Don't turn the British Museum into a playpen

Neil MacGregor will have received more than enough advice as he takes over as director of the British Museum this week. The best is probably – don't do it.

Why exchange the cosy world of the National Gallery, where you can live among the highest achievements of Western art, work with colleagues with the same aesthetic love, and be backed by trustees who share the same vision of the central importance of art, for a crisis-ridden mega-museum, several million pounds in the red, whose staff are on strike, whose Greek busts are being stolen and whose final paymasters, the Government, don't trust the institution?

The answer, in Mr MacGregor's own words, is that hardy perennial: "the challenge". Whatever its faults – and it is difficult to find any commentator with a good word for it these days – the British Museum is one of the three or four greatest, and largest, museums in the world. No other institution outside that other monument to imperial power, the Metropolitan in New York, has anything like the range and quality of its holdings. Name any place from the Antarctic to the Cook Islands, and it will have examples of its works. Think of any item, from Sumerian tablets to contemporary Japanese prints, and it will possess a collection.

The trouble is that no one knows what to do with this behemoth. The Government really wants to make it into a kind of educational playpen, full of teaching aids for the kids. The trendy museum designers would like to modernise it as a kind of interactive wonderland. The outgoing director, Dr Anderson, wanted to keep it primarily as a temple to academic research.

The new director should ignore the lot of them. All this confusion of purpose has done is to land the museum in an unholy mess. Dr Anderson's retreat into research allowed the finances to slide to a point where the Government insisted on the appointment of an administrative chief executive, whose arrival divided the staff and confused the structure. The trustees, under Graham Greene (the publisher, not the author), became obsessed with the building of the Great Court. What should have been the dawn of a radiant new millennium was sullied by a row over the substitution of French limestone in the building.

Yet there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the British Museum and a great deal that is right. Of course, if you were starting a museum of this sort from scratch, you wouldn't start from here. And, of course, this is not the way you would accumulate items.

But then this is where we are. And the up side is an astonishing treasure house of cultural artefacts and learning formed in the period of British world dominance. To "modernise" the museum as an interactive learning centre would be pointless. Half its charm is that you discover for yourself as you wander amid the display cabinets. Most of its character comes from the period and the style in which it was founded and developed in the 19th century.

There are things that can and must be done. The Museum needs to raise around £10m to restore its finances and, more important, get the Government out its hair. The board of trustees is in urgent need of a radical overhaul. The Museum shop badly needs a fresh mind (see the NY Met if you need ideas). The central planning of exhibitions is hopeless.

But Mr MacGregor's primary task must be simply to restore the institution's belief in itself and the customers' awe of its contents. It's a job he is uniquely qualified to do. He is a natural communicator. His achievement at the National Gallery was to relate his aesthetic beliefs to the interests of the gallery visitor. No one would have guessed, when he planned it, that he could promote an exhibition of religious art that contained few masterpieces and was garnered almost entirely out the Gallery's own holdings. Yet Seeing Salvation was the most successful exhibition of the year, because it opened a world to an audience.

And how many worlds does the British Museum hold out! I first visited it as a child of eight, eager to find out more about the Roman world, and unable to believe that you could learn, cross-legged on the floor, by joining a free guided tour of individual rooms. I fell in love, almost by accident, with the Assyrian bas-reliefs, incredulous that such movement and strength could be created so long ago. Even today I find myself caught by what I thought I could never be interested in – a piece of blue-and-white Chinese export porcelain or a popular Mexican print of death.

If I was to offer the new director some advice, it would be this: if the Museum, its ill-behaved tourist hordes, its self-obsessed curators and its ill-chosen trustees, gets you down, go to the side galleries of the main Egyptian rooms on the ground floor, where there are a series of reliefs of fishing and domestic life of such gentle grace and joy that you cannot fail to think of pleasure.

And if you need to feel alive and ready for battle again, go to the Tibetan collections where there is an 18th-century bronze of a god grasping his spouse in a dance of ecstasy and coupling. It is not beautiful. But it has an erotic energy as mind conjoins with body, wisdom with knowledge, passion with reason, that convinces you – as it was meant to – that there are no demons that you cannot realise and trample underfoot.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk