My favourite way to experience most museums and art galleries is “quickly”. I enjoy popping in on a whim and spending about 20 minutes looking around. It is like a cultural energy shot; you leave invigorated and inspired. If I spend too long in a gallery, however, my Art-ention Deficit Disorder kicks in. Inspiration gives way to irritation and my back begins to hurt. (Muscle pain is actually a common side effect of prolonged exposure to museums. I’m not being a hypochondriac, Google it.)
Anyway, my point here is not that I have subpar lower back muscles – it’s that London is probably the best place in the world to gallery-graze. Thanks to Britain’s prodigious history of pillaging and plundering, our national museums are world-class. And they’re free; or at least permanent collections are. So you can pop in just to look at one picture if you want. You don’t feel obliged to traipse around for hours because you have spent a small fortune on admission.
I don’t think I properly appreciated Britain’s free museums until I moved to New York. While New York is crammed full of culture, it tends to be costly. One exception to this used to be the Metropolitan Museum of Art which, for decades, let people pay what they wished. Last Thursday, however, this egalitarian admission policy came to an end. Now out-of-state visitors must cough up $25 (£18) to visit. New Yorkers are still able to pay what they want, but are asked to show proof of residency. There is nothing like having your identification papers scrutinised to amp you up for art.
The reaction to the Met’s new pricing has been more muted than I thought it might be. But this is the US we’re talking about. Healthcare is considered a privilege not a right; why would art be treated otherwise? This isn’t to say that the Met hasn’t drawn condemnation. Perhaps one of the strongest reactions came from the artist Ai Weiwei, who told the New York Times that the new policy is “like taking the jacket off a poor person … I will never go to the Met. Am I calling for a boycott? No. But I myself will not go.”
I’m not calling for a boycott of the Met either, but I do have a cunning plan I would like to share. I think it’s absolute Pollocks (as they say in the art world) that American tourists can enjoy British museums for free while Brits have to pay their way around so many US cultural institutions. So we should implement a special tax for Americans. I have done the maths, and if we start charging Americans to visit our museums, we will have a bonus £350m a week to divert to the NHS. That may be somewhat optimistic but, at the very least, we will have a few extra quid to help fund our flagging cultural institutes. Last month, an investigation by the historian Sir David Cannadine, commissioned by the Art Fund, warned that museums and galleries in the UK risk becoming “inert and lifeless” thanks to “stratospheric” art market prices and a decrease in government funding.
To be honest, my plan isn’t that cunning. Indeed, it is common policy in a lot of countries to charge foreigners more to visit national parks, monuments, museums etc than locals. And it’s not just culture where this two-tier pricing comes into play; in Bruges, some cafes charge tourists an extra 10% for chips. Which probably means we also should make a cup of tea at the Tate Modern cafe extra expensive for Belgians. It’s only fair.
Not as rich as you should be? Science has the answer
Being intelligent doesn’t always pay off. In fact, it generally doesn’t pay well at all. A new computer model of wealth creation out of the University of Catania, in Sicily, has found the richest individuals aren’t the most talented; they are simply the luckiest. This is not to say hard work and talent are meaningless – just that they only get you so far.
This is hardly breaking news; much has been written about the fact that “meritocracy” is a myth. And you have only got to look at the US president and his clownish cohorts to deduce that it seems to be the mediocre who inherit the earth. Nevertheless, according to the study’s authors, this is the first time the role of randomness in success and failure has been quantified.
The point of this research, by the way, wasn’t to mollify people who might feel miffed that their bank balances aren’t as big as their brains. Rather, it was to figure out the role of luck in scientific innovation and understand how research funding is best distributed.
From penicillin to Viagra to the microwave oven, the history of scientific discovery is full of accidental inventions. It is only fairly recently, however, that people have set about seriously studying serendipity. Last year, for example, the European Research Council invested €1.4m (£1.3m) in a programme led by Ohid Yaqub, a British scientist, to investigate the role of serendipity in biomedicine. So far, Yaqub has identified four types of serendipity. While I won’t go through them, I do want to flag a delightful concept he discusses called “controlled sloppiness”. The idea, basically, is that untidy experiments can have unexpected – but excellent – results. I don’t know about you but, in these Brexity times, I take great comfort in knowing that sloppiness sometimes turns out all right.
Lay off Stormzy; he’s more British than some of his detractors
According to a recent article by Amanda Platell in the Daily Mail, Stormzy ought to shut up and be grateful. While the grime artist was born in London, his mum is from Ghana, which therefore disqualifies him from ever criticising the UK. Platell, by the way, is an Australian immigrant, but she is allowed to say whatever she likes about the UK because she is white, therefore not an immigrant-immigrant, you know? As someone who was born in the UK but is half-Palestinian, I would like to take a moment to be grateful to Platell for tirelessly helping to keep us thankless immigrants in our place.
