King Tut's knick-knacks were last in London in 1972, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their discovery. One-and-a-half million of us queued to see them in the British Museum. I wondered why I was there, for I had never had even the slightest aesthetic response to things Egyptian; and when I came away I wondered again, for I had still had none and would have swapped all that rare magnificence for a fistful of drawings by obscure Italian old masters or one single bronze by Rodin. I have not since thought of that exhibition (or of Tut) and can recall nothing of it now, apart from the ubiquity of gold and my first experience of the miseries of the museum-crush in which even the standing on-tiptoe distant peep between the many heads in front cannot be had without the nudge of neighbouring elbows. In the 35 years since, the museum-crush has become an inevitability, with every exhibition promoted as a blockbuster, as the biggest, the best, the first, the only - and now that Tut is back in town and the circus barkers are at work, it is happening yet again, for Tut is the Hottentot Venus, the Elephant Man and the Bearded Lady, and in their many thousands the ignorant curious will flock to greet him in his first exposure for a generation.
Or will they? Tut himself is not there - his mummy has suffered enough from the humidity of gawpers in Egypt to risk the journey here - nor is his gold mask, the idealised portrait of the boy in gold and lapis lazuli that was placed over his mummified head and shoulders outside the bandages in which the whole body was wrapped. It was this above all things that drew the crowds to the British Museum, and this new show has nothing that quite matches it. And then there is the matter of the unprecedentedly high admission charge - £15 on the first four days of the week and £20 on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And a booking fee of £1.75 for every single ticket.
Will crowds come away delighted, enthralled and determined to join an Open University degree course in Egyptology? Will stag parties be spent with the great bulk of Tut material in the vast Cairo Museum instead of boozing in Budapest or Bratislava? Will holidays be spent pursuing Tut to Karnak and Luxor instead of lazing on the beaches of the Seychelles and Sodomolinos? I doubt it. The honest among us, having experienced neither visceral thrill nor intellectual arousal, will return to our homes mildly troubled by guilt that this is so, comfort ourselves with "Well - at least we've done our duty", and settle down to the evening's television schedules and a cup of tea.
Guardian Unlimited (Jonathan Jones)
The treasures of Tutankhamun are the finest artistic achievement of ancient times. Why on earth have they been desecrated with papier-mache pillars and Muzak? Jonathan Jones registers his disgust.
I've been robbed. I had this beautiful memory, and someone has stolen it. Yesterday I stood and mourned it beneath the howling, empty Greenwich sky.
It was the memory of a boy king's golden face: opulent, yes, but so tenderly observed, so human, so vulnerable. Those black-pupilled eyes, fringed with blue kohl. And around him, like friends, his treasures: lifesize statues, full-scale beds, stupendous shrines. Encountering Tutankhamun in Cairo was an experience to treasure. Now I've done something stupid, accepted an invitation I shouldn't, seen things I wish I hadn't - and the treasure is spoiled. The beauty is gone. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin said that it is never simple awe we should seek to feel in front of art, because nature is always going to be more awe-inspiring - a mountain higher, the blue of the sky more lovely. Art is about mind, imagination and feeling. The real treasure of King Tut is his soul. And that's what I have suddenly lost connection with - it's gone, drowned out by tinny Muzak.
On the same Guardian Unlimited Arts Blog Maev Kennedy says that the £20.00 entrance fee is well worth it.
The corporate hospitality space with its silk tented bar and drooping palm tree and the shop with its £29.95 tissue box holder (you pull the paper hankies out Tutankhamun's nose) are dizzyingly vulgar, but the exhibition - except for the remorselessly escalating background music - truly is not. The galleries are spacious, the labels terse but quite elegantly written, the cases extremely plain and very handsome, and the lighting ravishing. The gold mask on all the publicity is not the one I wept over, but a miniature sarcophagus the size of a large Easter egg, intended to hold the pharaoh's liver - but it is a wonderful thing.
Would I pay the £20 now, if I hadn't attained that enchanted realm, a place my teenage self would hardly have believed possible, where doors to such treasures often open free? Of course I would. And indeed will. I'll buy the ticket for my 17 year old niece, exactly the age I was: £20 is a lot to her, more than four hours waitressing, or five hours on her Saturday supermarket checkout. But I think even if she had to pay it herself, she would and think it worth it.
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