THE Arts Minister published the Government’s long- awaited vision for museums in the 21st century yesterday, only to find it derided by specialists in the sector.

Having waited 18 months for the consultation paper on museums, experts reacted with dismay to the “patronising” news that “museums are a way we connect our past with our present” and recommendations that included opening museums’ store rooms to make their treasures available to all. Estelle Morris’s report states that “England’s 2000-plus museums and galleries are treasure houses of our cultural and national heritage, but too many items within them are hidden from the public”.

She would like museums “to take steps to unlock their collections”. “Thousands of high-quality works belonging to major museums throughout the country are not on regular display,” the report said. The British Museum dismissed the notion, saying that it reflected a widely held misconception that museum store rooms are full of iconic treasures. Of seven million items in the collection, 75,000 are on display.

More than one million are flints and there are three million paintings and drawings, and a large oriental collection, which is too delicate to be exposed to light for long periods.

These include the Fascination of Nature — the exquisite 1320s Chinese silk scroll with images of butterflies and toads amid other wildlife — which needs to “rest” for conservation reasons following its display at the National Art Collections Fund exhibition last year. Like other institutions, the British Museum’s store rooms are full of objects that are too similar to exhibits on show or mere shards that are kept for scholarly reasons.

Tyne and Wear Museums, which has 11 museums in Newcastle, Sunderland, Gateshead, North and South Tyneside, pointed out to Ms Morris that they already have a long-standing range of partnerships with eight national museums, including the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Alec Coles, director of Tyne and Wear Museums, said that the national collections have been lending to the regions for years and that up to 20 paintings a year are lent by the National Gallery alone to his institutions. When the British Museum purchased the Queen of the Night, a 4,000-year-old terracotta relief of a Babylonian goddess last year, it immediately organised a tour to Glasgow, Sunderland, Leicester, Birmingham and Cardiff. Experts said they could find nothing new in Ms Morris’s report, which was roundly scorned for its “patronising content”, much of which stated the obvious.

Ms Morris’s call for a “consensus on what constitutes quality” was dismissed by one curator as “gobbledygook”. David Barrie, director of the National Art Collections Fund, Britain’s largest art charity, which helps cash-strapped museums to buy works of art, said: “None of these ideas is new and it looks as though museums and galleries will still be expected to perform miracles within ‘limited resources’.” Ms Morris did, however, have her defenders. The Museums Association said that this was the first time that the Government had looked at the museums sector as a whole rather than the ones it funds.

WHAT SHE SAID

“Museums working together — locally and nationally — are already an important part of our cultural landscape. Partnerships should continue to be part of the museums landscape in the future”

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