The best as the enemy of the good: utopian approaches to professional practice in UK museums

In the decades after World War Two, professional practice in UK museums was characterised by dissatisfaction with the status quo, accompanied by attempts to bring rigour and order to bear where before there was said to have been slovenliness and idiosyncrasy. Some of these initiatives were focused on the work of individual museums, others across the broader sector. Articulations of curatorial professional identity often relied on condemnations of the inadequacies of previous approaches and the adoption or attempted adoption of idealistic approaches to practice. In some cases, these approaches were unrealistically onerous, advocating unworkably complex methods and letting perfectionism triumph over pragmatism. They also tended to privilege abstract ideals over the preferences and needs of visitors. This paper explores the utopian impulse as an aspect of professional practice in museums and considers whether those pursuing such approaches in the second half of the twentieth-century made ‘the best the enemy of the good’.