Annotation by Jonah Keller on Review | ‘£1 a minute’: is the British Museum's Bayeux Tapestry exhibition worth it?

the £1 a minute framing assumes £33 is steep. I'd say it's under the market-clearing price. people sat in online queues for up to 9 hours and the museum set a one-day sales record. that's what excess demand looks like. the rationing happened in the queue instead of at the till

the price I get. we charge more for the saturday morning box than the tuesday one and nobody writes a review about it. the announcement every two minutes is what would bug me as a customer

@jonahkeller “as long as I liked” is the one thing a £33 ticket can't buy. It's one 70m case with around 100 people along it (Bailey's count), and NPR says entry goes out in 10-minute slots for a 40-minute visit. That's a timetable. Let one slot linger at Hastings and every slot behind it bunches up, so you sell fewer tickets or charge more for each. @luisortega on price, the museum's answer here is that £33 is the peak fare and the showcase has to be paid for.

Jonah, on your question: that's n of 1. One reviewer's stopwatch on the first public day. I'd want a few ordinary weekday timings before I called it the design.

@gracewhitfield one data point, sure, but it matches the plan. Before opening, the BBC said the one-way route takes about 40 minutes, so 35 is the design working. The number I'd chart is the hope of at least 1 million visitors between 10 Sept and 11 July. That's north of 3,000 people a day past one case.

@elliebrennan fine, if the plan says 40 minutes then it's the design. And @rachelkim, I'll take the maths. My complaint is the edit: a steady walk plays all 70m at one speed, and no editor would cut Harold's death at the same pace as a banquet. The BBC's closing tip is for people like me anyway: a full-size Victorian copy in Reading, free to see.

The two reviews disagree about homework. Bailey says read up before you go. Lukowski's five-star one says drink it in and do the reading after, and he guesses the thin context is deliberate, to stop people getting bogged down. So it may be the same choice as your 35 seconds a scene. Under-16s go free, so a lot of that reading after will be kids asking someone like me.

“It is really very light on context for a British Museum show. It could have dug far deeper into the historical background of England and Normandy in the 11th century.”

TReview: The Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museumtimeout.com

Tangent, but before it opened the museum's director told the FT this loan might offer “a glimmer of possibility” on the Parthenon Sculptures. Museums Association on where those talks stood at the start of the month:

“The British Museum has been in talks with the Greek government for several years about a potential partnership that would see the marbles temporarily return to Athens in exchange for rolling loans of other Ancient Greek treasures. The negotiations appear to have stalled lately, with Greek officials indicating they will accept nothing less than the full, permanent repatriation of the 2,500-year-old artefacts.”

MBayeux Tapestry loan could pave way for Parthenon Sculptures deal, says Cullinanmuseumsassociation.org

@marcusbell the analogy breaks on ownership though. france lends it and gets it back, both sides agree whose it is. per that same piece greek officials want nothing less than full permanent return, and the British Museum Act 1963 bars permanent deaccessioning from the collection

@priyavenkat he says himself there's no template:

““Every example of a relationship or cultural history is different, so there isn’t a cookie-cutter template,” he told the paper.”

MBayeux Tapestry loan could pave way for Parthenon Sculptures deal, says Cullinanmuseumsassociation.org

@nadiahaddad huh. So the thin context and the conveyor belt might be one decision. I'd trade five of my imaginary minutes at Hastings for a longer first act.