To find out where we might go from here, ArtReview asked several professionals close to institutions for a diagnosis
Everyone seems to have an opinion on museums. Few of them are overly positive or optimistic. It’s taken for granted, in some places at least, that museums should be part of the cultural furniture of a well-developed society, and few think they should simply be abolished. Yet no one is particularly happy with how they currently work. Museums are, it seems, in crisis. What that crisis is varies: they’re full of stolen loot and are vestiges of white colonial patriarchy, cry some; they’re too ‘woke’, bemoan others, too intent on virtue signalling to show anything anyone wants to see, or they perpetuate a model of knowledge and a value system of artefacts that no longer aligns with a more social, inclusive attitude to the role of cultural institutions in society.
That museums are centre stage in culture wars is fitting: they are, after all, bastions/reflections/facilitators of the social narrative (delete as applicable to your stance). That’s only one element of crisis, however: in the us, museums find themselves increasingly under attack from the Trump administration for not reflecting its version of a patriotic culture or history; in China, a contraction of the property market has hit the private institutions that flourished during the boom of the 2000s and 2010s; in Europe, public funding of the culture sector is being squeezed – the Flemish government recently made moves to dismantle M HKA in Antwerp – while at the same time private and corporate funding is more and more scrutinised for its supposed ethical shortcomings.
Of course, much of this might feel esoteric to those institutions still packing their galleries during the school holidays, from Bogotá to Jakarta, or the tourists filing through the Louvre or the Prado (the Madrid institution noting recently that it is at capacity most days and doesn’t want ‘a single visitor more’). But for those, like ArtReview, who grapple with the politics and implications of art, how it’s made and how it’s displayed, and for a generation of cultural workers – artists, curators, museum directors, many of whom began their careers in a political environment in which the arts were seen as a panacea to all society’s ills – it seems like we are at a crunch point. To find out where we might go from here, ArtReview asked several professionals close to institutions for a diagnosis. While they diverge on reasons and directions, the contributors here agree: that the museum is here to stay, but change is needed, and what the museum may look like in the future is still to be determined.
Featuring
Extinction Event
American museums are in Trump’s firing line. Do legacy institutions have a future?
by Jonathan T.D. Neil
How to Do Things with Museums
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?
by Alistair Hudson
The Polite Art of Lending Loot
Are loans ethical concessions wrestled from reluctant institutions, or are they institutional risk-management strategies?
by Sarah Jilani
Plus
The Unsettling Museum
by Sharmini Pereira
The Collaborative Museum
by Daisy Nam
The Contradictory Museum
by Eugenio Viola
The Emanant Museum
by farid rakun
Museum as Dreaming Machine
by Refik Anadol
Museum as Networked Modality
by Charlotte Kent
From the March 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
