As a sign of the times, museums around the world spent a few months this year being temporarily converted into Covid-19 vaccination centers. Castello di Rivoli and Capodimonte in Italy, the United Kingdom Thackray Museum of Medicine and Science Museum and the American Museum of Natural History in New York all handed over their seats to health professionals who administered jab.
As winter closures dragged on, frustrated museum directors in Switzerland and France called on governments to reopen museums – recognizing their “essential” roles in educating and boosting mental well-being and their ability to implement social distancing measures safely. Swiss institutions emerged early from the second wave of European closures on March 1, but their French counterparts had to wait until May 19, two days after museums in England. These were classified along with saunas in “step three” of the UK Government’s reopening strategy – and five weeks later “non-essential retail”, including commercial galleries – to the dismay of cultural leaders.
An outlier in the US, California, only gave museums in Los Angeles County the green light to reopen at 25% capacity in March – after a full year of closure. The California Association of Museums estimated that the closures had cost the county’s museums, zoos and aquariums $ 5 billion. USD in revenue. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art freed up funds by scrapping a home fringe property for its director Michael Govan, and put his $ 2.4 million home on the market just months after he reduced his previously rent-free property of $ 6.6 million, which was sold last year.
British Museums Hokusai NFT Store © The Trustees of the British Museum
Meanwhile, the Louvre launched a smart e-store that took advantage of its growing brand partnerships with people like the Japanese fast-fashion giant Uniqlo. And faced with a “dramatic” deficit after being closed without cash revenue for six months, Amsterdam’s independent branch of Russia’s State Hermitage Museum kept afloat thanks to a € 1m crowdfunding appeal that received more than 10,000 donations. The original Hermitage, Uffizi, and British Museum even ventured into the obscure market for NFTs to raise much-needed money, respectively, tokenizing digital editions of masterpieces by Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Hokusai.
Despite concerns that mandatory Covid-19 health passes could lead to discrimination, several countries introduced schemes regulating access to public events and venues, including museums. Denmark led the way, and France and Italy followed suit this summer, with Israel also extending its “green passport” to museums that had originally been exempted. Amid public protests against the passport, an Italian museum director, Fabrizio Masucci from the Museo Cappella Sansevero in Naples, pulled up his position with an open letter stating that “museums are by call inclusion places”.
The relaxation meant that the mega-museum’s openings were finally back on the agenda. After a crash in 2020, came the delayed launches of François Pinault’s Bourse de Commerce in Paris’ circular former grain exchange; the winding steel-clad tower designed by Frank Gehry for the Luma Arles campus; Oslo’s new waterfront home for the Munch Museum; and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which opened with an appropriately star-studded Hollywood gala. Not to mention the newly opened M + in Hong Kong and GES-2 in Moscow.
The Berlin Humboldt Forum, which was inaugurated practically at the end of 2020, but only open since July, is among Europe’s most expensive cultural developments with a final price of over 680 million. EUR. It is perhaps also the most controversial museum project in the area – a revival of the German Imperial Palace, which has been unreasonably built to house the city’s non-Western art collections. In March, its director, Hartmut Dorgerloh, let out to German media that he expected that Berlin’s Benin bronzer – most of which can be traced to an attack by British troops in 1897 on the West African empire – would be permanently returned to Nigeria. “The Benin bronzes were largely acquired illegally,” he said. “I share the belief that there must and will be refunds.”
The University of Aberdeen returned its Benin bronze to Nigeria this year Lent by University of Aberdeen
The German government and directors of the major ethnological museums will soon announce a national plan to return hundreds of artifacts to Nigeria by 2022 as part of a broader bilateral agreement that will also see Germany contribute to the construction of the new Edo Museum of West African Art in Benin City. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas called it “a turning point in our approach to colonial history”.
The question is whether Germany’s proactive policy will prove to be a turning point for other Western museums in possession of plundered Benin bronzes? Momentum certainly looks to build. In November, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York repatriated two brass plates donated in the 1990s (the Met holds a total of about 160 Benin objects). The University of Aberdeen and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge each handed over their sculpture to Nigerian dignitaries. The Fowler Museum at UCLA (with 18 objects), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art (with 16 out of 42 objects traced to the British raid in 1897) and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC have expressed repatriation commitments.
All eyes are on the British Museum with 900 Benin treasures in London, which recently received a request for repatriation from Nigeria, but which remains excluded by law from disposing of objects. (It has promised to lend to the future Edo Museum.) Nor is it likely that Britain’s culture war war conservative government will adopt Germany’s line of “moral responsibility”. In one of his last statements as secretary of culture before a cabinet reshuffle, Oliver Dowden said the Benin bronzes “duly reside” in the British Museum.
Another movement that is gaining momentum is the American trade union effort. Many U.S. museums made extensive layoffs to balance budgets during the pandemic, and exhausted workforces are fighting back against insecurity, stagnant wages, and poor health and safety conditions. In 2021 alone, staff at Mass MoCA, the Hispanic Society of America, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum have voted to join forces. They join the unions formed last year at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where staff went on a one-day strike in November over “painfully slow” negotiations with top management. The rise looks set to continue, with staff at the Art Institute of Chicago and its school set to vote this month on a union election with the National Labor Relations Board.
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