It's been a fantastic decade for the UK's museums and galleries. There's been lots of new money - from the lottery, from increased self-generated income and from central government. Hundreds of museums have been redisplayed and in spite of an aversion to creating new ones, the last decade has brought us plenty.
The money has helped a lot, but the profession has plenty to be proud of, too. Nick Dodd, the chief executive of the Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust, says: "A lot of the sector's current thinking can be traced back to ideas developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by members of the Social History Curators Group, the Museum Professionals Group and the Association of Independent Museums."
At that time, there was an essentially left-wing community-focused agenda, based on cultural rights, as well as a market-driven desire to regard visitors as customers who had paid for a decent product.
In the early 1990s these two tendencies were often in conflict, but they have now largely come together. The policies of the new Labour government in 1997 chimed well with the sector's new thinking: incoming culture secretary Chris Smith insisted that the aim was quality and access.
The Museums Association (MA) definition of a museum was revised in 1998. The crucial first sentence says: "Museums enable people to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment." Learning is certainly now part of the core purpose.
Displays and exhibitions skilfully communicate information and ideas to a wide audience; formal and informal learning programmes are booming. More than anything museums have opened themselves up.
As Veronika Harris, the head of training and development at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) puts it: "Museums have made subjects mean something to the public."
Museums and galleries are far more enjoyable, too. Displays are interesting and engaging, front-of-house staff are generally pleasant and helpful, catering has improved beyond all recognition (two of the 10 winners in Time Out London's 2007 eating and drinking awards are restaurants in museums - the National Gallery and Tate Modern). Maria Balshaw, the director of the Whitworth Art Gallery, says: "Museums are spruced up and welcoming."
The sector has largely moved on from the tiresome old tensions between conservation and communication, between academia and access. One reason is that the bright young things of the 1980s are now running many museums.
Mark O'Neill, Glasgow's head of arts and museums, says there is less ideological sniping now. "There's a broad consensus about best practice in accessibility; a core standard that everyone expects to reach."
21st-century needs
UK museum staff have become so good at using collections to educate and entertain, at broadening audiences while still serving traditional users, at improving interpretation and collections care - and at balancing the interests of the past, present and future - that it's hard to believe how contested and difficult everything seemed just ten years ago.
So, what's left to do? Learning and access certainly need sustaining. John Roles, the head of museums in Leeds, says: "Learning is seen as significant by museums, although I'm not sure we've won the battle."
It's still unusual for the head of learning to be on a museum's senior management team; O'Neill calls the current consensus around access "conservative" and worries that it might be only skin deep. Inward-looking curation is still a powerful force in some large museums.
There's a long list of things still to do, of course, from addressing diversity and making proper use of stored collections to improving staff recruitment and development. The current agenda, set by the generation that came into the sector in the 1970s and 1980s and reinforced by New Labour, is being achieved.
But now it is time to step off the treadmill of increasing audiences and capital developments to take stock and think more about what museums society wants and needs for the early 21st century.
Imagination and ambition
If museums are society's new churches and temples, then they have a responsibility to do more than merely help people encounter and celebrate the material evidence of the world.
Museums need the ambition to address the first element of the definition: to use their collections to inspire people. Museums could aspire to challenge visitors so that they leave inspired to do something: to change themselves or to change the world - or at least to think more carefully about things.
They could aim to have the same impact on audiences as other great art: to offer an intense, lasting experience. Some community inclusion work achieves this, but only a few museums really manage to inspire their visitors. The Imperial War Museum North is powerful and deeply affects its visitors, as do museums that deal with the Holocaust, such as the one in Washington, DC, and the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
But it's rare for museums to truly engage with contemporary concerns. Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum uses its collections of history, art and nature to engage with some of the messiness of modern life. Its displays include domestic violence and the impact of modernisation on traditional cultures.
The Science Museum's Dana Centre leads discussions about contemporary science policy and ethics. These examples show that museums can be places for significant debate.
Not all museums want to deal in conflict and controversy. But even in easier subject areas museums tend to give a far tamer, more downbeat experience than the rest of the cultural sector. Really imaginative, spectacular exhibitions are rare. Two have stuck in my memory.
Some Organising Principles, at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea in 1993, allowed film director Peter Greenaway to fill the entire building with objects, light and sound to reveal the way in which devices for counting and measurement are used to control people and order nature.
At the V&A in 1992, Visions of Japan was a memorable exhibition that interpreted the past, present and future of Japan in three separate installations that included objects but went far beyond them to evoke an entire way of life. But these are isolated examples.
The museums of 2007 are performing well, albeit within the narrow parameters that they have set themselves. But is it enough? If television set itself similar limits, the schedules would contain little but pleasant apolitical documentaries about art, history, science and nature. Politicians, critics, writers and academics would ignore it, pretty much as they tend to ignore museums today.
Museums need to start using their long view of life to contribute more to contemporary culture and debate. They need the creativity of great artists, the radicalism and drive of environmental campaigners, the insight of contemporary novelists.
If museums engage with life's difficult issues as bravely as the best journalism, appeal to the emotions as boldly as the most moving films, or become as imaginative and spectacular as the most daring theatre, then they will earn a place at the heart of national and local life.
Maurice Davies is the deputy director of the Museums Association
This is an extract from Don't Look Back in Anger, a keynote address at last month's Museums Association's annual conference
Riches galore
Government funding streams
Money is quite tight now, with uncertainty over university museum funding and the cost of the Olympics, but the past 10 years have seen several new streams of government funding. Here is a selection:
England
Designation, Renaissance in the Regions, Strategic Commissioning
Scotland
Regional Development Fund, Strategic Change Fund, Recognition Scheme
Wales
Sharing Treasures
UK
free admission for nationals
New museums and galleries
Prominent among the past decade's new museums and galleries are:
The Collection, Lincoln
The Darwin Centre, London
Imperial War Museum North, Manchester
The Lightbox, Woking
Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh;
National Maritime Museum, Cornwall
National Waterfront Museum, Swansea
New Art Gallery, Walsall
Tate Modern, London
Wellcome Collection, London
The money has helped a lot, but the profession has plenty to be proud of, too. Nick Dodd, the chief executive of the Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust, says: "A lot of the sector's current thinking can be traced back to ideas developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by members of the Social History Curators Group, the Museum Professionals Group and the Association of Independent Museums."
At that time, there was an essentially left-wing community-focused agenda, based on cultural rights, as well as a market-driven desire to regard visitors as customers who had paid for a decent product.
In the early 1990s these two tendencies were often in conflict, but they have now largely come together. The policies of the new Labour government in 1997 chimed well with the sector's new thinking: incoming culture secretary Chris Smith insisted that the aim was quality and access.
The Museums Association (MA) definition of a museum was revised in 1998. The crucial first sentence says: "Museums enable people to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment." Learning is certainly now part of the core purpose.
Displays and exhibitions skilfully communicate information and ideas to a wide audience; formal and informal learning programmes are booming. More than anything museums have opened themselves up.
As Veronika Harris, the head of training and development at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) puts it: "Museums have made subjects mean something to the public."
Museums and galleries are far more enjoyable, too. Displays are interesting and engaging, front-of-house staff are generally pleasant and helpful, catering has improved beyond all recognition (two of the 10 winners in Time Out London's 2007 eating and drinking awards are restaurants in museums - the National Gallery and Tate Modern). Maria Balshaw, the director of the Whitworth Art Gallery, says: "Museums are spruced up and welcoming."
The sector has largely moved on from the tiresome old tensions between conservation and communication, between academia and access. One reason is that the bright young things of the 1980s are now running many museums.
Mark O'Neill, Glasgow's head of arts and museums, says there is less ideological sniping now. "There's a broad consensus about best practice in accessibility; a core standard that everyone expects to reach."
21st-century needs
UK museum staff have become so good at using collections to educate and entertain, at broadening audiences while still serving traditional users, at improving interpretation and collections care - and at balancing the interests of the past, present and future - that it's hard to believe how contested and difficult everything seemed just ten years ago.
So, what's left to do? Learning and access certainly need sustaining. John Roles, the head of museums in Leeds, says: "Learning is seen as significant by museums, although I'm not sure we've won the battle."
It's still unusual for the head of learning to be on a museum's senior management team; O'Neill calls the current consensus around access "conservative" and worries that it might be only skin deep. Inward-looking curation is still a powerful force in some large museums.
There's a long list of things still to do, of course, from addressing diversity and making proper use of stored collections to improving staff recruitment and development. The current agenda, set by the generation that came into the sector in the 1970s and 1980s and reinforced by New Labour, is being achieved.
But now it is time to step off the treadmill of increasing audiences and capital developments to take stock and think more about what museums society wants and needs for the early 21st century.
Imagination and ambition
If museums are society's new churches and temples, then they have a responsibility to do more than merely help people encounter and celebrate the material evidence of the world.
Museums need the ambition to address the first element of the definition: to use their collections to inspire people. Museums could aspire to challenge visitors so that they leave inspired to do something: to change themselves or to change the world - or at least to think more carefully about things.
They could aim to have the same impact on audiences as other great art: to offer an intense, lasting experience. Some community inclusion work achieves this, but only a few museums really manage to inspire their visitors. The Imperial War Museum North is powerful and deeply affects its visitors, as do museums that deal with the Holocaust, such as the one in Washington, DC, and the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
But it's rare for museums to truly engage with contemporary concerns. Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum uses its collections of history, art and nature to engage with some of the messiness of modern life. Its displays include domestic violence and the impact of modernisation on traditional cultures.
The Science Museum's Dana Centre leads discussions about contemporary science policy and ethics. These examples show that museums can be places for significant debate.
Not all museums want to deal in conflict and controversy. But even in easier subject areas museums tend to give a far tamer, more downbeat experience than the rest of the cultural sector. Really imaginative, spectacular exhibitions are rare. Two have stuck in my memory.
Some Organising Principles, at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea in 1993, allowed film director Peter Greenaway to fill the entire building with objects, light and sound to reveal the way in which devices for counting and measurement are used to control people and order nature.
At the V&A in 1992, Visions of Japan was a memorable exhibition that interpreted the past, present and future of Japan in three separate installations that included objects but went far beyond them to evoke an entire way of life. But these are isolated examples.
The museums of 2007 are performing well, albeit within the narrow parameters that they have set themselves. But is it enough? If television set itself similar limits, the schedules would contain little but pleasant apolitical documentaries about art, history, science and nature. Politicians, critics, writers and academics would ignore it, pretty much as they tend to ignore museums today.
Museums need to start using their long view of life to contribute more to contemporary culture and debate. They need the creativity of great artists, the radicalism and drive of environmental campaigners, the insight of contemporary novelists.
If museums engage with life's difficult issues as bravely as the best journalism, appeal to the emotions as boldly as the most moving films, or become as imaginative and spectacular as the most daring theatre, then they will earn a place at the heart of national and local life.
Maurice Davies is the deputy director of the Museums Association
This is an extract from Don't Look Back in Anger, a keynote address at last month's Museums Association's annual conference
Riches galore
Government funding streams
Money is quite tight now, with uncertainty over university museum funding and the cost of the Olympics, but the past 10 years have seen several new streams of government funding. Here is a selection:
England
Designation, Renaissance in the Regions, Strategic Commissioning
Scotland
Regional Development Fund, Strategic Change Fund, Recognition Scheme
Wales
Sharing Treasures
UK
free admission for nationals
New museums and galleries
Prominent among the past decade's new museums and galleries are:
The Collection, Lincoln
The Darwin Centre, London
Imperial War Museum North, Manchester
The Lightbox, Woking
Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh;
National Maritime Museum, Cornwall
National Waterfront Museum, Swansea
New Art Gallery, Walsall
Tate Modern, London
Wellcome Collection, London
