Feat of clay

The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army, British Museum, Sponsored by Morgan Stanley

Here’s a show to pull in the public. More than 100,000 advance tickets already sold (Michelangelo’s drawings, though popular, sold only a fifth of that before it opened), and so much media coverage you scarcely need my review. Except, of course, that most of what passes for reporting is ill-informed and simply parrots the party line of press release and salesmanship. In other words, it’s just another form of advertising, which is why the art institutions of our country are desperate to get it — the life-support system of free publicity apparently necessary to the economic survival of museums. So often exhibitions are invented around an idea which someone (or a committee) hopes will be popular, because they need the turnstile revenue and the visitor numbers. Even great institutions are guilty of this, and sometimes scholarship is put on the back-burner in favour of sensation or popularism.