Object of DESIRE

The Victoria & Albert's Storehouse Order an Object project is blowing open the doors — literally — and letting the public in to see hundreds of thousands of items that rarely, if ever, get seen, let alone touched. Is this new democratic approach the future of all museums?

- SAM COLEMAN

The idea of the museum — a collection of artefacts put into some kind of order for the public to engage with and learn from—is an ancient one, derived from the Greek “mouseion,” meaning “place of the muses.” From the third-century Museum of Alexandria through to the renaissance, the cabinet of curiosities times and up to the grand public museum era of the modern day (the likes of The Louvre, The British Museum, The Met etc.), museums have followed a steady evolution of both showing the public exhibitions and — at the same time — cataloguing and storing works for researchers and prosperity.

But here’s the hidden secret of museums. Though what we see on display is impressive, on average, it’s less than 6% of the total collection that the museums hold. In other words, 93-97% of a museum’s incredible artefacts are stored in warehouses, in offsite storage, often never seen by anybody, sometimes never touched since they were collected. The Louvre has 620,000 works but displays only around 35,000 (5.6%); The British Museum has around 8 million objects; less than 1% is on view at any given time. The Metropolitan Museum of Art displays about 5% of its 2 million-piece collection. This dual role of museums is by design, and though many have wondered if there was a better way to allow access to the bigger collection, the logistics and reasonable level of responsibility and security seemed lacking.