MAURICE DAVIES: The purpose of museums is simple: to go to see things of human and natural achievement, past and present, and to enjoy that and to have a kind of light educational-cum-learning experience. All that stuff about research, reserve collections, all of that's nonsense compared to the displays and the temporary exhibitions people see.
The government and funders put all the stuff around it, about economic impact, creativity, general contribution to education, rather than leisure learning. That's all noise. I think the function of museums is very simply to show things to people.
SHARON AMENT: We hold our collections not simply to show them, we hold them to undertake research, to answer some of the big questions about society. We are about the future as much as the past and I am very wary about the ossified view of collections. They're dynamic, they're growing - or diminishing in some respects - ours get cut up by scientists all round the world. We've got 200,000 specimens on loan at any one time to 500 institutions. Without the scientists and researchers it is meaningless.
JAMES DELINGPOLE: A few years ago and I was shown the extraordinary plant collection at the Natural History Museum and it made me realise the amount of scholarship that goes on in museums. As an ordinary punter I do use museums for that kind of education-light element and I take my kids but actually I think that a museum's primary function is to collect objects, to study objects and to grow those collections constantly - otherwise they die.
SANDY NAIRNE: I would pick up on a concept that might emerge of 'learning light', because I'd say museums and galleries are about learning deep. We cannot possibly chart the range of interactive experiences, learning experiences, and we know that some of it is emotional. Some of it is to do with people's family, some of it is to do with people's connections, some of it is cultural. I think the purpose for me is the interaction around knowledge. I'd be very keen to say that this is learning that is pretty deep.
DAVID BARRIE: I remember coming to the Natural History Museum when I was about seven, when I was mad about moths, and a curator took me behind the scenes into this vast space with huge cabinets with hundreds of drawers. There was one little cabinet in the corner and he said: 'All the British moths are in this cabinet,' and there was 2,000-odd different species. It was a moment of wonder, and it was quite transformational.
The Art Fund believes that contact with works of art can actually change people's lives. We believe that museum collections have the capacity to touch people's lives in very profound ways.
NICHOLA JOHNSON: I was thinking about what the purpose of museums was. It broke down into two sections that are not mutually exclusive. One was the practical instrumental reasons for there being museums which are the ones that we tend to get trotted out. And the others were, to quote Julian Spalding's phrase, but not necessarily his philosophy, 'We're about poetics'.
The museum that can provide space for contemplation and space for imagination. They're not separate things, but government policy, and the way we tend to value museums has gone very much on to the practical and instrumental and has moved away from the whole question of the inspirational.
DB: I don't think that we have been good at offering alternative measures, and one of the reasons is that we don't really know very much about these deeper transactions that are taking place. I'm keen that we should find a way of doing some proper scientific research into exactly what goes on when people encounter works of art.
SA: But I think we could end up disappearing somewhere dark if we do that because we've just got to have confidence in what we do day in and day out - hearing the wow that happens when somebody engages with a painting or sees an animatronic is valuable. We would spend tonnes of resources trying to measure it - to what end?
MARK O'NEILL: It's just seeing, it's just collecting and preserving, and we all know they are laden with politics, with power, with social structures, with symbolic meanings. You can say what museums do: they collect, they do access, they display.
MD: Something that fascinates me is that ten or 15 years ago the dominant analysis of museums was as a bourgeois product of history being written by the winners. They were about exclusion. They were about certain kinds of art. And what is interesting is that now the entire framing of museums is as tools of inclusion, as tools of community cohesion.
MO'N: Most of our museums and galleries depend in one way or another on state funding. At the moment, the decisions that are taken about how that money is going to be distributed are made on the basis of very crude parameters.
We need to find a way of enriching the understanding of how museums work on the part of our political decision-makers so that they can see that there are reasons for investing in museums and galleries that go beyond social inclusion and education. Some of those rather intangible things that have to do with wonder actually do need to be in there, because if you don't include them then it's a very impoverished account of museums and galleries.
JD: I think access is one of the worst things that's happened to museums because numbers through the door does not mean anything. I would argue that 100 people through the door and not really looking at the exhibits is not worth as much as one person through the door really getting a great benefit out of it and looking at things carefully.
SN: I can vividly remember a former director of a university museum railing against children. It was an appalling thing to hear and it was not that uncommon. Fifty years ago it was a terrible era of assumptions, presumptions and ignorances about what museums and galleries could do.
What we have seen over the last 30 years is a set of transformations which are really intriguing between different bits of the museum sector, and between other areas of learning and education outside museums and galleries. For many years the most exciting things were happening in science museums and for us in art museums we were way behind thinking about interpretation, we weren't really engaging with the questions of audience and understanding.
DIANE LEES: What you had in the 1970s as well was the emergence of the independent museums that weren't run by local government. They were charities which were trading in terms of paid admission and they were incredibly user-focused. That shift to providing galleries and experiences, some collections-based, some not collections-based, focusing on getting people to come, getting them to come back, getting them to pay for the experience, left behind a whole series of local authority museums that, at that point, just opened their doors.
SA: This next phase which we're entering into is having dialogues with the visitors through mechanisms like our nature vibe in the Darwin Centre. Some of our scientists have been in the museum 40 years studying the sexual parts of greenfly - this exposure to the public is changing their research, changing them, and changing us as an organisation. I think that's absolutely healthy.
NJ: We're hearing different versions of what access means. There are quite a lot of ways in which access has been applied that are deeply patronising. People are not stupid, they are incredibly sophisticated in the way that they look at things. What you're saying, James, or what you are implying is that access is a very simple thing - it's about making the place available. And that's how a lot of people have interpreted it. It's about opening the doors and letting people get at it.
JD: I go very often to the Imperial War Museum and the brilliant thing about it is you can take a six-year-old child there; you can take a 14-year-old child there or you can be my age and a complete war obsessive and on every level you can enjoy that museum. And in no way is the museum's integrity as a source of higher learning compromised by the stuff that is child-friendly.
The Tate has a brilliant Art Trolley and there are various projects that your kids can do. This doesn't involve moving the paintings lower down so the children can see them, it doesn't involve dumbing down the descriptions of the paintings. It just means that the children can have their parallel experience to the grown-up one. There's good access and there's bad access.
MO'N: But that's a completely different discussion. Take the stuff about lowering paintings, which we've done. We tested it, we did an experiment to see if it did make a difference for children and people in wheelchairs, and then we discovered through testing that the majority of people spent longer looking at paintings if they are hung low.
The eyeline is a Victorian tradition. Most Renaissance paintings would have been hung much higher than the traditional eyeline, and we decided we would hang it at the height that works physiologically, ergonomically for people. It's less strain on your neck to be able to look slightly down.
A lot of the anti-access stuff is just a lack of generosity of spirit. If we're employed to do this by the public purse then I think you really need to share it systematically, not just with people who happen to click already.
NJ: What we've begun to think about is what is the legacy? What's different about university museums? For many children, contact with a university museum is where they first begin to think it's possible to go to university, and that interesting things do go on there that you can take part in. But I don't think that's exclusive to university museums.
MD: I think there have been enormous changes in museums that were very specialist that now aren't. I recently went to the Royal Naval Museum. I have no interest in naval history but I enjoyed it. They had redone the museum so it wasn't just for people who'd been in the Royal Navy or who were interested in Nelson. And I think that that's fantastic.
DL: I want to take issue with the idea of universality in the sense of audience because if you look at something like the fishing museum in True's Yard, they have a fantastic higher education programme, and they are a tiny museum with restricted resources. They could have decided to do everything and spread that budget so thinly that they would have been an expert in nothing.
What they've done is found the right niche for them from a subject point of view and from an operating point of view, and they concentrate their resources on developing their higher education role. What is wrong with that? Why is there a sudden need that they must tick the box on interactives for kids?
I'm not saying that they should be allowed to not do anything. What I am saying is there are paths that museums and governing bodies have to choose that are right for the survival of those institutions.
DB: There are big issues around the funding of collecting. It's getting quite difficult for museums and galleries to develop the collections. There are things that ought to be being acquired that aren't being acquired. The Art Fund is to announce this month an initiative to promote the collection of non-British contemporary art in regional museums and galleries.
One of the things that troubles me is that collecting has become more and more conservative. You've got limited resources and you have a choice of going for the thing that everybody thinks you ought to have and the thing that would actually take you into a rather exciting area, and the daring and imaginative acquisitions are becoming fewer and farther between: it's a tragic consequence of the paucity of money for building collections.
SA: With natural history collecting, there are new programmes. It's about capacity building in the country of origin: 'Collect three specimens: one for us, one for another institution and one for the country of origin' and build capacity and knowledge and skills in that country. We are on another mission to collect as much as we can.
MD: I think the sector hasn't properly articulated why collecting might be valuable. It's easy to assume that collecting is a good thing, because that's what museums do. But on the resources issue, there are real questions about whether museums do actually need to purchase and own things, because the potential for loan between institutions and between institutions and private owners is massively under-explored.
And there's the real question of exactly why something is being acquired. For me, the single most compelling reason is because our collections don't really represent the diversity of modern Britain.
DB: I think that one of the things we have to do is to encourage the public to become involved in this discussion much more actively than they are at the moment. We still do tend to make these decisions amongst very, very small groups of people who class themselves as great experts - and maybe sometimes they are - but the public are ultimately the end users, and I think we owe it to them to take them a bit more seriously.
JD: Speaking as a member of the public, I think the last thing you should do is waste time consulting us - you should have the confidence of your convictions.
DB: Over the last 20 or 25 years the tentacles of central government have been reaching out further and further and further, and in fact, they've reached museums and galleries almost last. There's a big responsibility on people working in museums and galleries and the rest of us to try and help ministers and policy makers understand better what it is that museums and galleries are for, what they can do and what they can't do.
MO'N: I agree we have to be accountable. It's our responsibility to come up with those intelligent measures. Museums are complicated institutions: you need to do the research, you need to preserve the collection, you need to do the education and you need to think your way through the national, local, international connections. You may shift priorities for some short periods of time to keep it all going, but the challenge is to keep it all going.
SN: We will need to be part of the debate for any government in the next ten years, which include debates around sustainability, ethical debates about the use of resources. I'm encouraged to think that we can get a more intelligent engagement now from politicians who feel more comfortable to be in a discussion than we've had in the past.
NJ: We have done incredibly well over the last ten years. It's become a cliche to say that, but we have done really well, and why have we done well? One of the reasons is because we have been forced to be accountable.
Sharon Ament, director of public engagement, Natural History Museum
David Barrie, director, Art Fund
Maurice Davies, deputy director, Museums Association
James Delingpole, journalist and author
Nichola Johnson, director, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
Diane Lees, director, V&A Museum of Childhood
Sandy Nairne, director, National Portrait Gallery
Mark O'Neill, head of Museums and Galleries, Glasgow
The government and funders put all the stuff around it, about economic impact, creativity, general contribution to education, rather than leisure learning. That's all noise. I think the function of museums is very simply to show things to people.
SHARON AMENT: We hold our collections not simply to show them, we hold them to undertake research, to answer some of the big questions about society. We are about the future as much as the past and I am very wary about the ossified view of collections. They're dynamic, they're growing - or diminishing in some respects - ours get cut up by scientists all round the world. We've got 200,000 specimens on loan at any one time to 500 institutions. Without the scientists and researchers it is meaningless.
JAMES DELINGPOLE: A few years ago and I was shown the extraordinary plant collection at the Natural History Museum and it made me realise the amount of scholarship that goes on in museums. As an ordinary punter I do use museums for that kind of education-light element and I take my kids but actually I think that a museum's primary function is to collect objects, to study objects and to grow those collections constantly - otherwise they die.
SANDY NAIRNE: I would pick up on a concept that might emerge of 'learning light', because I'd say museums and galleries are about learning deep. We cannot possibly chart the range of interactive experiences, learning experiences, and we know that some of it is emotional. Some of it is to do with people's family, some of it is to do with people's connections, some of it is cultural. I think the purpose for me is the interaction around knowledge. I'd be very keen to say that this is learning that is pretty deep.
DAVID BARRIE: I remember coming to the Natural History Museum when I was about seven, when I was mad about moths, and a curator took me behind the scenes into this vast space with huge cabinets with hundreds of drawers. There was one little cabinet in the corner and he said: 'All the British moths are in this cabinet,' and there was 2,000-odd different species. It was a moment of wonder, and it was quite transformational.
The Art Fund believes that contact with works of art can actually change people's lives. We believe that museum collections have the capacity to touch people's lives in very profound ways.
NICHOLA JOHNSON: I was thinking about what the purpose of museums was. It broke down into two sections that are not mutually exclusive. One was the practical instrumental reasons for there being museums which are the ones that we tend to get trotted out. And the others were, to quote Julian Spalding's phrase, but not necessarily his philosophy, 'We're about poetics'.
The museum that can provide space for contemplation and space for imagination. They're not separate things, but government policy, and the way we tend to value museums has gone very much on to the practical and instrumental and has moved away from the whole question of the inspirational.
DB: I don't think that we have been good at offering alternative measures, and one of the reasons is that we don't really know very much about these deeper transactions that are taking place. I'm keen that we should find a way of doing some proper scientific research into exactly what goes on when people encounter works of art.
SA: But I think we could end up disappearing somewhere dark if we do that because we've just got to have confidence in what we do day in and day out - hearing the wow that happens when somebody engages with a painting or sees an animatronic is valuable. We would spend tonnes of resources trying to measure it - to what end?
MARK O'NEILL: It's just seeing, it's just collecting and preserving, and we all know they are laden with politics, with power, with social structures, with symbolic meanings. You can say what museums do: they collect, they do access, they display.
MD: Something that fascinates me is that ten or 15 years ago the dominant analysis of museums was as a bourgeois product of history being written by the winners. They were about exclusion. They were about certain kinds of art. And what is interesting is that now the entire framing of museums is as tools of inclusion, as tools of community cohesion.
MO'N: Most of our museums and galleries depend in one way or another on state funding. At the moment, the decisions that are taken about how that money is going to be distributed are made on the basis of very crude parameters.
We need to find a way of enriching the understanding of how museums work on the part of our political decision-makers so that they can see that there are reasons for investing in museums and galleries that go beyond social inclusion and education. Some of those rather intangible things that have to do with wonder actually do need to be in there, because if you don't include them then it's a very impoverished account of museums and galleries.
JD: I think access is one of the worst things that's happened to museums because numbers through the door does not mean anything. I would argue that 100 people through the door and not really looking at the exhibits is not worth as much as one person through the door really getting a great benefit out of it and looking at things carefully.
SN: I can vividly remember a former director of a university museum railing against children. It was an appalling thing to hear and it was not that uncommon. Fifty years ago it was a terrible era of assumptions, presumptions and ignorances about what museums and galleries could do.
What we have seen over the last 30 years is a set of transformations which are really intriguing between different bits of the museum sector, and between other areas of learning and education outside museums and galleries. For many years the most exciting things were happening in science museums and for us in art museums we were way behind thinking about interpretation, we weren't really engaging with the questions of audience and understanding.
DIANE LEES: What you had in the 1970s as well was the emergence of the independent museums that weren't run by local government. They were charities which were trading in terms of paid admission and they were incredibly user-focused. That shift to providing galleries and experiences, some collections-based, some not collections-based, focusing on getting people to come, getting them to come back, getting them to pay for the experience, left behind a whole series of local authority museums that, at that point, just opened their doors.
SA: This next phase which we're entering into is having dialogues with the visitors through mechanisms like our nature vibe in the Darwin Centre. Some of our scientists have been in the museum 40 years studying the sexual parts of greenfly - this exposure to the public is changing their research, changing them, and changing us as an organisation. I think that's absolutely healthy.
NJ: We're hearing different versions of what access means. There are quite a lot of ways in which access has been applied that are deeply patronising. People are not stupid, they are incredibly sophisticated in the way that they look at things. What you're saying, James, or what you are implying is that access is a very simple thing - it's about making the place available. And that's how a lot of people have interpreted it. It's about opening the doors and letting people get at it.
JD: I go very often to the Imperial War Museum and the brilliant thing about it is you can take a six-year-old child there; you can take a 14-year-old child there or you can be my age and a complete war obsessive and on every level you can enjoy that museum. And in no way is the museum's integrity as a source of higher learning compromised by the stuff that is child-friendly.
The Tate has a brilliant Art Trolley and there are various projects that your kids can do. This doesn't involve moving the paintings lower down so the children can see them, it doesn't involve dumbing down the descriptions of the paintings. It just means that the children can have their parallel experience to the grown-up one. There's good access and there's bad access.
MO'N: But that's a completely different discussion. Take the stuff about lowering paintings, which we've done. We tested it, we did an experiment to see if it did make a difference for children and people in wheelchairs, and then we discovered through testing that the majority of people spent longer looking at paintings if they are hung low.
The eyeline is a Victorian tradition. Most Renaissance paintings would have been hung much higher than the traditional eyeline, and we decided we would hang it at the height that works physiologically, ergonomically for people. It's less strain on your neck to be able to look slightly down.
A lot of the anti-access stuff is just a lack of generosity of spirit. If we're employed to do this by the public purse then I think you really need to share it systematically, not just with people who happen to click already.
NJ: What we've begun to think about is what is the legacy? What's different about university museums? For many children, contact with a university museum is where they first begin to think it's possible to go to university, and that interesting things do go on there that you can take part in. But I don't think that's exclusive to university museums.
MD: I think there have been enormous changes in museums that were very specialist that now aren't. I recently went to the Royal Naval Museum. I have no interest in naval history but I enjoyed it. They had redone the museum so it wasn't just for people who'd been in the Royal Navy or who were interested in Nelson. And I think that that's fantastic.
DL: I want to take issue with the idea of universality in the sense of audience because if you look at something like the fishing museum in True's Yard, they have a fantastic higher education programme, and they are a tiny museum with restricted resources. They could have decided to do everything and spread that budget so thinly that they would have been an expert in nothing.
What they've done is found the right niche for them from a subject point of view and from an operating point of view, and they concentrate their resources on developing their higher education role. What is wrong with that? Why is there a sudden need that they must tick the box on interactives for kids?
I'm not saying that they should be allowed to not do anything. What I am saying is there are paths that museums and governing bodies have to choose that are right for the survival of those institutions.
DB: There are big issues around the funding of collecting. It's getting quite difficult for museums and galleries to develop the collections. There are things that ought to be being acquired that aren't being acquired. The Art Fund is to announce this month an initiative to promote the collection of non-British contemporary art in regional museums and galleries.
One of the things that troubles me is that collecting has become more and more conservative. You've got limited resources and you have a choice of going for the thing that everybody thinks you ought to have and the thing that would actually take you into a rather exciting area, and the daring and imaginative acquisitions are becoming fewer and farther between: it's a tragic consequence of the paucity of money for building collections.
SA: With natural history collecting, there are new programmes. It's about capacity building in the country of origin: 'Collect three specimens: one for us, one for another institution and one for the country of origin' and build capacity and knowledge and skills in that country. We are on another mission to collect as much as we can.
MD: I think the sector hasn't properly articulated why collecting might be valuable. It's easy to assume that collecting is a good thing, because that's what museums do. But on the resources issue, there are real questions about whether museums do actually need to purchase and own things, because the potential for loan between institutions and between institutions and private owners is massively under-explored.
And there's the real question of exactly why something is being acquired. For me, the single most compelling reason is because our collections don't really represent the diversity of modern Britain.
DB: I think that one of the things we have to do is to encourage the public to become involved in this discussion much more actively than they are at the moment. We still do tend to make these decisions amongst very, very small groups of people who class themselves as great experts - and maybe sometimes they are - but the public are ultimately the end users, and I think we owe it to them to take them a bit more seriously.
JD: Speaking as a member of the public, I think the last thing you should do is waste time consulting us - you should have the confidence of your convictions.
DB: Over the last 20 or 25 years the tentacles of central government have been reaching out further and further and further, and in fact, they've reached museums and galleries almost last. There's a big responsibility on people working in museums and galleries and the rest of us to try and help ministers and policy makers understand better what it is that museums and galleries are for, what they can do and what they can't do.
MO'N: I agree we have to be accountable. It's our responsibility to come up with those intelligent measures. Museums are complicated institutions: you need to do the research, you need to preserve the collection, you need to do the education and you need to think your way through the national, local, international connections. You may shift priorities for some short periods of time to keep it all going, but the challenge is to keep it all going.
SN: We will need to be part of the debate for any government in the next ten years, which include debates around sustainability, ethical debates about the use of resources. I'm encouraged to think that we can get a more intelligent engagement now from politicians who feel more comfortable to be in a discussion than we've had in the past.
NJ: We have done incredibly well over the last ten years. It's become a cliche to say that, but we have done really well, and why have we done well? One of the reasons is because we have been forced to be accountable.
Sharon Ament, director of public engagement, Natural History Museum
David Barrie, director, Art Fund
Maurice Davies, deputy director, Museums Association
James Delingpole, journalist and author
Nichola Johnson, director, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
Diane Lees, director, V&A Museum of Childhood
Sandy Nairne, director, National Portrait Gallery
Mark O'Neill, head of Museums and Galleries, Glasgow