The Ashmolean Museum Reopens

Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum, the world's oldest public collection of art and archaeology, will reopen on Saturday 7th November after a closure of 10 months. In the course of the £61m redevelopment the chaotic collection of sheds and lean-tos which had accreted on the back of Cockerell's handsome 1845 building have been demolished to make way for a huge new extension by Rick Mather. The new galleries do not, the Prince of Wales will doubtless be saddened to hear, imitate the fine Greek revival style of Cockerell's building, but instead aim for that blameless Constructivist pastiche so beloved of contemporary architects, with just a hint of hi-tech. There are asymmetrical windows and jutting edifices of Portland stone - the staircase in the atrium (above) would be quite good, if it wasn't for the plate glass (there is an awful lot of glass), which allows the handrails to intrude fussily. In any case none of this is visible from the street, being neatly tucked away behind the old facade.



But the real achievement of the new building is that it has allowed the curators to display the archaeological collection both more comprehensively and more comprehensibly - this is a museum after museum studies, a museum for a post-colonial, ever more closely entwined, world. The official theme is Crossing Cultures, Crossing Times, and while it may feel didactic at times to shoe-horn artifacts from all periods and all locations into one all-encompassing theme, it is surely a vast improvement on the 19th century style of curation that came before, when each period and culture was allotted its own distinct and hermetically sealed pigeon-hole. In contrast, the Ashmolean is planned to give the visitor a sense of the connections between different cultures, established by trade, religions, and tourism, that have shaped the world for millennia.

Critics have already complained that this development represents a 'dumbing down' of the old Ashmolean. The Times's Kathy Brewis was particularly cutting. She insists that the new themed galleries are simply a 'gimmick', and complains:

I don’t want to “discover how civilisations developed as part of an interrelated world culture”. I want to look at something really peculiar with a sense of awe and wonder at its otherness. A trip to a museum should be like a walk in the country — a respite from daily working life, a chance for a different perspective, an opportunity to reflect and ponder. I stare at a screen all day. I move from desktop computer to BlackBerry to laptop, with a bit of television thrown in for extra eye strain. By the weekend I’ve had enough of interacting. I go to a museum for something different.

There are so many things wrong with this kind of griping. A person who doesn't want to discover how cultures interact is a dull dog indeed. Brewis says she wants to wonder at something's 'otherness' instead, but wonder is such a content-less experience. This supplication before the aura of the artwork and the authority of the past is so suspiciously sheeplike, and has been criticized as such for so long, that only the feeble-minded could want to engage with archaeology and art on such a banal level. Finally, she reveals her true awfulness by claiming that her life of staring at screens is such an overwhelmingly 'interactive' experience, that she requires a trip to a museum like a neurotic needs a trip to a sanatorium. If art should be simply a 'respite from daily working life', then Ms Brewis should, I suggest, take a trip to the local branch of Hallmark instead and admire the lovely cards.

People like Ms Brewis want to forget that this is a world in which what we do has an impact, and often a painful one, on the lives of others, whether they are in the next street or the next continent. The attempt to exhibit artifacts in a way that encourages the consciousness of this fact may have occasionally clumsy results, but it is not to be scorned simply because it challenges the cosy assumptions and leisure pursuits of the traditional museum going elite. This is not a 'dumbed-down' but a 'smartened-up' museum: one that, thanks to its association with the University of Oxford, exhibits a critical understanding of the world and the place of the museum within it.