic intentions: collecting photographs began in the 1850s. There was a campaigning instinct: its exhibitions worked as Victorian social media, encouraging the public and rebuking manufacturers on questions of ‘taste’.

Our love affair with the 1950s has been going on for years and shows no sign of abating. Pangolin London, the city arm of the Gloucestershire foundry, has cleverly used the visceral appeal of Fifties design — if ever a period merited the term gay in its original sense, this one does — to show how sculpture can be incorporated into a domestic setting (until 17 May). All too often works of sculpture, whatever their size, are put on pedestals or instinctively relegated outdoors or to public spaces.

In the past ten years museums of modern and contemporary art have proliferated around the world. New institutions have appeared in Los Angeles, Venice, Doha and Beijing. Even Camden has seen a burst of activity — the Dairy Art Centre opened in April of this year, spread over the 12,500 sq ft of a former milk depot, with an exhibition of the Swiss artist John Armleder. A similar size space, The David Roberts Art Foundation (Draf), opened last year in a mews near the Mornington Crescent end of Camden High Street. They joined the Zabludowicz Collection, which has been housed in a former Methodist chapel on Prince of Wales Road since 2007.

It is a desperate state of affairs when museums and art galleries sell outstanding works of art in order to raise funds. It is even worse, perhaps, when they do so because they no longer want them. Next month, on 5 June, Sotheby’s New York is offering some 25 classical carpets on behalf of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, which includes what the auction house describes as ‘one of the most important and revered carpets in the world’. No one taking the trouble to contemplate the 17th-century Isfahan ‘Clark Sickle-Leaf Carpet’ (right) for more than a minute could fail to be entranced by it, or to recognise that this most beautiful and astonishingly complex of textiles is a remarkable work of art. That is, in one sense, precisely why it is being sold.

Twenty-five years ago I went to St James’s Palace to ask the Prince of Wales if he would open the new Design Museum. Before us was the model of the building, an elegant, austere, uncompromised white box that was very much along Bauhaus lines. We knew that ‘modern’ no longer meant ‘of-the-moment’ but had become a period style label. Even at the time we acknowledged the layers of irony in this historicist gesture. The Prince, sounding pained, I recall, asked, ‘Mr Bayley, why has it got a flat roof?’ And that was the end of that. Next time it will be different. The Design Museum is moving from a creatively reused banana warehouse near Tower Bridge to a creatively reused Commonwealth Institute on the edge of Holland Park.

We are fairly certain that the late Robert Maxwell never met the even later Josiah Wedgwood, but Cap’n Bob’s nefarious legacy is now being keenly felt by Wedgwood’s descendants. For it was in the aftermath of Maxwell’s plundering of the Mirror Group that the Pension Protection Fund was established to compensate pensioners in the wake of insolvency. And now this legislation is being used to asset-strip one of the great museums of England. On the southern edge of Stoke-on-Trent stands the Wedgwood Museum, dedicated to ‘The People Who Have Made Objects of Great Beauty from the Soils of Staffordshire’.