A text-based installation by the Uruguayan artist Louis Camnitzer has appeared on a handful of U.S museums over the last decade [pictured], including the Guggenheim, New York. Its message is simple: the contents of museums is not a fixed product, but an ever-evolving process which only exists with the participation of the public. Museums are not storehouses of past glories, but spaces to shape our understanding of the present and future.

Camnitzer’s words neatly reflect much of the new thinking about museums in the 21st century and beyond. They spell out some of the key concerns: who and what they’re for - and how they achieve this through the interrelations of museum, artist and public.  

One place to start thinking about the future of museums is how they collectively define themselves now, in the present. Or rather, their inability to do just that: the International Council of Museums (ICOM) met in Kyoto in 2019 to update their current definition of a museum, but they failed spectacularly to agree on anything.

For over 50 years, the definition of museums has been fixed as ‘a non-profit institution [that] acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment.’

ICOM then proposed a new definition which was more political and stressed a wider purpose for museums. It states that museums ‘work in active partnership with … communities to enhance understanding of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.’ The new definition was not agreed to by the consortium’s 40,000 professionals, even after an 18-month delay following the divisive meeting in Kyoto.

Museums are at a tipping point, and this split is one example of many. Whilst a new direction for museums has been discussed since the mid 1970s, the last two years have accelerated the urgency of such conversations. The most pressing reasons for this have been the pandemic and the resulting meltdown in museum finances, coupled with a confrontation with the historical legacies of racial injustice. These events have forced museums to radically re-examine their purpose, and their future.

The pandemic became a testing ground for museums to accelerate different models of engagement, beyond their traditional offering. The UK Museum of the Year Award 2020 was presented to Firstsite Art Gallery in Colchester, not for its programming but its community work, which included offering free school meals to children during the holidays and sending out art packs. This would have been unimageable before the pandemic.

Talking collectively about museums can be tricky. Such a plurality of form and function exists within London museums, let alone the UK or internationally. Whilst creating a museum taxonomy may unnecessarily emphasise differences over a commonality of purpose, it is useful to distinguish between ‘regional/local’, ‘national’ and ‘world/encyclopaedic’ museums, as these have been facing different challenges and have very different futures. The many other museums outside of this trio – most notably urban art galleries such as the Tate Modern – are discussed without any labelling.

LOCAL

The transformation of regional museums in the UK over the last decade holds clues as to what is possible when big picture thinking happens, as well as what is at stake in their often-radical transformation. One way to categorise the change of direction is a shedding of nostalgia, replaced by an embrace of the present and future communities these museums exist within. Rather than being a storehouse for forgotten ways of life, regional museums are increasingly seeing themselves as ethical actors in the present, revitalising their collections through contemporary dialogues and dynamic programming.

Derby’s Museum of Making is perhaps the best example of this. The current museum is housed in the Derby Silk Mill – then the first fully mechanised factory in the world in 1721. Although at the heart of Britain’s industrial past, the museum does not fall prey to presenting itself as a site of loss and longing – albeit it is easier than some areas given Derby is currently home to Toyota, Bombardier and Rolls Royce. Despite this local boon, these companies often fail to hire locally and instead rely on overseas workers to fill positions.

Aside from the museum’s ability to display of all 30,000 objects at once, what is remarkable is the organisation’s integrated, industry-grade workshop and outreach programs. These aim to directly address this local skill gap by inspiring a new generation of Derby makers: it is currently hosting the Midland Maker Challenge for local teenagers, with the idea this will eventually stop reliance on oversees workers. The workshops are open to anybody, and equipped with the tools to make either your own kitchen or the next generation wind turbine.

Unlike ‘encyclopaedic’ museums like the British Museum, with their complicated connection to British identity, there is real civic pride on view in these regional museums which can be seen right across Britain from Stornoway to Brighton. Museums have been thinking carefully about significant past contributions and not been shy to get rid of sentimental baggage.

A similar transformation to Derby’s museum has taken place in Suffolk. Here, the museum was until recently known as The Museum of East Anglian Life, a place which oozed nostalgic visions of rural idylls, before it faced the future with a recent rebrand to The Food Museum. The renewed focus is on the social history and production of food, given the reported lack of connection and understanding surrounding food production around Britain today.

Set within their political context, the transformation of these regional museums and their passionate ambition echo broader societal shifts, namely localism over globalism and a desire for culture to ‘earn its keep’ rather than exist in aesthetic isolationism. Regional cultural development policy now closely focuses on the economic benefit, with the Labour government’s 2001 report Renaissance in the Regions beginning the current model. It is therefore no surprise that museums have begun to think so practically: they are having to justify their existence on the basis of their net economic value. 

NATIONAL

Unlike the tenacity of regional museums, national and major urban art museums in the UK are facing existential challenges, unsure how to move forward. Their confusion issues from various things, including: how to remain primarily cultural institutions whilst engaging in social work with their communities and how to effectively program to ensure – on the one hand – commercial, often hackneyed ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions which provide funding, with – on the other – more diverse but less profitable exhibitions.

Cultural versus social

The Turner Prize is divisive, and therefore useful to illustrate the competing visions of the future of the museums. In 2021, the finalists were made up not of ‘artists’, but collectives, all of whom advanced ideas about the role of museums as sites for social change. These included Black Obsidian Soundsystem, who in their words are ‘a community of queer, trans and non-binary black and people of colour involved in art, sound and radical activism, following in the legacies of sound system culture.’ As usual, it split opinion – one critic described it witheringly as ‘the worst ever … irrelevant enough to harm the prize’s reputation’.

The significant takeaway is to understand why museums value this type of work. Arguably, these practises which exist at the boundary of social work and art are an inevitable response to years of austerity where artists are increasingly looking to fill in the gaps to provide basic social services. This isn’t new: in 2015, the collective Assemble won the Turner Prize for renovating a Liverpool council estate. This turn to the collective, therefore, is not a rejection of the idea of the artist – as the Telegraph would have us believe – but a desperate plea for art to carry on existing. Beyond the Turner Prize, therefore, museums must not be put off by the critics and wholly embrace this mode of cultural production.

Beyond the blockbuster

Museums revenues are built around putting on expensive, blockbuster exhibitions to guarantee a global audience and therefore a premium return on investment. It’s normal for museums to bid against each other to host these globetrotting shows, such is their popularity.

In today’s cash-strapped environment, many museum directors are reporting a move away from reliance on the blockbuster model. Alistair Hudson of the Whitworth, Manchester describes their new path as “a holistic approach”. Rather than focussing on special exhibitions that maximise visitor numbers, he argues that “a more rounded programme makes for a much more dynamic institution.” A now relevant 2019 report from the LSE: The Art World’s Response to the Challenge of Inequality discussed not just the economic problems of blockbusters, but also the cultural ones. It highlighted blockbusters ‘limit chances for minority artists’ therefore reducing scope to encounter them.

One museum which has trod the line delicately is the Barbican, whose Helen Frankenthaler retrospective did well to highlight an artist where there is a gulf between their talent and museum recognition. For the museum, it was the equivalent of an art house film that did well at the box office. Museums need to stop mounting David Hockney retrospectives, when they can still make huge returns by highlighting less visible artists.

Although probably Britain’s most benign national museum, the National Museum of Wales – particularly the St. Fagans History Museum – gently illustrates the ideological framework underpinning a positive way forward. In his recent BBC Radio 4 series documenting the changing role of museums, The Museums That Make Us, Neil McGregor visited St Fagans where he discussed the Oral Archive, which is central to the museum’s vision. Whilst generally unremarkable – with recordings ranging from early Welsh language speakers to more recent recordings from Wales’ Windrush generation – this is the archive’s point. The museum’s director discussed one of Wales’ most loved academic writers, Raymond Williams, and his assertion that ‘culture is ordinary, in every society and every mind’. Williams’ 1958 essay, Culture is Ordinary, articulated his belief that culture meant both ‘a whole way of life’ i.e. related to everyday in an anthropological sense, as well as its forms of signification (novels, visual art as well as adverts) which he dubbed ‘the special processes of discovery and creative effort’.

To really understand culture, for Williams, you had to understood how these two fitted together: life itself and its signification. This understanding of culture is central to how museums are beginning to, and should, present themselves. Culture issues from everywhere, and from everybody.

One individual featured in the Oral Archive at Wales National Museum is Mrs Vernesta Cyril OBE, a celebrated Welsh midwife born in St Lucia. She described how being included in the project had fostered a sense of belonging unlike any other. Museums must be about fostering such a sense of belonging, of shared heritage and creating a space that reflects people now.

GLOBAL

The ‘world’ or ‘encyclopaedic’ museum, however, has become the focus of debates on museum’s future. These museums count the whole world as their community, given their extensive and often divisive collections. Understanding their history is crucial to see how they must evolve.

Archetypal museums such as the Louvre and the British Museum came about in the 18th century following the Enlightenment when society split along religious and secular lines. Secular knowledge – unlike religious truth – was rational, empirically identifiable and rooted in lived experience. The belief these museums were founded on was that such knowledge was liberating, and a museum was an essential part of a civilised society. By being truly public institutions, they functioned as clear demonstrators of each nation’s commitment to equality.

Henry Cole, founder of the Victoria and Albert Museum, further articulated what he saw as the social function of museums:

If you wish your schools of science and art to be effective, your health, the air and your food to be wholesome, your life to be long, your manufacturers to improve, your trade to increase and your people to be civilized, you must have museums of science and art, to illustrate the principles of life, health, nature, science, art and beauty.

These museums were not the neutral spaces they claimed to be, however. For two centuries museum architecture emulated ceremonial monuments, whether they were temples, cathedrals or renaissance palaces. Through this evocation of religious rituals, they enacted a certain way of seeing the world upon the visiting public. As Carol Duncan has described, visiting a museum was a ‘civilising ritual’, and we can appreciate the ‘ideological force of a cultural experience that claims for its truths the status of objective knowledge. To control a museum means precisely to control the representation of a community and its higher values and truth’.  

As products of empire, these museums presented a very particular world view, in which their displays were filled with imperialism, ‘scientific’ racism, and Darwinist cultural hierarchies. The three pinnacles of western civilisation – Ancient Greece and Rome, followed by the Renaissance – were readily introduced as the heritage of the present.

The importance of articulating national identity became embedded in museums mission at this time. The museum was in effect a transformer: it took what had been private collections from the wealthy ruling classes, where each object signified the social status and wealth of its owner, and transformed this into a narrative of national and civic greatness.

In Victorian Britain, the spectacle of museums interacted with a novel culture of display, which the sociologist Tony Bennet has described as ‘the exhibitionary complex’. In his often cited book, The Birth of the Museum (the title consciously evoking Foucault), Bennet describes the outpouring of public, representational visual culture which was concurrent to the birth of museums. By examining Victorian panoramas, fairgrounds, arcades and international exhibitions, Bennet understands these to be emblematic of a strategy to instil a hegemonic, ‘civic seeing’ not by coercion but gentle persuasion. Bennet saw museums as tools to create an orderly society. If previous eras had used public executions and fear tactics, now it was about using culture to create order and virtue.  Although museums now try not to instil this ‘civic seeing’, the London Olympics opening ceremony in 2012 certainly recalls it.

Museums around the world, however, still often project this grandiose projection of national virtue. Often, they become tools for autocratic rulers to provide a veneer of western liberalism, and possibly demonstrate their suitability for military or economic aid. Notably, this was the case with Imelda Marcos’ Metropolitan Museum of Manila in the Philippines which opened in 1975 to coincide with the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Manila. The museum was put together in a matter of weeks, and reflected the economic relations between the Philippines and United States embodied by the huge US contribution to the Philippine military. The museum focused on Western art, and was full of loaned works from prestigious collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

The same story is true today, albeit with added dimensions. Viktor Orbán’s €1bn Liget project in Hungary is one conspicuous example. The plan aims to transform the Városliget area of Budapest into a showcase of Hungarian national culture, with a now-opened House of Music, a planned Museum of Ethnography and a new National Gallery among other smaller projects. The new plan deliberately mimics the layout of the park during the 1896 Millennium Exhibition, such is its emphasis on developing the ‘civic seeing’ of museum’s origins.

Unlike in Victorian Britain, however, there is fierce local opposition from activists and Budapest’s mayor who has said he will defend from further development ‘with my own body, if necessary’. They decry what they see as jingoistic ‘concrete mania’ in a public park, with a government promoting its own brand of illiberal democracy.

Restitution

Beyond these tokenistic cultural baubles, the most fundamental challenge to world museums’ future – the restitution of ill-gotten heritage – is bringing a novel geo-political slant to some of the world’s newest museums. It is a further demonstration of the close links between cultural heritage and power, and museums’ active role in this.

In a recent and well-argued book Restitution: The Return of Cultural Artefacts, Alexander Herman points out that the debate around restitution has “afforded certain governments a new way of establishing themselves through diplomatic links and geopolitical influence,” and President Macron’s words – and subsequent actions – about “doing the right thing” were in fact a way for France to assert its validity in Francophone Africa. The 27 items promised by Macron to the Republic of Benin and Senegal should therefore be seen in this light, but this is fairly apparent. 

A more intriguing example of a country using the restitution debate to further its international influence is China. China’s so-called “century of humiliation” (c.1839-1949) with the accompanying subjugation and looting – often by European armies – has meant restitution has often been on its agenda. But beyond recovering its own cultural property, China has endeavoured to assist less powerful nations with their own struggles, seemingly as an aspect of the Belt and Road Initiative, but in practice with strategic motives. When visiting Greece in 2019, Xi Jinping expressed sympathy for the country’s claim on the Parthenon marbles, saying “[w]e should work together. Because we have a lot of our own relics abroad.” China needs to remain on the right side of Greece since the port of Piraeus, is Chinese-owned and vital for their European export market.

Similar motives can be ascribed to China’s direct sponsorship of art initiatives in other countries. The Museum of Black Civilisations in Dakar, Senegal, opened to much acclaim in 2019. It cost around €35 million and was paid for exclusively by the Chinese state. Senegal was the first West African country to become part of the Belt and Road Initiative in that same year, and it’s no coincidence the port of Dakar is another vital logistical hub for China.

Budapest’s autocratic transformation and the Chinese sponsored Museum of Black Civilisations is one future for museums. But what about the future of traditional museums in liberal democracies such as the Louvre and British Museum, saddled with more difficult questions than just their political uses?

The new Humboldt Forum in Berlin shows us that the museum of the future cannot resemble the museum of the past. It shows primarily non-Western art, leading it to be described as the ‘German equivalent of the British Museum’. It opened to the public in 2021 in the rebuilt Berlin palace using the collections of two older Berlin museums.

The museum’s opening was dominated by the news that the Nigerian ambassador to Germany had asked Angela Merkel to return several looted Benin Bronzes. Following the request, Hartmut Dorgerloh, a director, announced the museum would fully restitute Benin objects. He claimed that the museum would only exhibit replicas of the bronzes or “leave symbolic empty spaces”. Despite the museum’s architectural splendour and years of development, it’s difficult not to see it as already obsolete: spending over €700 million to then leave several empty spaces is gimmicky and absurd. On its website, the Humboldt Form claims to be ‘more than a museum’. Ironically, this reads as an admission that traditional museums (i.e. those housed in ceremonial buildings with looted collections) are no longer fit for purpose. The Black Lives Matter movement forced museums to assess everything from their funding to the diversity of their collections and staff. It briefly appeared to be a moment of reckoning, but little meaningful work has taken place. The Tate Britain recently received a host of bad press for some of its labelling in the Hogarth and Europe exhibition earlier this year. One wall-text speculated about the origins of the wood used to make a chair in a self-portrait, commenting: ‘[C]ould the chair also stand in for all those unnamed black and brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity?’.

Again, it is a gimmicky response from an institution that should sort out its bigger problems,  like removing the racist Rex Whistler mural in its restaurant, rather than signal its virtue on incidental labels. In Britain, as with all liberal democracies, the museum has become one of the front lines of the culture wars. As publicly funded institutions this puts them in a perilous position as was made clear in 2020 by then Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden, who threatened to withdraw funds from museums ‘motivated by activism or politics’. The current Conservative government in the UK has abandoned the arms-length funding approach, instead demanding loyalty to the party’s values and even blocking the appointment of museum trustees they disagree with – as in the case of Aminul Hoque at Royal Museums Greenwich, who promotes the decolonisation of the curriculum.

Money

Although receiving public funds, most museums rely on private funding as well. Following the revelations from the Sackler family’s role in the opioid crisis, there is very little debate on the ethics of such funding, with all museums at least admitting they must end reliance on these families. This doesn’t change the fact museums now innately feel co-opted by market values.

As the subversive critic-duo The White Pube put simply in a 2019 text called ‘Why Museums are Bad Vibes’: ‘I can’t go to museums without thinking about money, the white powers that be, and the wider working environment. you know, they exploit volunteers, use zero-hour contracts … and generally only hire marginalised identities in the gift shop, kitchen, security and cleaning teams’ [sic].

The financialisation of museums and their ever-closer entanglement with the art market again gets in the way of their mission to become the truly democratic, educational institutions they claim to be. This is perhaps seen most clearly in the practice of allowing large collectors (i.e. those with vested interests) on major museum boards and acquisition panels. The financial journalist Felix Salmon comments succinctly that ‘increasingly we live not in a world where museums collect collectors, but rather in a world where collectors collect museums’. What he means by this is that museum boards now serve the narrow agendas of the ultra-rich. The aims are simply to make them richer by a) giving them access to sought-after art they would not otherwise be able to collect – as they are given a priority when it comes to buying work – and b) when they suggest the museum should invest in contemporary artists, they own work of, the museum plays ball and the price goes up. Salmon gives the example of the effective acquisition by the Fisher family of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

This creates a conflict not just between the public and the museum, but between the artists and the museum, and this is only going to become more apparent. Julian Stallabrass, a professor at the Courtauld Institute, has written widely on the tension between content and corporate context, and how the museum brand permeates everything, negatively colouring the museum. Stallabrass points out that: ‘[M]uch avant-garde and contemporary art is actively hostile towards capitalism. If an artist who is critiquing corporate power is presented as part of this branded apparatus, the work is being betrayed quite fundamentally.’

Some ideas about the future:

It is no exaggeration to say that many museums are at breaking point. But there are just as many other museums looking forward with a renewed sense of purpose. The author András Szántó interviewed 28 museum professionals from around the world during the pandemic to understand their ambitions for the institutions they ran. The resulting book of interviews, The Future of the Museum, is by far the best insight into not necessarily what museums will look like, but what they want to be. Three interviewees from three different continents in particular stand out for their candidness, and their suggestions of how museums can adapt.

The first is Anne Pasternak, Director of the Brooklyn Museum, New York. As well as acknowledging that museums are ‘monuments to a fraught past’, she also commented that she mostly looks outside of museums for inspiration, and that museums should take note: ‘[L]ibraries are particularly interesting. They have started to think of themselves as places of learning rather than places for books. The Brooklyn Public Library has classes for citizenship, job training, and a whole lot more… Another cultural model that has been reinventing itself is the Wildlife Conservation Society. The zoo or aquarium used to be a place to check out a lion. Now they support science and advocate locally and globally for the preservation of natural habitats.’

Second, Phillip Tinari is the Director of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. He addressed a theme which the pandemic again accelerated: technology and its integration into the museum experience. He discusses this, and it’s worth quoting at length:

“China has completely redefined e-commerce. You have digital-shopping hosts who can convene tens of millions of people and get them to buy something, through livecasting. For all the restrictions and censorship, people’s digital lives here are all-consuming. This manifests in this insatiable desire to document one’s existence and declare it to those around, using whatever channel or network is in vogue at any given moment. So for example, this idea of the museum as photo backdrop arrived here early. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to turn this inexorable urge into something productive, even educational. At the very least, we need to think about how, in a place where “traditional media” are even less influential than elsewhere, this kind of transmission by individual accounts and users can create excitement and understanding.”

Finally, Koyo Kouoh is the Director at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, in Cape Town. She discussed, among other things, the need for museums to respond to local understandings of culture, and the importance of recognising museum’s limits. Discussing how the museum can be a site of convergence, she commented: ‘We have to address the segregation of the visual arts from dance and from writing and music, and other artistic expressions. In most African societies, art has always been multidisciplinary and communal…I don’t see why music and performing arts and literature cannot be part of museum practice in the core of curatorial, and not just an appendix.’ She blames the big disconnect that many African museums suffer from on this failure to embrace this ‘African-inspired-radical multidisciplinarity that is so engrained in our societies’.