Tomb raiders

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

Jonathan Jones
Thursday November 15, 2007

Guardian

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.

Yes, you emailers, I know I'm privileged, I know I'm lucky. I got to see Tutankhamun's treasures a few years ago in Egypt, in the fantastically atmospheric old Cairo Museum. There, in the unhurried galleries of the world's greatest collection of Egyptian art, I was able to experience these wonders in an intimate, contemplative setting. I'm perfectly placed, then, to rain snobbery and contempt on what for many will be the chance of a lifetime to glimpse something of this miraculous, wondrous treasure.

Should I hold my fire? The exhibition, Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, is touring the world to fund Egypt's struggle to preserve its unique heritage. Surely it's best to ignore the irritations of this strange event, and to concentrate on the "wonderful things" - Howard Carter's words on first peeping into the tomb - at its heart.

And I would love to be positive. To caution you not to get too disheartened when you come out of North Greenwich station and there before you is that stupid, ugly dome you hoped never to visit again - the O2, as the millennial folly now calls itself. Not to despair when you go inside and drift down a shopping-mall line with sad cafes before entering the show via an escalator that makes it just like going to the adjacent multiplex cinema. Not to listen to the horrible music that plays not merely in the show's corridors but in its actual galleries. Not to be disgusted by the banal architecture that effortlessly recreates the feeling of a posh hotel lobby. Not to be distracted by all the films, overcalculated lighting effects and fake pillars. I would love to say, in short: ignore the trappings of the exhibition, and focus on the objects, for they will more than repay the effort.

But they don't. Try as I might at this horrible exhibition, I could not recapture one shred of the passion that these artefacts inspired in me the first time I saw them. I feel angry to have seen it - angry with myself for not heeding the warning signs, those vulgar ads and cheap publicity stunts. I should have stayed away.

Am I saying that the exhibition fails to give value for money? On the contrary: it is the most exactly calculated exhibition I have ever seen. Everything has been weighed in the scales, as the heart is weighed against the feather of Maat in Egyptian myth. With Anubis - or rather, the National Geographic Society, which collaborated with Egypt to create the exhibition - scrutinising the accuracy of the scales, a microscopically acute calculation has been made of what will be accepted as value for money. What is the exact quantity and quality of artefacts from Tutankhamun's tomb that will convince people that they have seen something worthwhile? How many other highlights from Egypt's collections will be needed to pad out the experience? It has been curated with a calculator.

I once stayed in a five-star hotel that had its own miniature archaeological museum, and it was like this - a simulacrum of culture for the cultureless. There's something replica-like about the display, so much so that I found myself checking, with mounting paranoia, that certain exhibits were authentic. The British Museum has advised on presentation, yet the labelling is perfunctory; so too is any sense of historical context. Still, as I say, the exhibition does do its job with an American Express, CNN, Hilton Hotel efficiency. It has been to a variety of American cities, and God knows, it feels like it. At the end, you stand in a darkened room to watch recent TV news footage of Tutankhamun's mummy going on display in the Valley of Kings - and that says it all about an exhibition that is as carefully selected, ruthlessly edited and neatly delivered as cable television. If hell is being locked inside a Discovery channel documentary narrated by Tom Hanks, this is hell - although it's actually Omar Sharif who narrates part of it.

Let's be blunt, and deliberately crude: as you descend a staircase so bland and poorly designed that it destroys any shred of mood from the early galleries and their highlights of Egyptian art history, and you prepare to enter the dark rooms containing the actual shiny treasures of King Tut, you need to readjust your expectations: everything in this version of his treasury is quite small. It's not an overwhelming assembly, it's more like a bijoux selection.

Every little thing is beautiful. Of course it is: the ancient Egyptians invented beauty. The civilisation that matured by the third millennium BC on the banks of the river Nile and survived, long after Tutankhamun's death in 1323 BC, into the early Christian era, was the first to conceive a canon of beauty. Egyptian art values harmony, balance, and exquisite form. Long before the Greeks, it was the Egyptians who saw the grace of the human body - as demonstrated early in this show by a wooden painted image of a nude female diver - and gave Greek sculpture its starting point.

Yet, before you come to Tutankhamun in this show, there is a sudden break in the line of beauty, a rift in Egyptian history. You encounter the long, thin, distorted face of Akhenaten, a revolutionary pharaoh who rejected the traditional gods and the traditional art that served them. Akhenaten said that there was only one god, the Aten. He commanded his artists to abandon their harmonious, elegant conventions and depict him as he looked: ungainly, angular, with prominent neck tendons and beady eyes. In this dismal setting, Akhenaten's art comes off the best, because it breaks through the glitz and hits you as real art.

Akhenaten's revolution made him hated, like an Egyptian Oliver Cromwell. As soon as he died, the Aten cult was suppressed. The old gods were restored in the brief reign of his successor - probably his son - the child king Tutankhamun. Even though when Tutankhamun died he was surrounded by the regalia of a traditional king personifying both Ra and Osiris, there's a life and immediateness to the objects from his tomb that owes something to his predecessor's radical art style.

I want to you to wonder at Tutankhamun's tomb, to marvel at its preservation - and I am sorry, I am so sorry, if your only opportunity to do that is by visiting this exhibition. You will see a relatively decent number of "wonderful things", but the choice is clinical. Genuinely marvellous objects are insulted by making them serve as substitutes for more famous objects that cannot be with us. Compared with the nest of gigantic gold-covered shrines inside which the coffin was hidden, the little golden shrine in this show inevitably resembles a small-scale replica. And yet it's utterly real. The gold reliefs on its sides exemplify the naturalism and energy of Egyptian art at this moment: Tutankhamun on a hunting trip fires his bow while sitting on a stool; the birds flutter up in fright.

It isn't shallow to ask where the famous death mask is. That mask is not just the most exquisite treasure from the tomb - it is the highest artistic achievement, a portrait before the invention of portraiture, a beautiful and human face from remote antiquity. Replacing it with a tiny "coffinette" that held the viscera removed during the mummification process is, once again, to take a perfectly fascinating artefact on its own terms and mock it; displaying it by itself at the centre of a darkened chamber with video images to complete the illusion is ridiculous. If I told you to ignore the meretricious manoeuvre and appreciate the coffinette, I'd be reducing art to what sex was in Victorian times. Just do it for Egyptology. Do your duty. And above all, do it for the kids - don't deny them this educational experience of a lifetime!

It may be that you live in dread of your child growing up to be an archaeologist, stuck in an underpaid job at a local museum surrounded by dusty pots. If that's your nightmare, then by all means take your children to see this exhibition. It will put them off Egyptology - and may put them off history, art, and the entire education system.

This is a simulacrum of a serious exhibition. It makes real objects look and feel like fakes. It is artful in its meanness: there is just enough to silence complaint. There's an excellent choice of King Tut's jewellery, for example. But this is still just the garnish on the food. The food is not here.

Art, as Ruskin said, should not be approached in dumb wonder - it is a human expression. The beauty of Tutankhamun's tomb does not consist in the sheer quantity of priceless items. It is about communicating with someone who died more than three millennia ago. The sadness, the loss of a young life, is so immediate. But here he becomes a lifeless nothing, a famous name. From his wooden statue you can almost hear him cry: "I'm the world's oldest celebrity - get me out of here!"

Looking at Egyptian art is uplifting not only because it is almost always beautifully proportioned and richly imaginative, but because it faces the things that we need art to face: life and death and our fragility. It is eternally contemporary - except here where, uniquely, it is made into something chilly and meaningless.

I thought we'd evolved beyond the drab belief that art was good for you and that you must visit a blockbuster exhibition whether you liked it or not. This brings back all my worst memories of going to big event shows because the Sunday papers said that I should. That was before I learned to really enjoy art. Now I wonder if art critics are not just collaborators with curators in imposing experiences like this on the public when we'd do anything to avoid those experiences ourselves.

Egyptian art doesn't need grandiose lighting, let alone papier-mache pillars, to make it accessible. And I'll let you into a secret: it doesn't even need King Tut. It's a sublime experience just to wander in the last afternoon light into the British Museum and see darkling statues of cat-headed deities - which you can do for free - or to visit the nearby Petrie Museum in Bloomsbury, which houses the collection of the great Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie.

I felt driven to visit this little museum straight after the Tut experience, just to remind myself why ancient Egypt matters. There, in row after row of glass cases, are thousands of pots - yes, pots - and ceramic shards. They are the most important pots in the history of archaeology, because by analysing them Petrie established a dating sequence for pre-dynastic Egypt and the basis of modern prehistoric research. These red dusty relics of simple lives long ago could not be further in presentation from the dazzle in the dome. And each fragment is more real and lovely than a thousand hysterical, crowded blockbuster exhibitions like the Tutankhamun one. I hope I never see another one like it

· Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs is at The O2, London, until August 30. Details: 0844 844 0003.