Amid political polarisation, financial squeezes and the advance of AI, what might be holding museums back is museums themselves. Can institutions turn away from habits of accumulation and self-preservation towards more dynamic experience and more ambitious social missions?
At the recent annual conference of CIMAM (International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art), the crisis of the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA) was high on the members’ minds. The month before the conference, M HKA was formally notified by the Flemish Government of its decision to remove its status as a museum and transfer its collections to the SMAK in Ghent. That so respected an institution could be so publicly undermined by politicians to suit their agendas was an alarming, if now unsurprising sign of the times.
Thanks to pressure coordinated by CIMAM and other cultural organisations, the Flemish government reversed their decision. As our sociocultural institutions feel ever more vulnerable in a destabilising climate of polarisation and individuation, we can take this as a sign of hope for the power of collectivity.
The people and networks of museum professionals that underpin our sector are seldom discussed in the pages of art magazines. Yet organisations like CIMAM comprise a new wave of directors and curators who now more fully represent our decentralised, multipolar world, while signifying a shifting of values and ambitions for the museum sector. We see in this a generation of public servants who do not want their vocation to be driven by hard metrics. The transition from the millennium era of culture-led regeneration has been replaced by something more urgent, more unsettled.
The social turn in art has influenced the social turn in curating and museology, and this idea of a societally focused museum (even if not new) has even led to the formal redefinition of the museum by the International Council of Museums. However, the big challenge is that as this transformation comes to full fruition, it coincides with the barrage of political and financial challenges that the sector is now facing. On the whole, politicians don’t want to cut the culture budgets, but when the economic landscape is so bleak, as it is in many cities, the long-term arguments of regeneration, societal health and wellbeing just don’t cut it.
The real challenges of running an institution in this scenario are multiple. For a start, decreasing public finances and rising costs always lead to a squeeze on the bit of the budget that is left when the bills are paid – the artistic programme. And the smaller the proportion of resources allocated to the job we are actually there to do (producing public-facing cultural activity), the less public value is generated, which then, in turn, makes us even more precarious.
The will to be a socially relevant museum, which engages with publics and plays an active, ‘useful’ role in wider society, is for many minds the right response to this precarity. However, working with people needs people, time and money. I speak from experience that it is a lot easier to hang pictures on walls than run lively social and education programmes with artists and artistry.
In this light many museums are falling back on their collections to fill space over longer periods of time than an endless cycle of temporary exhibitions, or maybe balancing this with fewer shows. You can do a lot with collections, and take pleasure in experimenting with and challenging what you have, but collections themselves are now under more scrutiny and stress.
Acquisition budgets have all but disappeared; storage is full. The rebalancing or decolonisation of collections requires reassessment, new perspectives, new works, new artists, new energies. Is the idea that we keep on growing our collections and storage indefinitely (assuming there is a means to acquire) still the right approach anymore? Is continual growth even aligned with the social imperative and counter-imperial mindset?
These are some of the many problematics being navigated, and that is before we face the political sea-change we are feeling all around us. I was one of many who did a double take at the letter from the White House to the Smithsonian demanding a ‘comprehensive internal review’ of the museum to ensure, under threats of funding cuts, that exhibits align with a directive to promote a positive view of American history, and remove ‘divisive’ narratives. This was perhaps at the extreme end of things, but nonetheless the neo-reactionary shifts to the right are not conducive to the socialising agenda of the new generation of museum professionals.
Simply doing less is in some ways appealing, with so many teams at burnout after COVID, and fighting on all fronts to stay afloat. All the colleagues I know, in museums and galleries across the world, have an insatiable desire to make creative, inventive programmes, to work with artists, to do ‘great projects’. They believe in the power of art to make transformations, to contribute meaningfully to a public good, somehow. It’s almost unimaginable to sit back, take it easy and weather the storm.
The alternative is to do things differently. Radical cuts require radical solutions. The modernity on which we were built championed the radical, the new, yet the museum machinery that has grown around it can sometimes feel so inflexible, conservative and unable to imagine new models. Somehow we have to escape the gravitational pull of doing things the way we always did them.
Deaccessioning works to reinvest in new work is still largely resisted, but it was interesting to see the door opening wider to this idea in 2018 when the Baltimore Museum of Art sold works valued at $16.2 million to diversify the collection with works by women and artists of colour. But something else is urgently required to rethink how arts and culture could contribute and reimagine the direction of wider societal, scientific and economic development. We need to move from valuing culture through static metrics to measuring their dynamic public value, and to have a ‘moonshot’, mission-oriented way of tackling the big challenges of our world. This could nurture new types of cultural ecosystems, embedded in policy design and industrial strategies to deliver the outcomes we all imagined. Like this, we could reimagine cultural institutions as a tool for participation, cocreation and social broadcasting, collectively contributing to a societal mission, not just their own survival.
There is also another timing issue here. AI is only just beginning, its pace of change astonishing and the seismic changes it will bring to our lives unprecedented: including the way we work, live and learn. To loosely paraphrase ‘godfather of deep learning’ Geoffrey Hinton, if AI was renamed ‘job-replacement software’, it wouldn’t be so popular.
Amid the fear and uncertainty, there could be a space for our museums, as places of sociocultural formation, to provide the public space needed, as ai takes over things we used to do so well. If we are having to recalibrate our culture – that is, the way we live and process the world around us – then our cultural institutions could be where we explore new ways to learn when all knowledge is known, where we refocus on creativity rather than data processing; where we learn how to use the new technologies artfully, have sensory, haptic experiences. Where we can utilise the potential convening power of the cultural infrastructure to speak to power about what we need and want to enrich our lives.
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