2024-01-11 19:51:00
Applications are officially open for one of the most prestigious positions in the art world: the director of the British Museum in London. The new director is expected to have an annual salary of 215,841 pounds, equivalent to approximately 250 thousand euros. The deadline to apply to run the oldest national public museum in the world, established by an act of the English Parliament in 1753, is January 26th at 12pm.
Too many thefts at the British Museum, the director resigns
The job advert for the high-profile permanent position tasks the future director with “significant challenges”, a nod to the consequences of the theft scandal involving the museum, low morale among the thousand employees, the five-year digitalisation plan of the entire collection and to the renewed requests for repatriation of objects such as the Benin Bronzes and the Parthenon Marbles.
Hartwig Fischer resigned as director last August after reports that around 1,500 objects from the British Museum’s collection were missing, stolen or damaged. A member of staff was made redundant and some items were sold on eBay.
The new director will also be tasked with leading fundraising efforts for a significant renovation project, which includes infrastructure improvements to the plumbing, heating system and rainwater-filtering roof, as well as a reorganization of the exhibition galleries . According to the ‘Financial Times’, the project will cost around £1 billion.
In October, the chairman of the London museum’s board of trustees, George Osborne, described the challenges of finding the right person for this senior position during a deposition to the UK Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Challenges included the museum’s high volume of visitors, negotiations with other countries, the institution’s functions as a research institute and library, its ongoing interpretations of the history of British colonization, and the respect of the academic community. “It’s a very, very complicated job, so finding the right person is something we take very seriously,” Osborne said on October 18 last year.
Osborne said he was confident the museum would receive good candidates for the director role, but the institution would need to consider an “interesting balance” between academic research and the individual’s experience in “managing large, complex organizations in the public sector”. . Osborne also acknowledged that museum directors are paid much less in Britain than in the United States. “It’s a different culture here, and also a different culture than on the European continent.”
The position’s pay is around $275,000 (£215,841), a small fraction of the $1 million base salary that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for example, gives director Max Hollein every year. Several museum directors in the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art, also benefit from tax-free luxury housing or housing allowances in addition to their salaries.
The “New York Times” reported that among the serious contenders for the post of director of the British Museum are Ian Blatchford, director of the Science Museum in London; Nicholas Cullinan, who heads Britain’s National Portrait Gallery and recently oversaw a three-year, $53 million renovation; and Taco Dibbits, general director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which last year mounted a highly successful Vermeer retrospective.
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