Ministry Decree: Celebrate Museums at Night

In case you haven’t noticed we can’t get enough of Museum’s here at The Ministry of Curiosity, so we’re pretty psyched about three day of festivities all in the name of after-hours museum loving. Run by Culture24 and with events across the country the annual celebration aims to encourage new visitors into museums, galleries and heritage sites - surely it should be made a national holiday? London’s museums expect to be thriving across the next few days and choosing events from the extensive list is sure to be a challenge. But not to worry, your Ministry is here to help and we have picked out a few of our fav events. See you there?

 Museum Mile Walk 15th and 16th May 

One Museum visit is never enough! Thanks to GoToMidtown you can spend a bright (not going to lie it’s probably going to rain) evening walking the Museum mile and visiting three of its iconic museums the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, the Courtauld Gallery and the Hunterian Museum. It’s a freebie and occurs on Thursday and Friday but places are limited and admission to the walk is ticket only. 

Find out more here… http://www.inmidtown.org/walks/join

Brunel Museum - Theatre of Blood, Dance of Death, Water of Life & Midnight Apothecary Special. 15th, 16th and 17th May

How exciting does this event sound? Alongside the Brunel’s Museums regularly Midnight Apothecary event The Pandemonium Theatre bring their acclaimed shows to the Underground Chamber of the Museum on Thursday and Friday. And on Saturday ‘Some Bodies Gonna Swing for this!’ perform a dance of death and you can dance the night away with the legendary Nikki Santilli. All of this excitement plus the Midnight Apothcary where you can sample cocktails based on ingredients from the museums gardens. Screw Shoreditch this is where you should be spending your weekend.

http://www.brunel-museum.org.uk/events/full-list-of-events/

UCL Museum Murder mystery Friday 16th May

UCL are known for their innovative and engaging museum events from pub quizzes and death drawing to last year’s Museum at Night treasure hunt the University collections rarely disappoint. For this year’s Museums at Night their celebrations centre around the discovery of a murder on campus. Teams of up to five are invited to dress up explore the extensive collections for clues and solve the mystery. We reckon it was the Moles in the Jar with the formaldehyde.

Guildhall big power nap Friday 16th May

Engaging the very tired city workers in their vicinity the Guildhall Gallery have turned their museum into a chillout zone for Museums at Night. The Big Power Nap is a chance to feel as comfortable in the galleries as your own front room and get that much needed party nap before your Friday night out on the tiles. Sounds like bliss!

For an extensive list check out our events calendar

And find out more about Culture 24 Museums at Night: http://www.culture24.org.uk/places-to-go/museums-at-night

God I love the Victorians: Object in focus at the Royal College ofSurgeons

Everyone knows that all museums have their star objects. The British Museum has the Rosetta Stone, the V&A has the Great Bed of Ware, the Natural History Museum has…dinosaurs. But what only insiders know are all their wacky and wonderful objects stories that don’t get featured in their institution’s displays. We think that’s the best part about museums, and I would say most people agree. They even made a show about it, it’s called Museum Secrets, and it’s awesome. In the past we’ve brought you John Dee’s angel and demon stones from the stores of the Science Museum, but today it’s all about those wacky death-obsessed Victorians at the Royal College of Surgeons.

As you may or may not know, the Royal College of Surgeons of England in Holborn houses the Hunterian Museum. If you do not know this, shame on you and get your ass over there ASAP to see it. Moving on. This is an object secret hiding in plain sight- it’s not kept in the museum but actually in the entrance hall of the building. As you enter into the grand foyer of the College, heading towards the sweeping staircase leading to Museum (because obviously that is why you are there) just take a quick look to your left and you will see…

Copyright the Royal College of Surgeons

THIS! Enormous bronze and green marble monstrosity. That’s not that weird, you might say. Everyone knows the Victorians loved funerary statuary, and this is obviously just some kind of memorial commissioned by someone close to the College. In green marble because you know, why not? You can clearly see a couple, lovingly leaning on each other in grief, looking at an urn containing the ashes of their child.

Well what if I were to tell you the ashes in that boxes aren’t their child, it’s those people themselves! Lovingly gazing at their…dead selves? What? This enormous piece of funerary statuary was commissioned by one Eliza Millard McLoghlin (1863-1928) in 1909 for her husband Dr Edward Percy Plantagenet Macloghlin (what a name). Edward was a GP and a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. After she died she requested that her ashes be moved in with his. The only slightly odd this was that Eliza had a love affair with the artist Alfred Gilbert while he was making the sculpture. Gilbert is probably best known as the sculptor of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. Poor Alfred, in the throws of the kind of dramatic love only a Victorian can experience, built in an a hinge on the top of Eliza’s head for his own ashes to be stored.

Yes, we are seeing a creepy Victorian love-triangle forever enshrined in statuary. As it turned out, the Alfred-Eliza affair turned sour towards the end and he was buried elsewhere (ie not in Eliza’s head for the rest of time).

But aside from the completely ridiculous back story, the sculpture titled Mors Janua Vitae (Death is the gate of life) is an actual work of art. The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool even has the model for making this monstrosity.

So over-the-top expensive decorations, a creepy love storyand a couple of deaths to boot, what’s more Victorian than that?

Sad dinosaurs and happy surgeons in The Time's 50 Best Museums

In case you missed it, last weekend The Times Magazine ran afeature on the world’s 50 best museums. The article begins, ‘Museums are notmusty repositories of outmoded relics. They are vivid compendiums of ourcultural life.’ We here at the Ministry couldn’t agree more. But how did theTimes rank a globe full of fabulous museums into only 50? And more importantly,how did London fare on this illustrious list? Don’t worry if you don’tsubscribe because we have it all right here for you. (Well thefirst 20 at least…)

First question is, of course, who ranked number one? Who claims the crown in total world museum domination? Drumroll please….

SMITHSONIAN INSTIUTION. Wait…what? As in all the Smithsonianstogether? Really? That seems hardly fair to somehow blend together the Sackler,the American History Museum and the National Air and Space Museum amongstothers into one behemoth competitor. Whatever, we guess the Smithsonians arealready. But just you watch out Washington DC coming up right behind you is ourfirst London museum!

It is….

The British Museum! And boring again. Just seems a bitobvious and derivative really. Of course the British Museum is wonderful, whywouldn’t they be? They have all the culture from the rest of the worldsquirreled away. Lets continue down the list and see if can get past CaptainObvious.

After a stop off in Greece the number four best museum inthe world is…

Sir John Soane’s Museum! Woooaaahhh out of no where! Way to get inthere small obscure London house museum of architectural history. This is oneof my favourite museums in London so I am glad but a bit shocked to see it sohigh up on the list! Really well done Soane’s Museum, now get back to openingup more of the house.

Number 5 is the American Natural History Museum in New York(fair enough, everyone loves a good diorama) and then on number 6, the ImperialWar Museum.

To be fair, they have ranked all of the Imperial War Museums acrossthe UK in one category. They even gave a shout out to IWM North in Manchester,in my opinion probably the best one. So hooray for military history getting inearly.

Number 7 is not a London based museum but the Topkapi Museumin Istanbul. Despite my undying love for this city, this has to deserve aspecial mention. The Topkapi museum is one of my favourites ever so really niceto see it going so well! At number 8 is Versailles…? Is Versailles a museum? Isuppose technically it is. Its gorgeous. We’ll accept it.

Our next London museum coming in at a very respectablenumber 9 is the V&A. I am really surprised the V&A is down at number 9,below the IWM. This museum is kicking some serious ass this year with two newpermanent galleries opening and a series of absolute smash hit exhibitions(Hollywood Costume, Bowie). Huh, well, everyone loves the V&A they don’tneed the publicity.

Number 10 is the National Museum of China and at number 11the Pitt Rivers Museum! Ooo interesting. This is a bit of a divisive one formuseum people. As a Victorianist I am completely obsessed with the Pitt Rivers.But as one London colleague recently pointed out to me spiritedly at anopening, what have they done in the last 150 years? To be fair they do a lot ofamazing research, but I can see his point.

At number 12 its… wait a minute, the Science Museum? A hush falls over the crowd. Are you meaningto tell me that the Science Museum has beaten in the ratings its SouthKensington neighbour and fiercest of rivals the Natural History Museum? Sorry,but NHM isn’t even here in the top 20, relegated to 21. Do you need some aloevera for that burn? Complete scandal in the museum world. Me, I really like theScience Museum. I think they have done a lot recently to make their offeringreally fun and dynamic, lates are brilliant, they finally have some kind of atemporary exhibition schedule going. They are also opening two new galleries inthe near future: Media Space and the unfortunately named ‘Information Age’. TheMinistry is not part of the London set which spurns the Science Museum at everyopportunity (cough Museums Showoff) but really, what a shocker!

Our next LondonMuseum comes at number 15 and it is the Hunterian Museum at the Royal Collegeof Surgeons. Damn, Lincoln’s Inn Fields’ small museums are getting some seriouslove in this article! The Hunterian is undeniably my favourite museum in Londonand it so wonderful to see a medical museum finally getting some seriousattention! They seem to know how to celebrate their 200^thanniversary right between this seriously high rating and a new exhibitionopening this week (we tweeted some sneak-peek images just a few days ago!) Withtheir star clearly on the rise, the Hunterian is one to watch.

And none for you Natural History Museum.

I said I wouldn’tbore you any longer than 20 into the list, and that’s it for London’s museumsI’m afraid! Sorry NHM, 21 doesn’t quite make the grade! Oh stop it now, thevisitor figures for Natural History are off the charts, I think they can getby. The rest of the list reads like a dream vacation for me. The Museo Nacionalde Antropologia in Mexico City is number 43, the Luxor Museum in Egypt is 38,the Museum of the Moving Image in New York at 22 and the Vasa Museum inStockholm at 32.

Field Report: ICON Positive Futures 2013

If you know or work with any British conservators, you may have noticed last week that they all disappeared to Glasgow and their twitter feeds exploded with the hashtag #Iconpf13. No we didn’t all go mad, or join in a giant conservator orgy. We were all participating in the triennial Institute of Conservation conference! 

ICON is the professional body of conservators in the UK. The main theme of this year's conference was 'Positive Futures' with professionals from across the country discussing the ups and downs of the conservation field. The bad news- all museum staff conservation costs are being cut to the bone. But the good news is ICON's host city Glasgow has re-opened the textile conservation centre! Hooray! 

The scope of conservation meant that there were loads of presentations to choose from: I saw how to repair a state bed, how to clean Yupik parkas, how to make the best use of volunteers and even learned more about adhesion theory [it was actually quite fun!]. My favourite talk was by Christina Rozeik about the public perception of conservators. Apparently if you do a Google image search, conservators are always women in lab coats sat alone at an easel or microscope. Which, if you have met any of us, you will know is not true! I often spend a lot of my time crawling around underneath shelves and getting covered in dust, not including the hours of paperwork, which is not fun enough to be photographed apparently! And the amount of gossiping that happens during tea breaks, I can safely say that we aren’t loners!

The best part of the talk was the description of some the literary versions of conservators. Get your conservators in fiction fix here. And from these we often see that we can clean paintings by day and solve crimes at night, think of us as Shirley Holmes, paintings conservator!

Porn for conservators: the latest humidity monitors

Now as a mass gathering of conservators, naturally tea and biscuit breaks were essential, but it also gave us time to get excited by things like buying cardboard boxes or perhaps a sexy new dehumidifier! And yes I got quite intrigued by gummed Tyvek strips!

Ooo check out those boxes, so acid free and so stackable!

I must say that the conference was excellent; it has given me many things to think about, mainly how long it will take me to write a sexy conservator Mills & Boon, but it was fascinating just learning about what other conservators are up to. And because the conference was hosted by Glasgow Uni, I got to trot around the Glasgow Hunterian Museum, which I recommend highly if you are up there anytime soon!  It even has William Hunter's death mask, which is the ultimate dedication to your own collection!

The author did not consider the fact that the Ministry's editors fall
sharply on the John side of the Hunter brothers divide.
John rules William drools! 

Check out the Institute of Conservation website for more information about conservation: www.icon.org.uk 

Emily (@emyyates) is an objects conservator extraordinaire, baking fiend and Olympic level museum-stores parkour athlete.