THERE was dismay in museumland last month after rumours that London鈥檚 Science
Museum might turn itself into a theme park. Naturally the museum has to pay its
bills, but the idea of leasing space to commercial brand-name purveyors of
entertainment and refreshment seemed shocking. The reality is less
definite鈥攏ot so much a plan, rather 鈥渁 methodology for a framework for a
development plan鈥�. But the museum鈥檚 spokespeople do say that it needs commercial
income and that you 鈥渃annot run an organisation like this without decent
catering and retail facilities鈥�.
Well, maybe they should make a real effort to do without commercial
brand-names. It鈥檚 not that I object to the existence of these
companies鈥攖hough I have my reservations about Starbucks, McDonald鈥檚 and
Disney. It might be OK if there were just one of each. What worries me is their
contribution to making everywhere look like everywhere else, and everywhere like
a shopping mall.
Not long ago, I took the train from London to Poitiers in France, partly to
evade the responsibility for climate change that a plane trip involves but
mostly to avoid the aesthetic nightmare that is an airport鈥攁ny airport,
since they鈥檙e all part of the same distributed mall. Imagine my horror when the
Futuroscope science theme park I was visiting was at the end of a strip mall on
the city outskirts, with only the smallest clues that I wasn鈥檛 on the approaches
to an airport somewhere in America.
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快猫短视频s must, I say, take a stand against any notion of institutions like
the Science Museum going that way. So many young people develop an interest in
science within its walls that if it is transmuted into merely another flavour of
mall, our intellectual life must suffer. Either the young who want to carry
science forward will see it as just another branch of commerce, or those who
want to do something other with their lives will be put off altogether. Which
would serve the suits but not science. After all, good science is about pure
curiosity: applications are accidents, which may be accidentally profitable
(semiconductors), accidentally destructive and profitable at the same time
(plutonium), or deeply unsettling for the commercial order (climate change
forecasting).
I know of no research on what impels people into scientific careers, but I
suspect it鈥檚 a certain intellectual dissidence, an unwillingness or inability to
accept received wisdom. And there鈥檚 no dissident temperament so powerful as one
armed with scientific argument. Conspiracy theorists might suspect a plot to
redraw science as a McDayOut and marginalise those youthful dissidents by
driving them into the arts.
If we lose this argument, then I suggest founding a Museum Museum. This would
be a rather sad place, where redundant museum attendants play at being museum
attendants, and where the mahogany cases of utterly useless but interesting
objects are authentically dusty because there is, by definition, no money for
cleaning.
If we can鈥檛 maintain a proper museum, we must at least manage such a
meta-museum, a record of how museums were before the mall metastasised. To let
the institution pass unrecorded would be an act of cultural vandalism equal to
the burning of the Library of Alexandria.