We shouldn’t fund museums to be woke censors
The Spinoff reports:
It was a hit exhibition connected to the juggernaut Harry Potter universe, one that began at London’s famed Natural History Museum, before travelling to Canada and Australia. “Fantastic Beasts: The Wonder of Nature… aims to inspire a love for nature and to raise awareness of conservation issues by highlighting to visitors their own relationship with wildlife and biodiversity.” Its next stop was to be Auckland, kicking off in March of 2024. The museum conducted a survey showing a willingness to pay that exceeded all previous exhibitions, and a large group of Harry Potter fans excited to have it arrive in their hometown.
Of the 500 people surveyed, a tiny minority worried about the views of Harry Potter creator JK Rowling – just two, one more than expressed concern about her implied support of witchcraft.
So they were offered a hugely popular exhibition that may have been their best selling ever exhibition, and support for it was overwhelming except for two out of 500 people who had an issue about the views of the creator, J K Rowling.
Read the full story for what happens next, but basically they spend months and months dithering, they have workshops, they hire an external consultant, they have senior staff vote 8-1 to proceed but they get spooked for a minuscule number of activists and cancel the exhibition.
They even debated about whether they could morally liver with JK Rowling making money from the exhibition. This was hilarious (in a pathetic way) because she doesn’t actually get any royalties from the exhibition, but even if she did she wouldn’t give a f**k about the amount of revenue compared to her massive income and wealth.
This is terrible decision making, in four ways.
- 95% of people can separate the art from the artist. Richard Wagner was a terrible person but his music is amazing. I can listen to his music happily.
- The views that some people object to from J K Rowling are not extreme. Many public opinion polls have shown her views to be ones shared by the majority of adults. Now reasonable people can disagree on what she has said, and how she has said it, but its ridiculous to consider her outside the mainstream.
- The museum paid almost no regard to the hundreds of thousands of NZers who would have loved to have gone top the exhibition. They just didn’t feature much at all.
- The museum is funded around 90% by ratepayers. By turning down a hugely popular exhibition, the museum will run at an even higher deficit
Why should Aucklanders fund a museum that effectively censors what exhibitions they’ll host on such flimsy grounds?