The Guardian view on a new era for museums: letting the public take control | Editorial

R.The Future Museum has arrived and appears to be a warehouse from Amazon. But art critics gave him unanimously Five -star. From Saturday, visitors to V & a East Storehouse In Queen Elizabeth Olympic Garden, you will be able to wander between 250,000 creatures in Victoria and Albert MuseumA group that is not displayed at her home in western London. Overcoming the address Arrange-objects The initiative means that you can book online to get your hands (gloves are provided) on an invaluable artifact on any day you want. And everything is free.

It is a victory for a son who was motivated. After evacuating the V & A from the Kensington Storage house a decade ago, they decided that instead of hiding one of the world’s largest design collections in an expensive warehouse, they turn it into an attractiveness in itself. Storage is a big problem for institutions: only 1 % Among the artifacts that exceed 8 meters with a general view. Show that your excessive attic benefit more than you already got, and reuse a wardrobe, for V & A, A, A Palinosa dress (The most requested element so far) and PJ Harvey’s HotPants.

Open access store is not a new idea. In 2021, and Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam It has become the first destination for the only public arts to be built (and is supposed to be the only inspired by Ikea-SALAD BowN). V & A Storehouse takes a leap further. You are called behind the scenes from the museum, where everything is confused together and the maintenance of the work – a giant version of the BBC The repair store. Like children who flee to the Metropolitan Museum in New York for a week in the 1967 classic El Konigsburg novel From the mixed files of Mrs. Basil E FranculerVisitors are able to explore freely. “We wanted people to feel that they are transgressing,” He said Tim Reef, Deputy Director V & A. “This feeling of joy, and a vision behind the curtain.”

Part of the V & A mission was to inspire innovation, to be a little radical. The request of an object is an easy -to -use way to involve the new arrivals, not just clicking and collecting art lovers. Like Sader Wales, which also launched a Stripford place Earlier this year, V & A consider withdrawing a younger audience who may have felt excluded from his home in the luxurious southern Kinsington. sister East V & A Museum It will open near the store next year.

Putting everything in the show cannot overcome uncomfortable questions about the source of the museum’s acquisitions. But it gives transparency how the museum works and what – to every other pin – it happened.

this week, Manchester Museum beat European Museum Award for the year For its own approach to open the excavation process. As part of renewal In 2023, the museum handed its exhibition in New South Asia to a group of 30 people from Manchester Diaspora Communities to design and fill as they chose. The upper floor was given to a College for nervous studentsWith the opening of the campus in London in Design Museum In September.

The epidemic, in addition to financing crises, care and anxiety on a legacy, placed institutions under pressure. B & A East Storehouse and Manchester The museum shows new bold ways forward. It indicates a shift in how museums perceive their role. They remind us that these groups are our groups. Fill in your basket.

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you want to provide a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered to be published in our Messages Please section Click here.