You can’t escape it: this is the same colonial museum we know, in a shiny new suit.
The V&A East Storehouse, which opened in Hackney Wick this summer, is hollowed out from the media centre that housed thousands of journalists during the London Olympic Games.
A welcome sign promises ‘maximum transparency and unprecedented access’. The publicity material describes Storehouse as ‘a chance to see behind the scenes of a working museum’.
Everyone knows that the V&A and the British Museum have been failing in their twin statutory duties to care for their collections and ‘secure that the objects are available to persons seeking to inspect them’ for decades. In 1988 a National Audit Office report castigated both institutions for failing to undertake basic inventories.
Genuine transparency will require the V&A channelling its resources into creating a truly comprehensive public database of the artefacts, images and archives that it holds.
Until that day comes V&A East Storehouse will be ‘a building which denies what’s going on’ – an exercise in misdirection and spurious transparency by an institution continuing to fail in its statutory duties.
