"Epic" Stonehenge exhibition opens
Plus: Museum of London's move delayed
Hello again.
I hope my UK subscribers are reading this in safety. The entire country is right now being battered by Storm Eunice. This morning it’s given us provisionally the highest gust of wind ever recorded in England and many museums and cultural sites have taken the decision to shut today, including Kew Gardens, the Museum of London and all of Brighton’s museums. To see just how damaging Eunice is, the O2 arena - formerly the Millennium Dome - is currently seeing its magnificent roof ripped to shreds.
Stay safe
Maxwell
This week’s top story
Forgive me this CLANGING self indulgence, but I had to put the opening of the British Museum’s The world of Stonehenge exhibition as this week’s top story. It has taken over my life in the most brilliant of ways in recent months as I’ve been managing the media campaign for the show.
It’s been the biggest PR campaign I’ve ever executed in in my career, with the number of pieces of coverage well into four figures from across the world. This time last week the show made global headlines as we announced the discovery of the Burton Agnes drum, “the most important piece of prehistoric art to be found in Britain in the last 100 years.” It is on display for the first time in the show. News outlets across the world covered it - including the Washington Post.
A huge number of in-depth features have come out this opening week too, with each one of them requiring bespoke work between me, the curators, the journalists and many more. There’s been double-page stories in the Daily Express, a full pager in the Daily Mirror, a great write up in the New York Times, dedicated programmes on Radio 4’s Start the Week and Radio 3’s Free Thinking, articles appearing on BBC News, ABC News, BBC Breakfast, Sky News (online and on TV), the Scotsman, the Yorkshire Post, Evening Standard podcasts, ITV and BBC local TV news and radio packages, long form features in AP, AFP, EFE, PA, CNN, El Pais, Die Welt, Corriere della Sera, the Art Newspaper and many, many more.
The reviews all landed on Tuesday - and they couldn’t have been better. The Guardian called it “a knockout epic” that is is “up there with the British Museum’s legendary shows.” It got stonking five star reviews from the Telegraph, the Times and the Evening Standard. Time Out said it will “go down as a landmark exhibition in the British Museum’s impressive history.” The Spectator said it was “Stupendous.”
A piece I’m super proud of is a wonderful feature on the Neolithic treasures of Orkney which are being shown in the exhibition, the first time they’ve ever been on loan. It appeared in the Guardian and was based on a fab press trip I took with the writer Charlotte Higgins up to the Orkney mainland last month. It was an amazing trip, resulting in an amazing article that was one of the most read articles on the Guardian for much of the day it was published. It was mind-blowing to see interes so high. Do take a read here if you haven’t already.
It was an absolute blast to look after this media campaign from start to finish. I loved every minute of it. None of this would have been possible without the exhibition’s excellent curators Neil Wilkin and Jennifer Wexler, and the brilliant wider exhibition team. Do go and see the show - it genuinely is one of the very best I’ve ever seen. For now though, you will find me sleeping for the foreseeable future.
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This week’s other stories
Huge news from the Museum of London as they reveal for the first time that their £330 million pound move to a new home will involve closing their doors for nearly four years. After 45 years at their London Wall site in the Square Mile, they’re planning a relocation to West Smithfield, where the new museum will occupy market buildings that have lain derelict for over three decades. There’s also going to be a new name: The London Museum. But it won’t open until 2026, four years late, in part because the new site is more complex then they first thought. But it’s also because market traders who are still operating in some parts of the new site are refusing to be relocated 14 miles from city centre. Which seems fair enough to me. Financial Times
The Imperial War Museum London is expanding. A multimillion-pound donation from the Blavatnik Family Foundation has enabled the museum to build art, film and photographic galleries which will open in late 2023. Their name? The Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries. Say what you see. The Guardian
London’s National Gallery has also revealed details of its important transformation plans. The first images show how the entrance to the Sainsbury Wing will be revamped by the time of its 200th anniversary in 2024. The proposals will go out to a public consultation by New York-based Selldorf Architects. The Art Newspaper
Tate Britain is to commission an artist to create a new work to sit alongside a 1920s mural that it says contains "racist imagery" and is “unequivocally … offensive”. The room which contains the Rex Whistler wall painting, will also no longer be used as a restaurant, as it had been for decades. BBC News
A blackboard of scribbles, in-jokes, drawings and equations from the office of Prof Stephen Hawking has gone on display at the Science Museum. The board dates from a conference of 1980, and the display’s curator has said he hopes “some of the scientists who wrote on it will swing by and help us understand what it means.” It’s gone on show as one of 16 items from the scientist’s Cambridge University office. The Telegraph
Oh dear. The Orlando Museum of Art last week unveiled - to much fanfare - 25 previously unknown Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings which they claim had lay hidden in an LA storage unit for decades. Now though it seems this fairytale story is too good to be true as a number of figures claim they’re actually fakes, including the great art dealer Larry Gagosian. New York Times
And finally
Ai Weiwei’s latest show at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge gets an ouch review from the Guardian: “so dull and sentimental it’s offensive”
A hearty round of applause to Jonathan Watkins, who will bow out as director of Birmingham’s contemporary art gallery Ikon in October after an incredible 23 years.
Good luck to Team GB men’s curling team in their gold medal match in Beijing tomorrow. We’re rooting for you!
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