Museums should stay shut

It’s been a promising week for museums. In Denmark, Germany and Australia some of their most famous galleries – Potsdam’s Museum Barberini, Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum – will all be open within a week. In the UK, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport established a taskforce ‘paving the way for reopening’ and Arts Council England have declared that ‘helping the sector to reopen is a priority’. The Museums Association issued a statement: ‘We believe that it is possible for many museums to reopen to the public in the first phases of lifting the current lockdown. Many museums are well-placed to introduce social distancing measures similar to those currently used in supermarkets.’ Museums in England will be encouraged to unbolt their heavy doors next month. […]

First published in The Spectator on 23 May, 2020. Read online here.

Image by Hulki Okan Tabak from Pixabay