The British Museum, like a lot of less prestigious museums, went woke with all the attendant pageantry and consequences.
At the British Museum, a recent exhibition on Stonehenge claimed that the presence of both a dagger and a necklace in a single ancient burial plot suggests that “gender rules were being transformed”.
Current collections include Black British History, Desire, love and identity of the LGBTQ kind and a modern art piece commemorating the mass Muslim migration during the Syrian Civil War.
While all of this goes on, the British Museum is falling apart. Literally.
The antiquated infrastructure in these rooms, which include the gallery displaying the Parthenon Marbles, is crumbling. Roofs leak, the climate control is failing, paint is peeling, and floor tiles are cracked.
Two adjoining galleries, one displaying Greek and Roman sculptures (Gallery 23) and the other masterpieces of Assyrian art (Gallery 8), are now exposed to the elements but for a thin sheet of material stretched over large skylights in the ceiling to cover the opening where reinforced glass panels should be.
These rooms are all in the Western block of the museum, the oldest part of the building, mainly dating to the 19th century.
Of course, they are, but that’s not the real priority anymore. What used to be the bread and butter of museums is now a series of unwanted controversies about provenance, imperialism, colonialism and whiteness.
Better to let the rain have it all, some might be thinking.
Woke goes broke. Sometimes on purpose.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/while-the-british-museum-focused-on-diversity-its-roof-was-crumbling/