Who should decide the stories museums tell?

Increasingly, museums are being challenged on how they select, display and interpret their collections. Six historians explain how these institutions can adapt to suit 21st-century audiences

- COMPILED BY MATT ELTON

"If museums truly want to be inclusive, they should tell the full life history of every object in their collection"

JUSTIN M JACOBS

It has become fashionable today for critics of major western museums to call for a 'reckoning' or 'coming to terms' with the imperialist and racist histories of some institutions.

This approach is rooted in the idea that, every time a museum chooses to tell a particular story, this story inevitably reflects the unconscious biases of the curators who tell it.

There's much to recommend this approach – but there's also a problem. Too often, institutions simply replace the bygone voices of long-dead white men with the present-day voices of people descended from the communities or nations that originally produced the artefact on display. But is this really a more inclusive approach?

Scholars who study the history of artefacts in museums are acutely aware that nearly every object on display has served different functions and had a different symbolic value down the years. In addition, many diverse peoples have owned or interacted with these objects. It follows that choosing to tell only a single story closely associated with present-day ideological agendas does a great disservice to the museum-going public.

Take the Parthenon (or Elgin) Marbles, for instance. Over the course of the past 2,000 years, they have played an integral role in embodying the political power and cultural beliefs of the ancient Athenians, Romans, Christians, Muslims, British and modern Greeks. Yet according to current intellectual fashions and political sympathies, only one of these stories is deemed legitimate: that promoted by the modern Greeks.