To Run the British Museum, You’ll Get $275,000 and a Host of Problems

Wanted: Someone to revive belief in one of many world’s most visited museums after an embarrassing scandal, deal with restitution claims and lift $1.27 billion for a serious refurbishment.

Salary: $275,000 a 12 months.

The British Museum in London this week started the search for a brand new director. Four months in the past, Hartwig Fischer resigned from that place after the museum introduced that considered one of its curators had looted round 1,500 objects from its storerooms, then offered some on eBay.

In September, Mark Jones, a former chief of the Victoria and Albert Museum, was appointed to run the British Museum, however solely on an interim foundation.

Applicants for the everlasting place will need to have a “vision for the future of the British Museum and its purpose as a national and a global museum in the 21st century,” the job posting says. But they need to additionally be capable to take care of a number of issues affecting the august establishment, which is the world’s third most visited museum.

As nicely because the fallout from the theft scandal, which has broken morale among the many museum’s practically 1,000-strong employees, the chosen candidate must handle requires the return of contested objects within the museum’s assortment, together with tons of of Benin Bronzes and the Parthenon Sculptures, also called the Elgin Marbles. The new director may even want to guide fund-raising efforts for a refurbishment challenge involving a reorganization of the museum’s galleries and enhancements to the museum’s plumbing, heating and leaky roof. The Financial Times has reported that it is going to price 1 billion kilos, round $1.27 billion.

Last October, George Osborne, the museum’s chairman, informed British lawmakers that discovering the proper candidate to guide the establishment was “a very, very complicated job.” Because additionally it is a analysis group, Osborne added, the profitable applicant would wish “to command the respect of the academic community,” in addition to having expertise “managing large, complex organizations.”

The director will likely be paid £215,841 a 12 months, about $275,000, in accordance with the itemizing. That sum is paltry in comparison with the salaries paid to the administrators of equal American establishments. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York pays Max Hollein, its director, a base wage of $1 million, in accordance with tax filings. In the United States, some museum administrators additionally obtain luxurious housing on high of their wage.

Observers recurrently point out a handful of significant contenders for the British Museum job. Those embody Ian Blatchford, the director of the Science Museum in London; Nicholas Cullinan, who leads Britain’s National Portrait Gallery and who just lately oversaw a multimillion pound renovation of that establishment; and Taco Dibbits, the director-general of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, who has overseen a few of Europe’s most talked-about latest exhibitions, together with a blockbuster 2023 Vermeer retrospective.

Representatives for Cullinan, Dibbits and Blatchford all declined to remark.

In preserving with latest high-profile American museum appointments, the job itemizing means that the British Museum’s trustees are open to sudden, and even outsider, candidates. “We are agnostic about the type of candidate we are looking for, whether that is someone from within or outside the museum sector,” the itemizing says. Last 12 months, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation named Mariët Westermann, the vice chancellor of N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, as its new chief.

Potential candidates have simply a few weeks to use for the position: The time limit is Jan. 26.