A year into his directorship, Nicholas Cullinan, 48, leads the British Museum, custodian of eight million objects and recipient of six million annual visitors. The collection includes contested items such as the Parthenon marbles, Benin bronzes, and the Rosetta Stone, all focal points of debate over cultural violence. Cullinan brings extensive museum experience from Tate, The Met, and MoMA, and previously led the National Portrait Gallery for eight years, overseeing a $55 million renovation. He favors museography and artist commissions that reject an exclusively Western mindset, attracts both erudite and popular audiences without overt politicization, and opposes strict high/low culture stratification.
Cullinan is far from an unknown in the world of culture. He has worked at London's Tate Museum, and at The Met and the MoMA in New York. Upon his return to London, he led the National Portrait Gallery for eight years, during which he captained a $55 million renovation that not only changed its physiognomy, but also placed it at the center of contemporary discourse.
Cullinan, who worked at the museum's front desk when he was a student and today wields both encyclopedic knowledge and celebrity friendships with Courtney Love and Tracey Emin, brings in artists and museography that breaks with an exclusively Western mindset and, it bears mentioning, a certain academic tedium. The young director manages to win over the erudite public and seduce the common visitor who attend the museum en masse without resorting to the openly political.
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