Taking Liberties at the British Library
…accurately summed up in one word: disappointing
Earlier today I went to see the Taking Liberties exhibition at the British Library. It can be accurately summed up in one word: disappointing.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s an awful lot of work put into the exhibition and it contains a stunning collection of documents and artifacts of the history of civil liberties in Britain. However, the whole tone of Taking Liberties seemed to be so horribly self-congratulating that it left a really bad taste in my mouth. Most of the questions asked of the visitors were populist and lacking in any real substance. Considering that the advertising promoted it as something hard-hitting, I thought that topics such as tuition fees were really weak and almost missing the point.
Speaking of the questions, the interactive element of the exhibition involved swiping a barcoded wrist-tag with a unique ID underneath a POS-style laser scanner each time you wanted to participate. Maybe it was just the way it was presented but it seemed to miss the irony of the obvious comparison to ID cards, data-mining and the database state and even if it didn’t, it really should have made more of this.
The main problem with Taking Liberties is that it concentrates too much on the past when it should be asking harder questions about the present and the future. What’s the point of cheerleading these achievements when they’re slowly being eroded away?
Don’t go to the exhibition. Watch the documentary of the same name instead.
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2 replies to “Taking Liberties at the British Library”
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Rob Ainsley
05/02/09
Hi.
Sorry you didn't enjoy the exhibition.
We're a library, so most of the documents we can display do tend to come from the past, rather than the future. We'll work on it, though!
We think the ID-cards comparison is indeed pretty obvious, which is why we didn't think it needed further emphasis.
And we honestly don't know what you mean by cheerleading or being self-congratulatory. If you check out some of the podcasts we've made of events staged to accompany the exhibition, you'll hear loss of civil liberties coming up again and again.
For instance, Shami Chakrabarti talks at length (90 minutes, in fact) about it.
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery.....barti.html
In a talk on one of the items in the exhibition related to the slave trade, you'll find a very critical assessment of the anti-slave trade movement, pointing out many reasons not to feel too self-congratulatory.
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery.....audio.html
In the latest podcast - which should be going up soon, maybe even today - Prof Linda Colley and AC Grayling rail against the present erosion of liberties too.
Thanks for your interest in British Library exhibitions.
You might be interested to know that a new free exhibition has just started, 'Sound and Fury'. You can listen to a collection of landmark speeches from Gladstone to Churchill to Tommy Woodrooffe to Hitler to Martin Luther King to Brian Johnston.
Angellaa
24/02/09
Hmm, very cognitive post.
Is this theme good enough for the Digg?
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