Britain | The museum world

Dance and laugh

Britain’s museums are being called upon to become more imaginative

History boys

HARTWIG FISCHER has a PhD in art history, speaks four languages fluently, is an authority on difficult 20th-century artists such as Vassily Kandinsky and Kurt Schwitters and for the past three years has been running the Dresden State Art Collections, one of Europe’s finest. He deserves to be described as a serious man. This is just as well because, at 52, Mr Fischer is being asked to fill some very big shoes as the next director of the British Museum (BM). The man he is replacing, Neil MacGregor, took over a museum in crisis in 2002; after 13 years on the job he has turned the BM into the country’s leading visitor attraction (6.7m people came through the door in 2014). Mr MacGregor, who gained worldwide renown as a result of his BBC radio series, “A History of the World in 100 Objects”, is a national treasure.

Mr Fischer will move into his office in Bloomsbury just as the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is being told about its coming budgets. The BM, along with other cultural institutions, has seen its public funding squeezed by one-third over the past five years. More cuts are on the way. In preparation for the government’s spending review in November, museums are being asked to put forward different models of cuts of 25% and 40%. “The short-term funding outlook in Britain is very, very grim,” says Maria Balshaw, director of the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester.

Nevertheless, Ms Balshaw, one of Mr Fischer’s rivals for the top job at the BM, has some good ideas for how to face up to the challenges of austerity. Her gallery has hosted a hip-hop party in its Grand Hall, done tai chi in the art garden, asked elderly men from a local care home to curate an exhibition and encouraged young people to do a “takeover” of the gallery. In the seven months since the Whitworth reopened after a 17-month restoration it has welcomed 300,000 visitors, compared with 180,000 over the whole year before it closed. In May the Art Fund voted it Britain’s “museum of the year”.

Nor is the Whitworth the only museum in Britain to be reimagining what museums are for and testing what audiences want. Tate Modern, which later this month will also start looking for a new head, transformed itself into the “Musée de la Danse” earlier this year, with hundreds of people dancing together in a mass performance in its Turbine Hall. Originally conceived for 2m visitors a year, Tate Modern hosted 5.7m people in the year to September. When polled about their experience there, 45% said what they liked most about it was that it was “a space for encounters”. The BM hosts sleepovers for children among the mummies in its Ancient Egyptian gallery. Mr Fischer is a serious man; in his new job he may be called upon to be a playful one too.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Dance and laugh"

Dominant and dangerous

From the October 3rd 2015 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

The future of Drax, Britain’s largest power plant

From coal to wood to carbon capture and storage?

A new hate-crime law in Scotland causes widespread concern

Transgender identity is protected; biological sex is not


Britain’s kings of sourdough

The rapid rise of a firm that makes bread very slowly