Michael Portillo, chair of the judges for this year’s The Art Fund Prize for museums and galleries, is trying to explain to me just how difficult it is comparing the museums on this year’s long list.

Its less a question of comparing apples and oranges, he says, and more a question of comparing apple and aardvarks. I can see what he means: the ten museums on the longlist for the prize, which rewards a major exhibition or renovation undertaken in the last year in the UK, range from stalwart cultural institutions such as the British Museum to much smaller specialist museums, such as the Polar Museum in Cambridge.

It is to the Polar Museum that Portillo and the other judges have come to assess the renovation last year which gutted the museum and created the spacious and engaging galleries of today. As Portillo says the story of Captain Scott told in the museum is one “written in the British DNA” and there is certainly plenty of evidence in the exhibits of a very British sort of eccentricity.

One particularly brilliant museum case dedicated to the late-Victorian search for the Northwest Passage included a miniature barrel organ taken on an expedition – not, one would think, the most obvious thing to pack for a perilous journey across the ice.

Artefacts from other expeditions reveal eccentricity teetering close to insanity with items such as hot air balloons designed to scatter messages printed on little pieces of silk to the missing explorer Franklin and his team. (The accompanying label wryly notes “Franklin and his men were probably dead before the first balloon was sent up”.)

The Arts Council's recent publication of its funding allocations for the year after next, and the subsequent revelation that many arts organisations – including Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge – will receive much reduced funding makes the eternal topic of a shortage of money in the arts particularly pertinent. Portillo, ever the practiced politician and keen perhaps not to rock the boat for his former colleagues, refused to be drawn in any respect on arts funding, speaking only generally about the importance of accessibility for all in museums.

One of his co-judges, Baroness Young, an independent peer and arts and heritage consultant, had no such reservations. She described the cuts as “devastating” and criticised their unnecessary scale and rapidity. She described an attack against the arts not only through reduced funding but also through cuts to arts and humanities university courses and a reduced public budget to commission works of art.

Against this apparently bleak outlook for the arts she did point out some comfort both in her belief that the Arts Council had done their best in allocating money when in very trying circumstances and her confidence in the resourcefulness of artists and art organisations.

I put it to both Portillo and Baroness Young that one method often discussed of reducing the cost of museums is to digitise the contents of the museum and close the physical location. While both commended the work done in putting collections online by the Polar Museums and other museums they had visited, they felt that this should be an adjunct to a physical presence rather than a replacement. An online presence, done well, should serve both to bring the collection to those unable to visit the museum and to encourage those who had come to examine objects in more detail.

Baroness Young summed up both the purpose of The Art Fund Prize and also museums more widely: “I have a specific interest in how museums can make objects speak to people in the age in which we live…there is something very special in actually seeing a hat worn on an expedition 150 years ago.”