Review: The Return of Curiosity by Nicholas Thomas

Museums are on the up. More than fifty per cent of the UK population now visits one every year; with attendances across many western countries having grown as much as ten per cent in the last decade. During half that period, a variety of funding agencies and individuals have poured no less than five billion dollars into America’s museum infrastructure, with entirely new museums (such as the Eli Broad in LA and Smithsonian’s African American Museum) or hefty extensions of established ones (like that at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) being built as a consequence. While on the other side of the planet, somewhere between two and four new Chinese museums have been set up roughly every week for the last five years; though not all of them, it seems, are full of either exhibits or visitors. Across the entire planet, it has been estimated that there were something like 23,000 museums twenty years ago, with the figure more than doubling to 55,000 today (Fiammetta Rocco, ‘Temples of Delight,’ The Economist, 21 December 2013, p 152). Museums then are unmistakably gaining in both social and cultural significance. These words will no doubt sound complacently hollow and implausibly distant to those working with dwindling budgets or through drastic cuts; but it is difficult to resist a sense that we might be entering a new international museum age. This swelling of overall fortunes provides the backdrop to Nicholas Thomas’ timely and rewarding The Return of Curiosity.

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