To find out where museums might go from here, ArtReview asked several professionals close to institutions for a diagnosis
To meaningfully address whether or not we need museums now, we must consider their role within concrete social and political contexts. Museums do not operate in abstraction; their relevance is inseparable from the societies they inhabit. This is something I have experienced directly in my role as artistic director of the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (MAMBO) over the past seven years, a position from which I’ve recently stepped down. Working within a country shaped by prolonged armed conflict, deep social inequality and contested historical narratives makes it clear that museums are not merely cultural institutions but essential civic spaces, called to foster reflection, dialogue and collective reckoning.
From this situated perspective, museums emerge as infrastructures for encounter. They can hold together divergent memories, contested identities and unresolved tensions. When museums engage with histories of exclusion, they do not offer closure; rather, they create conditions for visibility, listening and shared questioning. Their strength lies precisely in their ability to host discomfort, ambiguity and multiplicity – qualities that are often suppressed in broader political discourse. Particularly in an increasingly polarised world, marked by inequality and the systematic erasure of cultural memory.
In this context, museums safeguard histories at risk of being erased, make visible narratives excluded from official accounts and create conditions for critical thinking. But to fulfil this role, museums must situate themselves, through their programmes, at the heart of cultural debate, without fearing conflict, difference or dissent. Today’s visitors no longer come merely to witness exhibitions; they seek recognition of, resonance with and legitimacy for their own experiences. This demands a move away from singular, authoritative narratives towards spaces of listening, representation and symbolic negotiation – platforms upon which multiple voices can coexist, even when they are uncomfortable or contradictory.
This need becomes even more complex in the context of the digital revolution, which has radically transformed how museums are accessed and experienced. Virtual exhibitions, online archives, immersive technologies and algorithmic mediation have expanded audiences and redefined participation. Museums now operate simultaneously in physical and digital spheres, offering interactive and personalised encounters with art and knowledge. Yet this ‘technological turn’, I believe, does not diminish their relevance – on the contrary, it sharpens it. Digital tools can disseminate content, but they cannot replicate the embodied experience of sharing space, time and attention with artworks and other bodies. The specific atmosphere of museums – their silences, frictions and temporal density – resists digitisation. They remain places where complexity is not reduced, but held open, and where meaning is negotiated collectively rather than consumed individually.
But while it’s clear that we need museums today more urgently than ever, it’s equally clear that they should not exist as temples of authority or neutral repositories of culture. We need them as critical spaces in which care and conflict, memory and imagination, can productively coexist. In specific social and political contexts, museums function as indispensable infrastructures for dialogue and critical consciousness, operating at the intersection of history and lived experience. Their responsibility today is not to provide definitive answers, but to remain open, responsive and ethically attentive – capable of embracing uncertainty, dissent and complexity. Only in this way can museums remain places where society sees itself reflected, questioned and reimagined.
Eugenio Viola is an art critic and curator based in Bogotá. He was until recently the artistic director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO)
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