Women Who Travel Podcast: How to Museum With The New Yorker 's Rebecca Mead
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Earlier this year, New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead reported on the scandals taking place within the British Museum—and its own history of cultural theft that continues to define how we approach it as a museum today. Lale joins Rebecca on the ground in London to learn more about the institution she grew up visiting—and more broadly, how to tackle some of the world’s biggest museums in a way that’s both fulfilling and, well, fun.
Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. Welcome to Women Who Travel, where I'm on location at London's British Museum. I'm joining New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead, and we'll be walking you through some of its galleries and looking at celebrated exhibits that Rebecca has chosen, as well as some less famous attractions that are full of surprises.
Massive museums can be overwhelming, so we're here to talk about how to strategize one. We'll hear ideas on how to get a unique experience that veers away from what guidebooks suggest. Plus, there are tips for you if you want to plan it all out in advance, or if you want to roam spontaneously, or head directly for one exhibit that's special to you.
Well, we're going in. There is a massive queue outside, which I've never seen before because growing up in London, you could sit on the steps and wander in whenever you wanted.
Rebecca Mead: Once you're in, you can sit on the steps for as long as you like, so that's still good.
LA: Yeah, because also one of my favorite things to do when I'm in London and when I was growing up here is actually just using the museum as a shortcut, because there's a back door, and so you can just walk all the way through and miss all the traffic and the crowds.
RM: It's so fantastic to be in here right now before anybody gets in. It's like you sort of want to go skating on the marble here because it's all so smooth.
LA: Connor, you work here at the museum. Tell us what you do.
Connor Watson: I am senior press officer here at the British Museum.
LA: So you must get to walk around when it's empty like this quite a lot.
CW: Yes.
LA: What a treat.
CW: It's a massive privilege to be here, getting here before the public opens, when they've gone at the end of the day. You try and find as much time as you can to walk around the galleries and see the objects.
LA: Where's your favorite place to sit when no one's around?
CW: In the great court, just because it's so stunning. Especially if it's raining, you can hear it on the roof. It's fantastic, especially at night. Egyptian Sculpture Gallery is so striking, but I also really like going into Asia Gallery at the back of the museum and the Ming vases and the pots are just very, very peaceful and evocative.
RM: Instead of doing what everybody does and going left and looking at the-
CW: Rosetta Stone.
RM: Rosetta Stone, which is ... You know what, maybe we should just quickly go look at the Rosetta Stone because nobody's there.
Normally when you come in here, you cannot get close to this object because the Rosetta Stone is, I think, maybe the most visited thing in the museum. Am I right? It feels like it must be.
CW: Yeah, it would be one of the most visited.
RM: Which is interesting. Why do you think that is?
CW: It's at the heart of Egyptology and people just want to see it.
RM: It's a stone that's got three different kinds of writing on it, and it was the way in which linguists figured out what hieroglyphics mean. Right?
CW: Yes. So we recently had the 200-year anniversary of deciphering the stone. So it has hieroglyphs, demotic, and then ancient Greek.
LA: So last time I was here, I could not get this close to it. In fact, I couldn't see any of it because there were so many people with their phones taking pictures, which obviously is par for the course with something so famous. But I don't know, Rebecca, we're here to talk about tackling museums, why we want to walk around them, how to make it like an actual worthwhile travel experience. I get really frustrated when I see people just going to the one famous thing and taking loads of pictures. Is that something that annoys you or can you see that there's value in that?
RM: It drives me nuts, which isn't to say that I never take a photo in a museum, but I don't usually take a photo of the most obvious thing. I'll take a picture of something that I want to look up later, or more often I'll take a picture of the wall text because that'll have the details of the acquisition and so on. But yeah, I think if you can put your phone down, just look at the thing. You can buy a postcard of it. You can even just look it up online later and have another look at it. Just try to have as unmediated an experience with the thing as possible. Anyway, it'll be a terrible picture. You'll just get the glass.
LA: Well, I know. I was looking. I was like, "What are people take pictures of?" It would've been terrible.
RM: Well, they're taking pictures to capture their sense of having been there and a trigger for having been there and all that kind of thing. Maybe we try not to.
LA: Three minutes in.
RM: They're going to be running. Yeah, there's going to be people running, running.
LA: To here right now.
CW: Great.
RM: So should we leave it to them now?
LA: Yeah, let's let them take their pictures of the Rosetta Stone.
Rebecca, I feel like just even walking around just now, clearly you've developed a very good eye for museums, but how did you get good at museums?
RM: Well, I don't know that I'm good at museums. I've read other people's strategies of going to museums. I was reading something the other day about somebody who says that they go and they spend the first two hours walking around the whole thing at speed, not stopping and looking at anything just to get a lie of the land, and then they go back and find the thing that they particularly like and want to concentrate on. That sounds to me like absolute murder. Two hours of speed walking around the whole museum, then I'm done.
LA: Also, that's a workout. You're not even sitting down on the bench.
RM: No, that's true. That's true. I think it does help to know a little little bit before you go so that you know what you are expecting to encounter. But on the other hand, I don't think it makes sense to have looked at an image of everything that you want to see already. You want to be surprised and have your eyes open to fresh. So I don't look at everything. I try not to go for the most popular thing if I can help it. And quite often, it's useful to look at a map of the museum when you first go in and just see what today you feel like looking at. Today, it might be the Asian Gallery, it might be the Africa Gallery. It might be, oh, I've never looked at the textiles collection from China, I'll go look at that.
LA: So give yourself permission to stray off course and see something different.
I live in New York. You used to live in New York. I feel like in my head, the Met Museum and the British Museum kind of live together in my head because of the sheer scale. And I've been to the Met numerous times. I've been lucky enough to live in New York for long enough that it's a repeat visit. I see them as quite comparable. Is that fair? Is that true?
RM: Well, in a sense, no, I think. Because the Metropolitan Museum in New York is principally an art museum of paintings and sculptures and those works for us are all, in London, are all over in the National Gallery. I'm trying to think. The British Museum doesn't really have an equivalent in New York. It's more like the Smithsonian or something. They function in some sense in the same way as the big one that you're going to go to on a Sunday afternoon.
LA: And they're huge.
RM: And they're huge, but they're quite, quite different. I think if people come here expecting that they're going to see great works of art in terms of paintings, they've got to go elsewhere for those.
LA: You went to the wrong museum, love.
RM: You went wrong, but it's not far away. It's very close.
LA: Another joy of London is you can walk between a lot of the major museums.
CW: In London, our museums of paintings are split into two. We have the National Gallery and then the National Portrait Gallery. So if you want to go really, really specialist and you're like, "I'm just a fan of portraits." It's one for you.
LA: How many people pass through the museum every day roughly?
CW: I couldn't tell you daily. About six million visitors a year, and we only close for two days a year.
LA: Six million visitors, that's half the population of London.
CW: And actually a lot of our visitors are international as well, and from the rest of the UK. It's not just sort of Londoners on a lunch break, although I'm sure there are plenty. We have such a diverse range of visitors. And actually the two other museums that have similar figures are the Louvre and the Vatican.
LA: I will admit that I've been to Paris several times and I've never gone to the Louvre because I've always figured there wasn't much point because it would be too crowded.
RM: I don't know. It is crowded, but it depends what you feel up for. There was one trip I did, I don't know, a few years ago where I had a day. I just thought, like as if I was going on a hike, I decided I'm going to the Louvre for the day. Now, normally I would never go to a museum for a day. I feel like you can usually ... A couple of hours is about as much as I can take. But I made this commitment, I went and had lunch in the restaurant there, I took coffee breaks, I sat down. And I really spent the whole day visiting the Louvre as if it was a city I was visiting and I wanted to see all of it because I only have one day to do it. And it was amazing. It was an amazing day.
LA: I love that. I've never considered that I could just be in a museum for the whole day. Partly because also it actually sounds quite daunting, but I guess if you relax into it and just kind of, like you said, approach it like a hike and just let yourself kind of walk around and experience the space as much as the works, it becomes this whole new cultural experience.
RM: And there are always places, parts of the museum that you didn't know were there or that aren't very well trafficked. The rooms where they've got the furnishings from the royal household. Sort of things that aren't on the top 10 list, but they're really, really interesting in the same way that if you're walking around a city, there are certain back streets that aren't necessarily, haven't got the greatest buildings on them, but they're really good to go see.
So yeah, Connor, I recommend ... You've got enough cafes here for people to go to one at lunchtime, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, don't you?
CW: Enough cafes, a restaurant, a pizzeria, little van outside for iced coffee. The whole works.
LA: Yeah, you can do breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
CW: So like a hike, sensible footwear, make sure you know where the cafes are for your snacks and your water, and make sure you've got plenty of time to sit down on benches.
LA: Coming up, on our way to a very special room, Rebecca leads me along some quieter corridors.
We are back in a different part of the British Museum with RM.
We're in the reading room. Rebecca, you look slightly awestruck.
RM: I am a bit awestruck. It's so big. It's so big.
LA: It's huge.
RM: Okay, so this was built in the 1850s in what had been the empty courtyard. And it first opened to the public in 1857. So what a brilliant idea. It's like the dream of finding that you've got an extra room in your house where you are thinking, "Oh my god, where are we going to put these books?" And then deciding, "I know, let's build a rotunda in the courtyard." This is a little bit like a library that I worked in quite a lot as a student, only on a bigger scale, so I'm having slight kind of anxiety about that I have an essay due. But just the sort of excitement of knowing how many writers and thinkers have used this space. Can you come and work in it?
CW: No. So this room is now a working room for the museum. So it houses our archive and we've created this display. And some of the famous readers who've been here, we sort have pulled out and highlighted along the sides as well, so Virginia Woolf or Karl Marx, and a little bio about what they did here and sort of where they sat and what they read.
LA: Sort of imagining Karl Marx in here or Virginia Woolf. It's extraordinary.
RM: Well, if you spend a lot of time in a library, it's not just a place for work, it's a place for socializing and catching people's eye, and deciding who you're going to go out and take a tea break with. So I like to imagine Karl Marx not only writing Das Kapital here, but also deciding having a chat with someone around the corner or going for a pint across the road.
LA: I want to know who Karl Marx's library buddy was.
RM: Yeah, good question. Don't know. Friedrich Engels. I don't know.
CW: Let's go see the Lewis chessmen because they're right next door and then we can go to the gallery, can't we. These are the Lewis chessmen and are chess pieces made of walrus ivory and found in Scotland on the Isle of Lewis.
RM: You've got to wonder whether they actually played with them or whether this was like, "Don't use the Lewis chessmen. They're the best set."
LA: Don't touch the walrus ivory.
RM: Nobody looks very cheerful, do they?
LA: Again, it's like every single thing you see is fascinating and fantastic here. Why do visitors latch onto certain pieces over others?
CW: These are particularly popular. They're one of really the oldest depictions of chess, not the oldest but one of. And they were also the inspiration for Wizards Chess in Harry Potter. So a lot of pop-cultural reference makes these fascinating.
RM: I don't actually play chess, but if you do, it's something that you can relate to. It's something that you yourself could use, you would know how to use. It forms a connection between you in the present and the people in the past who played in the same way that you do. Things are not so distant and people don't change so much.
LA: So it is really all about we're obsessed with each other, we're obsessed with other humans, and these kind of facilitate that in a way.
RM: All right, so we're now in the relatively new Islamic Galleries. Not too crowded, nice and quiet. I don't know this part of the museum at all. I've walked through, but no more than that. What should we see in here?
CW: It kind of feeds into your point of how you best tackle a museum, if you go, "I want to do a region or a country or a time period." And this is one of those examples of how museums, not just the British museum, but others are set up in that this is the Islamic world. So in here we have sort of a collection of objects that cross literal continents and countries. There's a map behind us which shows sort of the influence of Islam. It's not just the Middle East, but it's Africa, it's Central Asia, it's Europe.
RM: Reminds me of another great museum in Marseille, the Museum of the Mediterranean. Have you ever been to that?
LA: I have not. I've never even heard of it.
RM: It's a great museum because it reminds you that the Mediterranean is not just Italy, France, and Spain, but there are objects from the African continent and history about different trade routes across that part of the world, and it brings it all together in a way that in a place like Marseille, which is a very multicultural polyglot city, you're living it as well as seeing it in the museum. And here in London, it's an incredibly diverse multicultural city.
LA: One of the most magical things about visiting any museum, particularly these massive ones, is that it's never the same trip twice.
RM: Yeah, that's really true because you are never the same, are you? You're interested in different things and you might have read a different book or watched a different TV show that'll make you want to go and look at a different part of the world. I think one of the things that's important about this museum too is it was never a royal collection or a private collection. It was always intended not just for the people of Britain really, but for anybody. So it's unlike the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, which was Catherine the Great's art collection, unlike the Louvre, which was the royal art collection. It wasn't created for the private enjoyment of the absolute top of society. We can also be grateful for the existence of an institution that's here for all of us to come in, not to have to pay at the door, by the way, unless we want to.
LA: I was about to say, one of the wonderful things about London is all the big museums are free, which is I think something quite special about the city and unique globally. Not many big international cities let everyone walk into their major museums for free.
RM: In a lot of cities, to take a family to a museum is cripplingly expensive.
There's a lot of eager young learners with their iPads.
LA: Very studious children.
RM: Very studious children with their earphones, listening to somebody talking on a headset. Visiting museums with children is a whole other project.
LA: That's a very diplomatic term.
RM: But before children learn that they're supposed to be bored by museums, they can be interested by them so long as you don't expect them to last for hours and hours and hours. And when my son was their age, the age of these children, which I'm guessing is sort of eight or so, we would come to a museum with a notebook, plain paper notebook, and we'd take him into a gallery, and he would sit down and choose an object or a painting and copy it. There's something about the sustained attention that sitting in front of a thing, drawing it gives you that you can do even without drawing, although maybe I should have been drawing too. But staying in front of something for 20 minutes, try that as a way of visiting a museum.
LA: Advice for children and adults.
RM: Exactly.
LA: Coming up, we're talking about the museum's reputation and its future.
So Rebecca, you know so much about this museum and I am really walking around from a place of great ignorance. But I think there's a lot of conversation that goes on around how all of these incredible objects ended up in the British Museum.
RM: It's a very, very complicated story. I don't think that there's an easy right, wrong answer. I think the British Museum's been in the news a lot because of restitution questions. With the Parthenon sculptures, which are in the next room, there's obviously been a lot of debate about whether they were taken with permission, how far the permission extended. Were they allowed to take stones from the ground? Were they allowed to take things off the building? Were the people who granted permission in a position to grant permission anyway, given that they were an occupying power? I think the museum is in the process of trying to come to an accommodation with the Greek government, which has been asking for them back for a very, very long time. Connor.
CW: Yeah, the museum's 270 years old. It's come about in a variety of ways and through a variety of means and countries. So one part is addressing our own history as well as the history of the objects, which take on a new life when they enter the building. But we want to come to a mutually beneficial partnership with not just Greece, but partners around the world. And some countries we already have that, and some we're sort of forging those relationships.
LA: It's a long process.
CW: Yes, it is.
LA: Rebecca, you described it as complex, and even just what you said in those few sentences had my mind whirring. How much do you think people are thinking about that when they're walking through the museum? How do you think about it when you walk around?
RM: I think people, when it's in the news, they do think about it and should. Because it's interesting, among other things, just to think about how these institutions gathered their objects and what the ethical questions are and what they were and what they are now. If we go quickly into the next gallery, into the Duveen Gallery, it's also you go and you look and these are amazing works of art. And it's a privilege to be able to see them wherever you're seeing them. And they're here right now and let's appreciate them. I want to look at the horses.
We are walking towards one of the pediments or some of the sculptures that were taken down from one of the pediments of the Parthenon because there are these incredible horse heads here.
LA: Wow, that horse is fabulous.
RM: This was high up on the building. You weren't supposed to be able to come face to face with this creature.
LA: He's got his mouth gaping in shock. He's like, "I wasn't supposed to be down here." Although it says he's weary from a night long labor, which I feel like that because I went to the pub last night.
RM: He's been carrying the moon chariot, the moon goddess. It's just a spectacular thing. It's rendering me speechless and it has done since it's been in the museum to people who've come to see it. So look at it while we can.
LA: And also from such a vantage point, because as you said, this horse's head wasn't intended to be seen this up close because it would've been quite high up at some point.
RM: This is, again, a very popular part of the museum, but it's usually not so crowded that you can't walk around and appreciate it. So it's unlike going to something like the classic example of things you can't see in museums is the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Impossible, don't even bother. There are other paintings. There's even another painting on the opposite wall that you can look at. It's quite a good one.
LA: Like any big museum, we've thrown a few names around, like the Louvre and the Hermitage. How do you strategize?
RM: I think that you go early, don't go tired, wear comfortable shoes, and try to think a little bit about focusing on one period, one zone, maybe two. I think you have to just try to be realistic about your own levels of patience and tolerance and absorption.
LA: It shouldn't be a punishing experience. It shouldn't be like you're doing it out of a sense of duty or because you have to when you are on holiday in a big city or something. It is supposed to be enjoyable and you should just see what you're interested in. My mum is a big museum goer, and one of the reasons why I spent so much time here as a kid is because my mum would bring me and would bring me to all the museums. But one of the things that she taught me, which I think was really good advice, is that as soon as we weren't having fun and we weren't enjoying ourselves, she'd be like, "All right, we're done."
RM: Yeah.
LA: Rebecca, what are you up to now?
RM: I don't know, but I'm coming back here tomorrow evening for a talk. So I'm going to have the great pleasure of being back in the museum within just over 24 hours.
LA: And no doubt in a completely different part, seeing something that feels completely new.
RM: Yeah. It should be good. It's always exciting to come. There's always a sense of elevation when you walk through the door.
LA: Next week, I'm chatting to Reem Assil, a Palestinian-Syrian chef based in San Francisco. Her restaurant has won awards through her food's ability to bridge Arab street food with California ingredients. She says championing Arab hospitality is a way to make her community seem less of a threat and be more visible around the world.
Thank you for listening to Women Who Travel. I'm Lale Arikoglu, and you can find me on Instagram at @lalehannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus, James Yost, Vince Fairchild, and Pran Bandi. The show is mixed by Amar Lal at Macrosound. Jude Kampfner of Corporation for Independent Media is our producer. Stephanie Kariuki is our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of global audio.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
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