feeling listless

Art I suspect that the commercial wing of the 'British Museum' choked on their crumpet's this morning when they read this article from The Guardian regarding a licensing deal they've hatched to sell reproductions of some the drawings from their collection. The writer picks his way through the wording of the sales blurb breaking down what it actually means in real terms. This may not be the deal that collectors are looking for:

"How much does the punter pay? Not much, if you buy only one image - the cheapest is £106 plus VAT and postage - but rather a lot if you imagine that you are going to start a "collection". Working my way, with some difficulty, through the website, I located 18 prints and put them on a shopping list: by that time I was due to pay a little short of £2,500 plus VAT and postage.

And here is an astonishing figure. The trustees' latest total allocation to the museum's departments for acquisitions is £100,000, of which the prints and drawings people receive £4,000. If the department, for some perverse reason, were to decide to buy all 25 of the hand-pulled lithographic prints, on acid-free deckle-edged conservation paper, in the Atelier 350 British Museum Collection, it would exhaust probably the whole of its acquisitions budget.

I agree that museums have to raise funds somehow and I'm not against the commercialisation of the more popular images, however, their first responsibility must be to educate not to distort or hide the truth in the way which is shown here. [Metafilter thread]