This blog posting and its associated article seeks to explore the nature and purpose of academic writing. It does so by setting out the background to a peer reviewed paper that I wrote and which appeared fleetingly in the online journal Museum and Society. Shortly after publication the chair of the journal's editorial board, Professor Richard Sandell, agreed to remove it following complaints from other members of the board. The reasons for this unusual action are outlined. So too are the wider implications that this might have for the field of Museum Studies. These thoughts prompt additional reflection on some of the issues tackled in my initial paper which sought to scrutinise Sweden's national museum of modern and contemporary art, Moderna Museet. It achieved this through the prism of the artists Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska. Their collaborative practice was critiqued in connection with one of their patrons, the former director of Moderna Museet, Lars Nittve.

My abortive Museum and Society article is reproduced here in full and in its original form. This action mimics Cummings and Lewandowska's artwork, Errata (1996). Meaning "an error in writing or printing", the term "erratum" encapsulates my earlier paper. Richard Sandell quickly rectified this "error" by expunging it from the journal over which he currently presides. Its reappearance here constitutes an unofficial and undoubtedly unwelcome erratum to Museum and Society. Its presence is also intended as an erratum both to the practice of Cummings and Lewandowska and to the career of Lars Nittve. As with the original paper, my actions lack any endorsement from the named individuals or institutions. It is an act of parasitism that apes the so-called institutional critique of artists such as Cummings and Lewandowska: one that seeks to expose the positions of certain actors in the museum field – be they museum directors, artists or academics.

Burch, Stuart (2011) "A Museum Director and His Go-Betweens: Lars Nittve's Patronage of Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska", Museum and Society, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 34-48, accessed 17 May 2011 at, http://www.le.ac.uk/ms/m&s/Issue%2025/burch.pdf.

Burch, Stuart (2011) "A Journal Editor and His Go-Betweens: Richard Sandell and the University of Leicester’s Museum and Society", uploaded 05/08 at http://www.stuartburch.com

Think back to the last time you travelled to some place new. What was going through your head? Excitement? Expectation? Nervousness at the prospect of venturing into the unknown? I experienced all of these emotions in the run up to my first trip to Narva in eastern Estonia - as I set out in the article Narva: past, present and future soon to be published in the magazine Lennuk.

Have you ever stopped to read a label in a museum and, instead of finding the object to which it refers, come across yet another label? An example of this can be seen by clicking the image to the left. It refers to a portrait of "Mrs Carré, dancer" by the Swedish artist, Lorentz Sparrgren (1763-1828). At the time the photograph was taken the object had been removed from its usual place amongst the miniatures of Sweden's Nationalmuseum. It could instead be found in another room of same museum, this time as part of a temporary exhibition entitled "Lust and Vice". The little portrait of the rather scantily clad Mrs Carré might not have moved very far, but its relocation meant that it had been reframed to tell a very different story.

This is a reminder that the meaning of things is neither fixed nor inherent. Instead, it is the physical and temporal context of an object that determines its significance. That's what makes museums such interesting places: their collections can be reformulated in all sorts of minor and major ways. Each change inside (and outside) the museum will alter the nature of the collection. So, even if Mrs Carré is destined to return to the comparative obscurity of the miniatures collection of Sweden's Nationalmuseum, she will have gained new-found exposure. Perhaps her fame might spread? The next time you look for her another label might have taken her place informing you that Mrs Carré is currently touring the great museums of the world in a glare of publicity. Like everyone, of course, she will at some point have to come back home. But what memories she'll have! Her exploits will be charted in lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogues, books and postcards. Who knows, she might one day become a saucy fridge magnet...

Traumatic events often lead to the creation of spontaneous memorials prompted by outpourings of collective grief. The spot where Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, for example, became a shrine. The demise of Princess Diana led to something similar in the UK. However, the fact that her death occurred abroad meant that proxy spaces had to be found for the laying of flowers and leaving of messages. These sites tended to be situated outside civic or religious buildings as well as adjacent to existing monuments, including war memorials. However, unlike obelisks in stone or statues in bronze, these spontaneous acts of commemoration were temporary. The flowers for Diana are no longer there. Yet the memory of them remains.

A further such memorial is being carefully dismantled in central Oslo. The area outside the cathedral has become a makeshift shrine to those killed in the terrorist attacks of 22nd July. The flowers and other organic material will be composted and the wax from the candles recycled. But the messages and mementos are to be preserved in the national archive.

A similar process of preservation and documentation has taken place at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. Artefacts left there continue to be gathered up and safeguarded to become part of a living and very public collection.

This will also be the case in Norway. Those traces of collective grief left on a street in central Oslo are destined to become sources of collective memory.

Further reading
Curtis, Paulette G. (2010) "Stewarding a living collection: the national park service and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection", Museum Anthropology, Vol. 33, Iss. 1, pp. 49-61
Phelps, Angela (1998) "Memorials without location: creating heritage places", Area, Vol. 30 (2), pp. 166-8

"It is in times of danger… that we become deeply conscious of our heritage." So said Roy Strong in his foreword to Heritage in Danger by Patrick Cormack (1978). A notorious example of this is the Firestone Tyre Factory in Brentford, England. This Art Deco building was designed by Wallis, Gilbert & Partners in 1928-9. Its subsequent owners decided to demolish it in the summer of 1980, just as moves were being made to safeguard the structure by listing it as a protected monument. This controversial action prompted the creation of the Thirties Society, an organisation that campaigned for the protection of interwar architecture. It still exists and is today known as the Twentieth Century Society.

It appears that the Firestone fight has now shifted to Glenelg, just outside the Australian city of Adelaide. Its Art Deco cinema on Jetty Road dating from 1937 is being torn down as I type. Now local residents are urging the 35,000-strong community to protect the town's remaining Art Deco buildings - pointing to the former fire station as an example to be followed: it still stands and has been adapted for use, first as a museum and now as an art gallery.

See: Altschwager, Emma (2011) "Save our history", Guardian Messenger (Australia), 03/08, p. 5, accessed 03/08/2011 at, http://guardian-messenger.whereilive.com.au/news/story/save-our-history/

                                   "It is not the role of the Bytown Museum to
                make claims related to the personal lives of historical figures"

So said Mike Steinhauer, director of Bytown Museum in Ottawa in a press release reported in:

Seto, Chris (2011) "Sexual preference of John McCrae questioned by museum", Guelph Mercury, 27/07, accessed 02/08/2011 at, http://www.guelphmercury.com/news/local/article/569563--sexual-preference-of-john-mccrae-questioned-by-museum

Steinhauer's statement will no doubt send shockwaves among the curatorial community: what else are we supposed to do, then?

The director's stern directive was in response to a controversy involving the Canadian soldier-poet, Lt.-Col. John McCrae (1872-1918). Steinhauer's colleague, Francesco Corsaro (the museum's "director of development") suggested to Pink Triangle Press that McCrae was a homosexual and that his most famous poem In Flanders Fields (1915) was written in memory of his "lover", Lt. Alexis Helmer.

The poet and his poem are mentioned in Bytown Museum's exhibition, "Hidden Treasures", although it would appear that the question of McCrae's sexuality is not actually discussed in the museum. And its director was quick to point out that Francesco Corsaro "neither planned nor conducted research for the exhibition". Steinhauer and others further undermined Corsaro by saying that his claims lacked any supporting historical evidence.

This raises many questions. Can (or should) museums speculate? Is Mike Steinhauer correct to say that museums shouldn't "make claims related to the personal lives of historical figures"? How much control should museum management exert over what their colleagues say to the media? And, thinking a trifle more cynically: is a little scandal like this such a bad thing? Isn't it an excellent way for a museum to promote itself? (Would I have even heard of Bytown Museum if it wasn't for Francesco Corsaro?) Or does it undermine public confidence in the museum as a bastion of impartial knowledge where personal claims and speculation are rejected in favour of cool, hard facts expressed by impartial "experts"?

Whatever one's point of view, perhaps the most significant consequence of this story is that it prompts us to revisit McCrae's sublime poem:

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Professor Arvid Gunnarsson from the city of Lund in the kingdom of Sweden on the planet Earth would make for an interesting artefact in the galaxy's most distinguished museums... [The] last human being of the original type.

                                                           Dénis Lindbohm, The Judgement's Stars
                                                                                      Delta, 1978, pp.110-111

At the start of my article "Sweden's Memory: Museums, Monuments and Memorials" I refer to the classic novel, The Time-Machine (1895). H.G. Wells' gloomy prediction for the human race is symbolised by the ruined vestiges of London's Natural History Museum. Hundreds of thousands of years in the future it has become nothing more than an "ancient monument of an intellectual age‟. Inside the wrecked and neglected building the narrator comes across:

"brown and charred rags that... I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified."

The time-traveller discovers that our future selves have evolved into two separate species: infantile, dim-witted Eloi and blood-thirsty Morlocks. Despite their extreme differences they share at least one significant characteristic: they are both illiterate.

This doesn't bode at all well for Brewster Kahle's attempt to warehouse every book he can get his hands on - a fact reported in Anon (2011) "Internet Archive founder turns to new information storage device – the book", The Guardian, 01/08, accessed 01/08/2011 at, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/01/internet-archive-books-brewster-kahle

PS
For a non-paper copy of The Time-Machine click the image of the book above.

The Western Mail reports that a painting owned by the National Museum of Wales previously thought to be "a fake" is, in fact, "almost certainly genuine".

See: Evans, Gareth (2011) "Doubts held over Turner painting vanish in the mist; after 50 years art work at museum is declared genuine", The Western Mail, 01/08, p.15, accessed 01/08/2011 at, http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2011/08/01/doubts-held-over-turner-painting-vanish-in-the-mist-91466-29154179/  (text available here)

The reporting of this story is worth considering in detail.

We are told at the outset that the painting entitled Off Margate was purchased by the museum in 1908. However, later on, Beth McIntyre (a curator at the museum) is cited as saying that the "painting was part of a large bequest to the museum in 1951 and shortly after it arrived, an expert questioned its authenticity. In those days, working out authorship wasn't a question of science as it can be today, it was a question of 'this doesn't quite feel right'."

However, unnamed "experts" working at Tate in London have now declared that Off Margate is "entirely characteristic" of the work of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851). Yet we are not told how they reached this decision: was it "a question of science" or just their "expert" eyes that determined if it was authentic or not? It seems that artistic style played a key role in questioning the painting's authenticity in the first place. McIntyre remarks that, "while it was identified as a Turner, the 'late' style was questioned at the time.” This was despite the fact that the "painting had good historic provenance" meaning that McIntyre and her colleagues "could trace its ownership back a long way". To what extent did this supporting evidence influence those unnamed "experts" at Tate?

Interestingly, the Western Mail journalist who wrote this newspaper article chose to add the following statement:

    "Turner remains one of Britain’s most celebrated artists. His work is instantly recognisable
    and remains, some 160 years after his death, among the most sought-after in the world."

If his work is "instantly recognisable", why was it so difficult to decide if Turner painted Off Margate?

We are told that it was McIntyre who thought of asking "Tate experts" to examine the work. This, adds the journalist, was a "decision [that] paid off." But in the article this "payment" is expressed solely in terms of financial rather than artistic value:

    "The precise value of Off Margate is unclear, but a painting by Turner depicting a
    Welsh castle drenched in the orange glow of a sunrise last year fetched more
    than £500,000 at auction. The watercolour sketch over pencil of Flint Castle,
    which dates from the early 1830s, sold to a private collector at Sotheby's for £541,250.
    A piece by another English artist depicting what some regard as a quintessentially
    English view of Wales – William Dyce's Welsh Landscape with Two
    Women Knitting  – sold for more than £500,000 in 2009."

Whilst we are informed about the potential auction price for Off Margate, we are not told how much the museum paid for it (assuming that it did indeed purchase the painting in 1908).

The Western Mail's framing of the story, with its inclusions, exclusions and points of emphasis really matters given that recent changes to the UK's Code of Ethics "now allows financially motivated disposal... in exceptional circumstances" (section 6.14).

The story of Off Margate touches on important museological issues regarding the use and interpretation of objects; the role of "experts" and of how decisions are reached when it comes to authenticity. This leads to additional questions: Were doubts about the painting conveyed to the public from the 1950s until today or did it hang in the gallery without comment? Or was it locked away in the museum store? What additional "fakes" might be similarly forgotten about in the "worthless" reserve collection? Does the museum own other artworks of debatable authenticity? Are there examples of works that the museum considered to be genuine but have later been labelled "fake"? Do experts always agree and, if not, how do we decide who to believe? What impact do technological developments have on opinion-making? And what role do personal contacts play in getting the support of "experts"?

Instead, by focusing just on money, the Western Mail newspaper encourages this sort of comment:

    Who cares: it's either art or not.
    Oh! sorry it's either money or not.
        siarad 9:27 AM on August 1, 2011

This was the only reader's comment that followed the article at the time I accessed it. But "siarad" shouldn't be blamed for reducing the Museum of Wales's art to a question of money. The fault lies with the way the Western Mail newspaper has framed the story. It encourages its readers to look upon the National Museum of Wales as primarily a place of financial rather than cultural capital.