“To those of us reared on the fogeyish assumption that a museum’s collection is sacrosanct – that the British Museum will always have its Elgin Marbles and the Pitt Rivers its shrunken tribal heads – the idea of ancient vases being mauled and chipped by mobs of primary schoolchildren or Roman coin hoards being flogged off to fund the acquisition of a more socially relevant collection of graffiti art is indeed a pretty shocking one. But for the new breed of museum professional, this line of thinking is very much the fashionable orthodoxy.”