The Quai Branly cost £160m, and consists of an iconic new building in the heart of Paris and a fabulous collection of art from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Kelvingrove's redevelopment cost £28m and includes an interior scrub-up that reveals the building's true colours and sheds more light on what is probably the best civic museum collection in the UK.
The two could not be more different and provide a manifest lesson in how to - and how not to - put a 21st-century museum together.
At Kelvingrove, the traditional classifications such as ethnography and natural history have been discarded and instead the focus is on thematic displays and allowing the objects to tell the stories.
Curatorial and academic research is constantly unveiling new stories about objects and the story-telling approach will allow Glasgow to be more flexible and change up to half a dozen stories each year to reveal what's important about the objects now.
The awkward bits of history that museums sometimes don't like to talk about are not avoided either - there are several sections that include details of how objects came to be in the collection and, importantly, what source communities think of them now.
And in the Cultural Survival gallery, Mark O'Neill, the head of arts and museums in Glasgow, was determined that it wasn't going to be based on a western idea of 'looking at funny foreigners'.
So alongside the Benin Bronzes (their contested provenance is pointed out) is the story of the remote Scottish island community of St Kilda - a juxtaposition that emphasises a commonality of experience rather than a gawping at the 'exotic'.
The approach at the Quai Branly is rather different. Aside from the fact that the dim interiors and poorly designed gallery spaces make it hard to read what little interpretation there is, the prevailing concept seems to be a Zidane-esque 'no regrets' view of French colonial history.
The objects and works of art are spectacular, but they lack context. Chirac said he wanted the museum to: 'Put an end to the disregard of civilisations too long ignored and misunderstood.' But despite these good intentions, the museum is a mishmash of items that have nothing in common apart from that they are not western European.
Crassly grouping the collections from four diverse continents together in this way reinforces a sense of 'otherness' and divorces them from the stories they could tell.
Scotland may not have made it to the World Cup this year, but the final score on museums is very definitely Scotland 1 France 0.
Sharon Heal, editor
sharon@museumsassociation.org
The two could not be more different and provide a manifest lesson in how to - and how not to - put a 21st-century museum together.
At Kelvingrove, the traditional classifications such as ethnography and natural history have been discarded and instead the focus is on thematic displays and allowing the objects to tell the stories.
Curatorial and academic research is constantly unveiling new stories about objects and the story-telling approach will allow Glasgow to be more flexible and change up to half a dozen stories each year to reveal what's important about the objects now.
The awkward bits of history that museums sometimes don't like to talk about are not avoided either - there are several sections that include details of how objects came to be in the collection and, importantly, what source communities think of them now.
And in the Cultural Survival gallery, Mark O'Neill, the head of arts and museums in Glasgow, was determined that it wasn't going to be based on a western idea of 'looking at funny foreigners'.
So alongside the Benin Bronzes (their contested provenance is pointed out) is the story of the remote Scottish island community of St Kilda - a juxtaposition that emphasises a commonality of experience rather than a gawping at the 'exotic'.
The approach at the Quai Branly is rather different. Aside from the fact that the dim interiors and poorly designed gallery spaces make it hard to read what little interpretation there is, the prevailing concept seems to be a Zidane-esque 'no regrets' view of French colonial history.
The objects and works of art are spectacular, but they lack context. Chirac said he wanted the museum to: 'Put an end to the disregard of civilisations too long ignored and misunderstood.' But despite these good intentions, the museum is a mishmash of items that have nothing in common apart from that they are not western European.
Crassly grouping the collections from four diverse continents together in this way reinforces a sense of 'otherness' and divorces them from the stories they could tell.
Scotland may not have made it to the World Cup this year, but the final score on museums is very definitely Scotland 1 France 0.
Sharon Heal, editor
sharon@museumsassociation.org
