Secrets have never been more suspect. Post Snowden, post Saville, post the Catholic Church abuse scandal, institutions which keep secrets are automatically seen as having something to hide, and openness and transparency are seen as the new imperatives. Any deviation from the new orthodoxy of honesty is punished – by exposure. But the story of secrecy is not as black and white as our contemporary prejudices would have it. For centuries secrecy has been seen to serve a useful purpose. It has protected citizens from the prying eyes of governments, it has protected the feelings of individuals and kept couples together. Have we lost more than we have gained by abandoning our respect for the power and sanctity of secrecy? Tiffany Jenkins presents a history of secrecy driven by a thesis which challenges the conventional wisdom of the moment.
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Keeping Their Marbles – ‘an outstanding achievement… wide-ranging and incisive.’
In October 1860, during the Second Opium War, British and French forces attacked the Summer Palace near what was then Peking. Built of jade and marble and filled with treasures crafted exclusively for the imperial family, it had been described as a “dazzling cavern of human fantasy”. Three days of looting left it a smoking ruin. Eyewitnesses told of soldiers carrying off strings of pearls and pencil cases set with diamonds. The empress’s pekinese was also taken and, tactlessly renamed “Looty”, presented to Queen Victoria.
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My secret life: on the benefits of secrecy
At the heart of The Secret Garden, the much-loved children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, in which a disagreeable orphan is transformed into a flourishing young girl, lies the protective power of secrecy.
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Great collectors used to have great taste. Now they simply show off their wealth
Article published in The Observer on the Leonardo and contemporary collecting. If you walk around Mayfair or Manhattan at twilight and look up, you could glimpse a Damien Hirst spot painting through an …
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Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams
Is it worth traveling 300 miles to another country at the height of summer to see a exhibition of old clothes? Yes, if it’s in Paris—and Christian Dior, the designer. Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams, takes …
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Making amends to Native Americans may be endangering their history
A few years ago, a group of Native American leaders drove 12 hours from Oklahoma to Denver Museum of Nature and Science, a natural history museum in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, to collect 26 …
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Art show too male? At times, this cry makes no sense
The first major survey of abstract expressionism since 1959, which has just opened at the Royal Academy, has been accused of displaying too much testosterone.
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Politics are on exhibit at migration museums, not history
The “museumization of migration,” as one academic has put it, is a significant shift in the history of museums. But the resulting exhibitions deserve as much attention for how they obscure the West’s new relationship to migrants as for how they clarify it.
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Who owns culture? Start the Week, Radio 4
On Start the Week, Tom Sutcliffe discusses who owns culture. The writer Tiffany Jenkins tells the story of how western museums have come to acquire treasures from around the world, but dismisses the idea of righting the …
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Are we entering a new age of artistic censorship in Europe?
There is an uncomfortable moment in Ganesh Versus the Third Reich when the actors pause. The play, ostensibly about the Hindu deity travelling to Germany to reclaim the swastika, an ancient Sanskrit symbol, from the Nazis, comes to a halt as they remove their costumes—an elephant head and a SS armband—turn to face the audience, and ask: “Do we have the right to perform this?” None of the actors are Hindu or Jewish. Many have physical and mental disabilities but act the roles of Hitler and Josef Mengele, who tried to exterminate those similarly handicapped. Later, an actor drops out of character again, to accuse the crowd: “You’ve come to see some freak porn.
