ATTENTIVE followers of the House of Lords debate on the Victoria and Albert Museum will have been startled to find Lord Armstrong describing the Trustees and Director of that institution as 'new museologists'. The Editor of Hansard was clearly so bewildered that he introduced a distracting misprint: 

If it is the few [sc. new] museology - an unlovely word - to want to improve the accessibility and attractiveness of the museum to the general public and to play a greater part in public education, the trustees and the director must plead guilty to being new museologists. 

Examples elsewhere in his speech of the Chairman's aspiration to the museological avant-garde were his justification of the so-called EltonJohn exhibition (actually an auction preview) as a way of persuading the young to think of the V & A 'not just as a historic museum of dead gothic sculpture and the rest', and his knowing references to the 'Courtauld Mafia'. Cultural historians of the present might like to ponder the way in which the conservative establishment has begun to appropriate the jargon of the art-historical left - in the name of populism. 

What is the New Museology and what does it have to offer? Some light is thrown on the matter by a timely volume of essays edited by Peter Vergo. The chief defining characteristic of this instant discipline is apparently 'a state of widespread dissatisfaction with the "old" museology', which is 'too much about museum methods and too little about the purpose of museums'. So far so good, although initial suspicions that the New Museology may be a rather arm-chair affair are reinforced by the observation that only three of the nine contributors to the volume actually work in museums. But there again, perhaps museology is for museum staff like ornithology is for the birds. 

The essays in the volume are not uniform in character: the useful odd-man-out is an analysis by Norman Palmer of British statute and case-law as it affects 'museums and cultural property'. But most of the other authors are concerned with the defects of contemporary museums (in Britain) which are perceived as at best unattractive and uninstructive to the public, and at worst as socially divisive instruments of coercion. 

The intellectual roots of this culturally pessimistic view of museums are readily traceable. They go back immediately to Marxist analyses such as that of Pierre Bourdieu in 1969, which attempted to demonstrate (by largely circular arguments) that museums functioned to reinforce class divisions and the repressive dominant culture, while, for their limited public, visits to museums served merely to accumulate 'cultural capital'. Kenneth Hudson's influential book, 'The Social History of Museums' (1974) added a characteristically British note of depression, articulating the view that because museums trace their origins to aristo-cratic collections or oppressive Victorian philanthropy, therefore the 'ordinary' public of today is intimidated and alienated by them. A few of the contributors to this volume point out that the enormous increase in museum visiting in the 1980s has rendered such analyses obsolete, but still seem reluctant to abandon the underlying theory. Thus Nick Merriman in an interesting survey of museum visiting (and non-visiting) in 1985 found that 91 per cent of those interviewed thought it was 'definitely worth knowing about the past', and that 47 per cent visited a museum at least once a year. Surely there is some ground for optimism in this. 

The lack of confidence in the public's interest in art museums may be related to art historians' own loss of faith in the objects of their study. Charles Saumarez Smith tells us that museum scholarship 'has steadily drifted out of the mainstream of research into a methodological backwater governed by empiricism'. Traditional art-museum systems of classification and display are indeed derived on the one hand from various positivist notions of schools and chrono-logical development and on the other from a belief that objects of quality have a direct aesthetic appeal. But now the history of taste has replaced notions of aesthetic excellence with cultural relativism; the social history of art has sought to put objects back into the 'contexts' from which museums have wrenched them; academic art historians are beginning to feel it is more than their job is worth to express an aesthetic or stylistic judgment. 

The resultant state of uncertainty about the worth of objects and their relevance to the public has left bien pensant art historians and museologists intellectually defenceless against the reformist onslaughts of a philistine, market-oriented government. Indeed, in some cases an unholy alliance has formed between reforming left and reforming right in the name of populism and 'giving the public what it wants'. Such views, much in evidence during the V & A discussions, are embodied in extreme form in Philip Wright's essay here on 'The Quality of Visitors' Experiences in Art Museums'. Fired with the kind of righteous indignation about 'litism, style history, snobbish scholar-curators and establishment values traditionally associated with the left-wing, Wright is nonetheless braced for museum charges, 'providing entertainment' and cater-ing for the 'harassed leisure consumer'. Somewhat mysteriously, this is apparently best served by cramming as much half-baked social and political history into permanent displays of art objects as the walls can stand. 

But it is by no means clear that art objects in museums are the most appropriate vehicle for purveying social his-tory to the three-minute culture. It is tedious and fatiguing to read a book (or watch a video) standing up; and why do objects need to be 'real' to make a historical point - particularly if one believes that their evocative power is a delusion, and that aesthetic quality is a construct of a narrow social dlite? But most art historians are closet aesthetes. It is time for them to 'come out' and admit it before it is too late. What could be more dlitist and patron-ising than to claim (while secretly enjoying it oneself) that there is nothing for the 'ordinary public' to gain from simply looking at great art?