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A Scandal and Its Fallout Compound the British Museum’s Woes
After it fired a worker for theft and its director stepped down, the museum faces renewed calls to give back contested objects and an uphill battle to raise funds for refurbishment.
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The Great Court of the British Museum, which has a circular structure in the center and a glass roof.
The British Museum is expecting donors to pay for most of a planned major renovation.Credit...Neil Hall/EPA, via Shutterstock
Alex Marshall
By Alex Marshall
Reporting from London
Sept. 1, 2023
Updated 3:35 a.m. ET
Visitors to the British Museum this week could be forgiven for thinking it was business as usual.
In the museum’s Egyptian galleries, tourists jostled to get a closer look at the Rosetta Stone. Nearby, a teenager posed for a photo in front of a huge statue from Easter Island. In another hall, art students sketched a sculpture of a centaur from the Parthenon Marbles.
But despite the air of normalcy, the world’s third-most-visited museum is in crisis.
Since news broke in August that an employee had been fired over the theft of potentially thousands of items from its storerooms, the British Museum has struggled to deal with the fallout, which is exacerbating challenges it already faced.
The museum is now deluged with renewed calls for the restitution of contested objects, and raising a huge sum for an impending refurbishment looks even more difficult. At a time when it needs leadership most, the museum is rudderless, after its director, Hartwig Fischer, resigned on Aug. 25.
Image
A bearded man wears a blue suit and a blue patterned tie.
Hartwig Fischer, who resigned on Aug. 25, had served as the museum’s director since 2016.
Credit...Tom Jamieson for The New York Times
On top of those challenges, the institution has also recently been troubled by protests over a longstanding oil company sponsorship, shutdowns caused by striking workers and a flap over the uncredited use of a translator’s work in a recent show