If you think I’ve been quiet on my blog, you’re right. My intellectual energies are going into my museums book – writing talks, thinking about how to promote it, waiting anxiously for reviews. It appears today in Art Newspaper’s March book bag. I wrote the Conclusion nearly a year ago, but one did not have to be clairvoyant to see the inevitability of a necessarily harsh retrenchment (witness what is happening at the V&A), a search for new sources of income, and the likelihood of fewer big building projects. What I perhaps did not fully anticipate was the ferocity of the critique of their colonial inheritance, which I maybe made a mistake in thinking was more an issue for the so-called Universal Museums than art museums. The book has been described as a love letter to museums and I’m quite happy to be excoriated as a true believer.
