The great David Ekserdjian deserves a museum of his own

Ever since Mr Blair’s New Dawn of 1997, the dominant idea in public policy towards public collections has been ‘access’. The doctrine is more than half-right: art, antiquities etc paid for by the public are not doing their work unless we can see them. But it has promoted the heresy that the person chosen to run every museum must be a communicator rather than a scholar. Actually, both is best. True, some learned persons are interested only in objects and cannot communicate with the human race, but the best evangelisers for a museum or gallery are the people who really know its contents. The best-known current example is Neil Macgregor, at the British Museum. So it has been a great frustration that the most knowledgeable and eloquent art historian of my generation, David Ekserdjian, has not — so far — been made head of any great collection. When he has got close, as at the Ashmolean, it has been held against him that he has not run a museum already (his career has been mainly academic), trapping him in a vicious circle.