Neil MacGregor: She's History

Neil MacGregor retired as director of the British Museum yesterday.

One of his last two acquisitions to be unveiled was this photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans (it's a tradition for the museum to collect portraits of retiring directors).

PS Fagburn will be posting less frequently over the festive season, mainly because most proper journalists appear to have metaphorically pissed off early and gone down the pub. x

Neil MacGregor: Night At The Museum

The art historian behind the landmark radio series A History Of The World In 100 Objects has announced he is to step down as director of the British Museum.

Neil MacGregor, whose role in the 2010 BBC radio series made him a household name, will leave on 15 December to take on new projects.

In his 13 years at the helm of the British Museum he has overseen a near 50% increase in visitor numbers, making it the second-most visited museum in the world after the Louvre in Paris.

MacGregor, 68, said on Wednesday that his decision to leave the museum had been a difficult one. He said: “Working with this collection and above all with the colleagues here has been the greatest privilege of my professional life. But I’ve decided that now is the time to retire from full-time employment and the end of this year seems a good time to go.” ...

The Guardian.

And so soon after Nicholas Hytner left the National!

The British cultural Homintern is losing its grip.

PS How Neil MacGregor reinvented and revived the world's greatest museum, a fittingly glowing tribute in The Times. Edit: And in this Independent editorial, Neil MacGregor's exemplary tenure at the British Museum is an object lesson in curatorship. A giant of Britain's cultural life, The Guardian. Neil MacGregor made running the British Museum look easy, Telegraph.

Hopefully Katie Hopkins will pop up soon and say he was a disgusting old perv - for balance, like.

Update: My Hero: Neil MacGregor by Grayson Perry, Guardian.

British Museum: The Virtuous Bottom

Socrates would have seen the same bottom. If you go to the new exhibition at the British Museum you will find yourself looking at a section of the Parthenon frieze. A beautiful young man is seen side-on; pertness in profile. While Socrates may have looked at the same thing, however, he would have understood something subtly different by it. He would, to be sure, have seen a good bottom. But he would also have seen a good bottom.

A beautiful bottom was, to the Ancient Greeks, also “a virtuous bottom”, says Dr Ian Jenkins, senior curator of Ancient Greece at the British Museum. And what precisely is a virtuous bottom? “The bottom of someone who is attractive — but who didn’t look over his shoulder to see who was looking at it.” So Socrates, a notorious pederast, would have had an entirely pure mind as he was looking at this? “Oh no,” says Jenkins. “He’d also think, ‘Mmm, peachy’.” Aha. This is, after all an exhibition of Greek art. Perhaps we should not be surprised if we meet one or two paradoxes along the way...

An hilarious and scholarly article in The Times by Catherine Nixey.

Defining Beauty: The body in ancient Greek art opens on Monday March 26th.

Can't wait.

Neil MacGregor: From London To Berlin

He often walks to work from his home in Maida Vale, west London, some five miles away. He is gay, a devout Christian, dedicated to his work – a man, according to Jowell, “of intense and acute moral purpose”. He is, she says, sociable without being “one of the gang”. He has twice turned down knighthoods. He doesn’t ally himself with any political party, his independence and his mastery of his sphere such that, according to Jowell, “it would be a very foolish culture secretary who alienated him”. He is committed to the principle of free entry to museums, and, says Jowell, “utterly understands that there is a fatuousness about the argument that you have to choose between access and excellence”.

MacGregor embodies the ideal that you can very much have both. Germany’s gain stands to be Britain’s huge loss.

The conclusion to a glowing profile of the British Museum's director Neil MacGregor in The Independent, rumouring that our Neil has been headhunted by a new cultural centre in Berlin.

Mr MacGregor was unavailable for comment.

FULL DISCLOSURE!!!: Written and published on Thursday 15th - as was everything blogged between then and here. On the 16th I moved them to days closest to publication of the relevant story.

Elgin Marbles: To Russia With Love

From the new Private Eye - a cracking issue.

PS The lovely Neil MacGregor on taking an Elgin Marble to St Petersburg as cultural diplomacy.

Taking this homoerotic rock cock to Russia does far more than standing outside their London embassy going 'BOO!'

Queeny But Highbrow Interview Of The Week: Simon Schama Does Neil MacGregor

FT Weekend Magazine, of course.

Neil's epic new series, Germany: Memories Of A Nation, starts on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday October 1st.

The Tomb Of The Unknown Craftsman: Art!

Being a ponce I went up to London to see Grayson Perry's The Tomb of The Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum today.
Now if there's one thing everyone knows about Britain's best loved "Turner Prize winning transvestite potter" it's that he's a massive Fall fan.
So I was thinking "I bet he's managed to work MES into this somehow."
I was staring at the badges on his motorbike jacket, but no...
Then I turned a corner and BAM!
One of Grayson's huge fuck-off vases 'Grumpy Old God' about you know who - with a picture of MES on one side.
You can buy postcards of GOG (75p) but with the highest British attention to the wrong detail they show the side without MES on!*
Anyway the rest of the exhibition is totes amazeballs, too!
As is the British Museum.
Though there's none of their Dürer on display at the moment, and I didn't see Neil MacGregor.
I did see a lot of statues of Roman dudes in the nude, though.
Double amazeballs!

* The British Museum also sells postcards of The Warren Cup - tortuously arranged so you can't see any Roman nook. WHAT IS POINT??

Howard F Ahmanson: Mammon From Heaven

"What great success the British Museum has had with the exhibition Treasures of Heaven, a characteristically brilliant display of sacred masterpieces of medieval art. It's been such an illuminating experience that one has hardly to consider how it came about. A few people, on doing so, have had a shock. Peruse the list of sponsors and among them are Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, two of the stranger members of the US religious right. Ahmanson Ahmanson is the reclusive heir to a Californian real-estate fortune who has also been funding much of the anti-gay insurgency that has helped undermine Rowan Williams in the worldwide Anglican Church. They were once followers of the Christian Reconstructionist movement, which believes in the restoration of Old Testament punishments in public life – including stoning to death adulterers, gays and even recalcitrant children who fail to obey their parents. An interesting choice of sponsor, but then, times are hard, and we've all benefited. As colourful and interesting as the display's many exhibits."

Hugh Muir, Guardian Diary.

And wait til Mr Ahmanson finds out the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, is a son of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Update: "More on our new friend Howard F Ahmanson, the multimillionaire whose money and activism has fuelled anti-gay sentiment in the Anglican church. Yesterday we highlighted his sponsorship of the British Museum exhibition Treasures of Heaven. But this was to underestimate Howard's contribution to the artistic life of the nation. For six years ago the National Gallery's exhibition Caravaggio: the Final Years benefited from Howard's generosity. It didn't bother him that Caravaggio was alleged to have kept a boy lover. Howard sees the big picture, so to speak."
Guardian Diary.

Fagburn Awards 27: Queen Of The Year

Neil MacGregor.
The wonderfully erudite director of the British Museum and writer and presenter of A History Of The World In 100 Objects.
The best radio programme in the history of the world - which involves illuminating yet wrily amusing comments about Roman Art and pederasty.
Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.

A History Of The World: 97

Today the endlessly fascinating BBC Radio 4 series, A History of the World in 100 Objects did number 97 a 1966 drawing by David Hockney, In A Dull Village.
It's worth the licence fee itself etc etc.
Neil MacGregor was speaking from the heart, and fessed up that a key subtext to his history was sex and the world's changing attitudes towards it.
Fagburn was really moved by today's programme.
Thank you, Neil.

A History Of The World in 100 Objects: Painting On The Radio

Now I don't care about you, but the cultural highlight of this month for Fagburn is the final countdown of the BBC Radio 4 series, A History of the World in 100 Objects.
We know that straight in at number 97 is this 1966 drawing by David Hockney, In A Dull Village.
Series curator/presenter and British Museum Director, that wonderfully erudite old queen, Neil MacGregor writes: “We have no idea whether the relationship between the two men is recent or of long standing, but at first sight this looks like a calm and entirely satisfactory morning after.”
Steady on!
The image he explains “was shocking for many then, and still is for some today. It raises perplexing questions about what societies find acceptable or unacceptable about the limits of tolerance and individual freedom”.
MacGregor has already chosen such phallic relics as the Taino Ritual Seat (65), homoerotic/pederotic artifacts as The Warren Cup (36), and some of your actual gay iconography, including a coin showing Alexander The Great (31), and a head of Emperor Augustus (35).
Object number 99 is the credit card.
The 100th object will be unveiled on October 14th.
My money's on a cockring.

Neil MacGregor: "Male Genitalia"

Britain's most erudite old queen, Neil MacGregor, has found another excuse to talk about "male genitalia" on his A History Of The World in 100 Objects.
Today it's the Taino Ritual Seat.
You can hear it here as soon as the BBC sorts its website out.
It's here now!
It wasn't as good as his piece on the delightful pederastic pornography that is The Warren Cup, but you can't have everything.
It's for moments like this that I listen to Radio 4 all day.
I can't wait for Neil to get to the present day and talk sagely about a Bel AMi DVD or something.
Well done Neil, you lovable old ponce!