Pizzas galore!

From the outside World Museum, Liverpool still exudes the fading Victorian civic grandeur of its neighbour the Walker Art Gallery. Stepping inside, however, the impression I got was that I'd entered some kind of super-primary school, possibly a lavishly funded co-project with the European Union: a soaring, modern five story atrium with each department represented by illiteracy-friendly pictures - a fish, a bug, a dinosaur, a hand, a star. ("Children from St Vincent's Primary School and their artist in residence Alan Murray produced these banners," said a sign).

I visited the Clore Natural History wing, a sort of state-of-the-art school biology lab with lots objects (silicified wood; ammonites; skulls; shells) for visitors to paw and molest. A microscope was focussed on a stinging nettle. "Ouch!" said the caption. An exhibit on sea spiders asked "Are the spiders in mum's bath going to get this big?" A class of seven-year olds milled about, opening and closing specimen drawers, pushing and prodding but without focussing on anything in particular. Two or three young, friendly curators were trying to engage their attention. "Do you get much time to do any research?" I asked one. "Not as much as we'd like," he admitted.

Upstairs, in the Ethnographic galleries, a video of a man dressed in tribal robes introduced the African section with a lame rap number. "You might think of them as a simple people/But in essence they were truly complex," it went.

If you wanted to be annoyed by this sort of thing, you didn't have to look hard. A section on weapons seemed to think that their main purpose was for "dancing and initiation rites" rather than fighting. The one on masks claimed: "These objects show how important identity is to us and how we make identities for ourselves and for gods and spirits." Ancient Egypt, it is stressed, "was an African culture". The Roman Empire was "multicultural."

And besides the glib pacifism, woolly cod-sociological gobbledegook, cultural relativism and political correctness, the texts seemed designed to insult the intelligence of anyone past primary age. This is no accident. Museums are advised by local authorities to couch their labels in language no more complex than can be understood by a child with a standard reading age of twelve.

"I do worry that there's nothing there for those people who have that bit of education, who would like to know more in depth," a Liverpool curator said to me. But as he went on to admit, middle class museum goers are going to keep coming no matter what you do. The key to expanding audiences is concentrating on the C2s D2s and Es. "It's why all our promotional leaflets are in simple language and done in reds, yellows and blues like the world Barney [the horrible purple American TV dinosaur] lives in. You see in lower income households, it's the kids not the grown ups who decide whether or not visiting a museum is a worthwhile leisure activity."

A tunnel journey away on the other side of the Mersey, the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight could hardly be more different. This fabulous collection of pre-Raphaelite painting and decorative art, amassed by the soap powder magnate Lord Leverhulme, is most definitely not the sort of place you'd want to entertain a child. It's fusty, unglamorous and object-rich; the labelling is austere to the point of dullness. "The Lever does tend to attract the blue rinse brigade," admitted its curator of paintings, Julian Treuherz, as we took lunch in the subterranean museum cafe thronged with elderly matrons.

Treuherz was far too politic to tell me what he thought of his boss across the river, but it seems unlikely that he and Fleming would find much to agree on. His worry is that marketing-led, access-driven policies are having a dangerous effect on scholarship. "A lot of museums pay lip-service to it but their staff are too busy on access-type projects to do any serious research. If all our museums end up with is interpreters and presenters without any primary experience of the paintings or ceramics in our collection, then we're not doing our job properly."

Symptomatic of this, he argues, is the new trend for hanging paintings lower so as to make them more accessible for children and the disabled. Thus are politically correct considerations given a higher priority than scholarly or aesthetic ones. "A lot of paintings were made to be hung at a particular height," Treuherz says, "hanging them lower just spoils them." But if - as is so often the case among young curators these days - your MA is in Museum Studies and not Art History, how can you possibly be expected to understand such nuances?

And if you're going to keep pandering like this to perceived public needs, he wonders, why stop there? "A lot of people might say: 'Oh it's very off-putting having art in these big buildings with columns and steps.' Are we supposed to scrap those as well?"

This question is not altogether a rhetorical one. Those "big buildings with columns and steps" are an example of what the Department of Culture, Media and Sport's latest consultation document - Understanding the Future: Museums and 21st Century Life would probably term "intellectual barriers to entry". By this it means those qualities in a traditional museum - the grandeur of the building, the way everything is arranged and labelled, perhaps even the other visitors' middle class accents - which the people who generally don't use museums might find off-putting.

()Of course it never occurs to the document's authors that these "intellectual barriers to entry" might actually be a desirable thing. Rather, it is taken as a given that these are problems which must be overcome at all costs. A museum's job, in other words, is to make itself equally attractive to every single member of the population. And until it has done so, it might be said to have failed.