Museum relic

On 1 July, at a swanky party at Tate Modern, one of Britain’s museums will bank a cheque for £100,000, as the Art Fund announces this year’s Museum of the Year. Sure, the money will come in handy. Sure, the publicity will be useful. But this posh bunfight can’t disguise a growing sense that museums face an existential crisis. Cuts are one problem — some say the present round will take museums ‘back to the 1960s’. But they also face a more profound dilemma. In the age of Wikipedia and Google Images, what are modern museums actually for?

When I was a child museums were my adventure playgrounds, but was my enthusiasm merely relative? After all, in the 1970s there really was very little else to do. Shops were shut on Sundays. Television was awfully finite. Never mind the internet — even home video was science fiction. If you wanted to mug up on anything, there were two options: get a book out of the library or go to a museum.