Coals to South Kensington

It isn't often that museums get into the news and when they do it tends not to be for positive reasons: museums doing their job happily and uncontroversially isn't news. It seems to me self-evident that the mighty Science Museum shouldn't be going to fossil-fuel companies to fund its exhibitions, but the matter doesn't appear to be quite so clear-cut to its leadership, no matter how many of its trustees or advisors resign, or prospective trustees refuse to go near it. Director Ian Blatchford's argument that taking money from Indian energy conglomerate Adani is somehow about 'editorial balance' is, I think, risible. The Museum could mention their viewpoint without being paid to do so. Am I missing something?

Mind you, were I still in the museum world I think I would be resisting any attempt by donors of artefacts, no matter how I agreed with their outlook, to determine how they might be used and displayed. You give something to a museum and it enters into a different conceptual space from yours. It becomes an interpretive device, an element in other stories than you might have imagined. You don't control it any more.