There’s nothing very entertaining or clever about the cuts.
Some of my museum leader friends have tried to put on a brave face. One even quipped: “I say, I say, I say! Did you know that a big society version of Cluedo has just come out? It doesn’t have a library!”
Another, having lost 30% of his staff over the past two years, responded: “Ho, ho, bloody ho! What really annoys me is the way it’s all spun. Some museums are facing 40% cuts to their budgets and this is met with: ‘This is a new opportunity to think again about how we deliver our services.’ If the minister offers that once more, I’ll tip off the Beeb that he was Jimmy Savile’s chauffeur.”
More enterprisingly, one of our number at a recent arts council bash offered the hypothesis that: “There are desperate bands of resource-rich businessmen out there just waiting for us cultural bounty-hunters to pick them off.
"What makes them vulnerable is their incessant need to recover their ethics, their self-respect and their tainted reputations. No, they are not child molesters, al Qaida or the Catholic Brotherhood.
"They are another whole scale of depravity below those… they are bankers. Let’s round up a media posse and go a-lynching, with individual reprieves offered for every 10 museums they save from bankruptcy. That would be the big society in action.”
Of course Cameron applauded, he would, wouldn’t he?
Another dived in. “Wouldn’t work, too canny by half, that lot. Drop us all in it and run for cover.”
Mind you, last week I had a retired exec from a “listening bank” who’d read of our distress and was offering me a six-figure sum for an expressionist painting in our collection.
Very generous, we all thought.
Some of my museum leader friends have tried to put on a brave face. One even quipped: “I say, I say, I say! Did you know that a big society version of Cluedo has just come out? It doesn’t have a library!”
Another, having lost 30% of his staff over the past two years, responded: “Ho, ho, bloody ho! What really annoys me is the way it’s all spun. Some museums are facing 40% cuts to their budgets and this is met with: ‘This is a new opportunity to think again about how we deliver our services.’ If the minister offers that once more, I’ll tip off the Beeb that he was Jimmy Savile’s chauffeur.”
More enterprisingly, one of our number at a recent arts council bash offered the hypothesis that: “There are desperate bands of resource-rich businessmen out there just waiting for us cultural bounty-hunters to pick them off.
"What makes them vulnerable is their incessant need to recover their ethics, their self-respect and their tainted reputations. No, they are not child molesters, al Qaida or the Catholic Brotherhood.
"They are another whole scale of depravity below those… they are bankers. Let’s round up a media posse and go a-lynching, with individual reprieves offered for every 10 museums they save from bankruptcy. That would be the big society in action.”
Of course Cameron applauded, he would, wouldn’t he?
Another dived in. “Wouldn’t work, too canny by half, that lot. Drop us all in it and run for cover.”
Mind you, last week I had a retired exec from a “listening bank” who’d read of our distress and was offering me a six-figure sum for an expressionist painting in our collection.
Very generous, we all thought.
