Moctezuma at the British Museum

I had never been to an exhibition at the British Museum before last week, mostly due to the fact that there are a staggering number of interesting things that you can see there for free. Handing over at least £10 for a ticket has therefore never seemed necessary, and, if the current Moctezuma display is representative of these exhibitions, is not something that I will be doing again in a hurry.

It doesn't help that they have taken over the reading room in order to stage this exhibition. I love the reading room. With its multiple storeys of heaving bookshelves running around the outer wall, all in good old-fashioned heavy dark wood, and its desks protruding in a star-like fashion from the centre, it is my idea of heaven. Having all its glory hidden away behind screens irks me. Especially when the reason for it is so underwhelming.

The major failing of Moctezuma is that it doesn't have a coherent story to tell. There are indeed some nice objects to look at (although the masks that were my favourites are normally available to see in the Museum anyway), but many of the descriptions are repetitive and failed to provide any useful insight. The exhibition is supposedly divided up into sections on such things as religion and warfare, although if it weren't for the signs it would be difficult to tell this. Little is truly engaging, which is a huge disappointment as it wouldn't have taken much extra effort to make this a must-see event.

For example, there was a diagram comprising of three gears showing how the Aztec’s, or rather the Mexica’s, (the refusal to call people by their commonly known names was another annoyance) calendar worked. Why not make actual gears rather than just drawing them, so that people could move them and hence understand better how the whole system slotted together? Instead of just having small models of temple buildings why not make a mock-up of the interior of one of them that people could walk through? The Aztec way of drawing is highly stylised and figures are often difficult to pick out on the un-painted stonework, so why not give an explanation as to why their artists worked in this way?

I came away not really knowing what Moctezuma was like as a king, what society was like in the Aztec civilisation, or how the ordinary people went about their days, all things that I had hoped that the exhibition would shed light on. I could probably now sketch out a map of the centre of Tenochtitlan, or tell you the outline of the myths surrounding its creation, but I didn't feel in immersed in the culture. I appreciate that there are many things that we just don't know due to the Spanish invasion, but even if it wasn't completely accurate a bit of speculation could have added much needed colour, and the points we can be more certain on could have been fleshed out. The exhibition has received rave reviews, and so maybe I just didn't 'get' it, but I would still caution those thinking of spending a lot of money on a ticket.

Montezuma: Aztec Ruler