A Museum Conference

Abstract

I DEPRECATE as strongly, though not so violently, as “Academicus,” an association to talk about museums, but I cannot agree with his reasoning on the subject of museums and their curators. I have had twenty years' daily experience of museum work, and at the risk of being dubbed a pretentious curator I can assert I have brought an average intelligence to bear on my work. With a certain amount of sympathy for the strictures of “Academicus” on the multiplication of conferences, I am yet free to assert that in no department of public work might and could greater public advantage result from close association of officials than from a union of museum curators. A provincial curator must often be oppressed with the conviction that he is spending weeks over a task which is already, in some other locality, done to his hands, and he must likewise know that the labour he is in other instances performing, and the objects he is manipulating would be sufficient for the wants of a dozen institutions like his own. He knows that he wants what others have, and that from his abundance others might be filled. Then again, in a general museum, the presiding officer, to be thoroughly efficient, should be master of the circle of the sciences, and have a familiar acquaintance with all arts and art. But science is all-embracing, art is long, and the arts of to-day are obsolete to-morrow. I say in contradiction of “Academicus” that museum officials only know their business when they know their ignorance, and that proper salaries are not their only or chief want. In a scientific sense the best men would be the worst museum curators, and were the municipalities of Great Britain each to offer the salary of a cabinet minister for the services of a museum superintendent, I do not think the institutions would thereby at once be so much revolutionised as “Academicus” thinks.