Museums should stay shut

It’s been a promising week for museums. In Denmark, Germany and Australia some of their most famous galleries – Potsdam’s Museum Barberini, Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum – will all be open within a week. In the UK, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport established a taskforce ‘paving the way for reopening’ and Arts Council England have declared that ‘helping the sector to reopen is a priority’. The Museums Association issued a statement: ‘We believe that it is possible for many museums to reopen to the public in the first phases of lifting the current lockdown. Many museums are well-placed to introduce social distancing measures similar to those currently used in supermarkets.’ Museums in England will be encouraged to unbolt their heavy doors next month.

These early visits won’t look like any of those made before Covid-19 closed down our cultural institutions, almost overnight. Visitors will wait patiently in taped boxes marked out on the marbled floors until the adult in front of them moves on from admiring the cut-out Matisse.