Issue 175 November-December 2015

What is the Future of the Museum?

SURVEY

Sam Thorne considers what lies in store for gallery visitors and invites ten art
professionals to reveal how they envision the museum 25 years from now

Johann Steingruber, M, 1773, from the series Architectural Alphabet, recreated by graphic design studio
Europa for Material Presence, 2008, 176 Gallery, London

Speculating about the future of the museum has a long history, one that goes back even
further than the invention of the museum itself. A century and a half before the doors of
Europes princely collections were thrown open to the public, philosophers of different
stripes dreamed of museum-like constructions. These imaginary institutions spring up in a
number of early-17th-century utopian tracts, such as Sir Francis Bacons New
Atlantis (1627), which describes a building depicting the whole of natural history. In fact,
as Andrew McClellan demonstrates in his excellent bookThe Art Museum from Boulle to

Bilbao (2008), the neoclassical French architect tienne-Louis Boulles visionary

proposals of the 1780s would go on to influence the blueprints for the Louvres Grand
Gallery. Speculations are often given form by later generations.
Museums have always been as concerned with prediction as with preservation. In caring
for the past and the present, they must also stake a claim on what will matter in the future.
These wagers often involve searching for new models or aspirations. In an 1889 lecture
titled The Future of the Museum, a curator at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.,
predicted: The museum of the future must stand side by side with the library and the
laboratory. More than a century later, the dream of redrawing the museums boundaries
continues. This tendency has been especially visible recently, with all kinds of different
guises being tried on for size: M HKA in Antwerp temporarily turned into an art school
(MUHKADEMIE, 2013) and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven dedicated itself to
useful art (201314) while, over a weekend earlier this year, the French choreographer
Boris Charmatz refashioned Tate Modern as the Muse de la danse.

Snhetta, design for a new staircase at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Courtesy San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art; rendering: Steelblue

We are living in an era in which the shape of the museum, what it stands for and how it
operates, is being rapidly reconfigured. Attendance has never been so high and there have
never been so many new buildings in progress. Still, at the same moment, the ways forward
have never been so disputed. The breadth of this shifting terrain is suggested by this nonetoo-brief list, found in publicity materials for museum consultant Mark Walhimers recent
book, Museums 101 (2015): inclusion, globalization, social media, social collateral,
crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, mobility, collaboration, consumerization of it, online
education and corporatization. Most current debates are about balance. Where, for
example, do the older pleasures of contemplation meet those of participation? How is
popularity achieved while rethinking the canon? How can public collections keep pace with
private collections? Or, in the face of cuts to state and municipal funding, what is the
proximity between public institutions and private interests?
Today, the tension between the museum as a civic space with a social responsibility and its
increasingly commercial imperatives is often palpable. Since the early 1990s, these
critiques have become more common, honing in on lucrative sponsorship deals, heavily
branded exhibitions and events, along with dramatically expanding retail and cafe
ventures. Recall the small furore caused in the late 1980s by Saatchi & Saatchis infamous

campaign: V&A: An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached. Again, this is a debate
with a long history. Ad Reinhardt, in his 1940 broadside How Modern is the Museum of
Modern Art? was already asking: Is the museum a business? His question continues to
resonate. Two years ago, Claire Bishop updated Reinhardts title for her book Radical
Museology: or, Whats Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art?, which
she opens by arguing that: increased scale and a proximity to big business have been
two central characteristics of the move from the 19th-century model of the museum as
a patrician institution of elite culture to its current incarnation as a populist temple of
leisure and entertainment.

Marina Abramovi, 512 Hours, 2014, documentation of performance. Courtesy the artist and Serpentine
Galleries; photograph: Marco Anelli

The 1990s was once characterized by The New York Times as the grandest, most
ambitious museum boom in history. But that decade was almost sluggish by the standards
of today, in a moment when the Chinese government has pledged to open 1,000 new
museums. Over the last year or two, it has become difficult to keep track of the slew of new
buildings, extensions and private foundations. The highest-profile opening this year was
no doubt Renzo Pianos widely praised Whitney Museum of American Art in New York,
although the move left the much-loved, Upper East Side Marcel Breuer building empty. In
March, it will reopen as the Met Breuer, the Metropolitan Museum of Arts annexe for
modern and contemporary art, a temporary measure while David Chipperfields new wing
is built. (Its expected to be completed in 2020.) Not to be outdone, momas galleries will

also be expanding by about a third. The project will be overseen by Diller Scofidio +
Renfro, who are currently busy on the West Coast: their Broad Museum has just opened in
Los Angeles, while their Berkeley Art Museum is due to launch in January. The latter is
one of two Bay Area museums to open in the next few months: Snhettas SFMOMA
extension will open in the spring. Across the Atlantic, Rem Koolhaass OMA has completed
two private foundations in the last 12 months Fondazione Prada in Milan and Garage
Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow while, last year, there was Frank Gehrys
Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. In the summer, Herzog and De Meurons Tate Modern
Project an 11-storey, brick-latticed pyramid will also open, expanding the worlds mostvisited museum of modern and contemporary art by 60 percent. And, in the Gulf, Jean
Nouvels controversial Louvre Abu Dhabi is opening in December.
Many are convinced that museums are going to have to change in ways other than by
simply getting bigger. The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, whose Museum of Innocence
opened in Istanbul in 2012, has argued: It is imperative that museums become smaller,
more individualistic and cheaper. As Hal Foster suggested in his essay After the White
Cube, published in the London Review of Books earlier this year, one pressing dilemma is
the sheer variety of exhibition spaces required by contemporary art. While the white cube
isnt completely defunct, Foster concludes, it has become more various: black boxes for
projection and grey boxes (or what the moma plan calls art bays) for dance and
performance. What happens next, after this current wave of building projects? Is this the
end of an era of expansionism or the start of a new phase? Might we be moving, instead,
towards institutions that have multiple sites, are networked, collaborative or
even immaterial?
Sam Thorne is artistic director of Tate St Ives, UK, and a contributing editor of frieze. His
book, School: Conversations on Self-Organised Education, will be published by Sternberg
Press in May 2016.
Abdellah Karroum
Abdellah Karroum is Director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar, and
the Artistic Director of Lappartement 22, Rabat, Morocco.
Art forms evolve continuously as expression takes shape and adopts the shared languages
of the time. Graffiti is the oldest and newest means of expression, found in both prehistoric
caves and as traces of our present times on urban walls. Museums in 2040 will continue to
serve as living archives and spaces for exploring art and creative expressions from other

times and locations. As well as being places of memory, museums also act as arenas in
which to think about how our bodies relate to space and time, how we remember the past,
our relationship to elsewhere and how we project into the future.
I envision a museum that is part of daily life, a space that co-exists with the transportation
systems that are yet to be invented. Museums will be part of flights between Shanghai and
Los Angeles, or floating villages in the Mediterranean between Tangier and Beirut. Beyond
2040, a museum of humankind might even be accessible on the moon or in outer space.
But a museum is also a space for thinking about our present and expressing this moment
through innovative language. And this is what we must cultivate, now and well beyond
2040.

tienne-Louis Boulle, proposal for Sir Isaac Newtons cenotaph, 1784. Courtesy National
Gallery France
Maria Balshaw
Maria Balshaw is Director of the Whitworth, Manchester, UK.
Future technologies will certainly offer entirely new experiences for visitors to museums,
but these will only come to life if they draw inspiration from the collections and from
the ideas that artists have and then connect to new audiences.
The art museum in 2040 will be a space of contact and connection between people,
artworks and ideas. It will be a beacon for culturally democratic participation in a thriving

city, with a great collection still at its centre. The aspiration for the future has to be that
more people will engage with our museum institutions.

Charles Esche
Charles Esche works at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and Afterall,
London, UK. He is curator of the Jakarta Biennale, which opens 15 November 2015.
The state of things in the world these days feels too urgent and harsh for empty
speculations. But if we really want to project the logical trajectory of today forward to
2040, I think we are likely to see: big-city museum brands extending their control over,
and support for, provincial museum outposts globally; more populist and less diverse
museum programming; a global expansion of the canon that widens its base but fights to
keep the existing power structures intact; closures in western Europe and openings
elsewhere; closer collaboration between the commercial world and the traditional public
sector. (Will there be a Gagosian moma or a Google Tate, for instance?) There will be
rising inequality of opportunity between museums; insurgent institutions, new and old,
that crowdfund from a wide, shallow support group to undermine the universalizing
mainstream and offer new forms of agency to communities. There will be an emergence of
the idea of a museum of the commons that breaks with ownership and commercial logic
to serve new constituencies and generate a different political and intellectual space for art
than the tired territories of modernity. In reality, I expect the current trajectory to fall into
complete crisis before 2040, and for things to get much more interesting than this.

Bice Curiger
Bice Curiger is Artistic Director of the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, France. From
1993 to 2013, she was a curator at Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland.
How can museums be protected from technocrats? This seems the most urgent question.
The museum is an ordering machine, generating conventions of looking that must, of
necessity, get broken down. It is also a paradoxical place that combines the past with
surprise and new ways of seeing (and close contact with artists is a guarantor for a lively
culture of looking). Ideally, the museum should have an aura of imaginative
disinterestedness. This is at odds with the ethos of the hyperactive museological camp,
with its populist programming, steamroller communications, loud merchandising and

metropolitan branding. My generation fought to open up and democratize museums, and

for an expanded definition of art. Today, it is a matter of reasserting the museums
relevance in society in the face of the mercantile intentions of optimized entertainment
engineering, with players increasingly acting as if museums were part of the fashion
industry.
The museum of the future will bear witness to the degree of intelligence, love and
sensitivity with which it has been developed. As most innovations in todays society are
technologically driven, we must imagine that museums, too, will prioritize new
technologies. In a few years, 360 3D presentations, based on the algorithms of our
personal preferences, will conjure up a muse imaginaire. A built-in update or surprise
factor will make sure that our experience is not purely what we expect.
What I hope for, however, is that the museum will survive as a place where things that
have fallen out of time are allowed to slumber to be woken one day with a kiss from some
inspired princess or prince.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell.

Architects rendering of Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, under construction. Courtesy Heatherwick Studio

Lawrence Rinder
Lawrence Rinder is Director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive,
Berkeley, USA.
In 25 years time, museums will have evolved to be much less doctrinaire and limited in
presentation styles and formats than they are today. Except for certain exhibitions (those
that attempt an accurate historical re-creation of modernist style, for instance), the white
cube approach will have largely vanished.
Rare will be the museum that sees its role as primarily illuminating historical periods or
the achievements of individual artists. The vast majority of institutions will have embraced
an instrumental, experiential approach in which art (from any time or place) is understood
as a tool with which to achieve some kind of impact or impression on the visitors. The
biggest challenge facing museums will be that, while therell be a much greater focus on the
viewers subjective experience, there will be a commensurate rise in the demand for
quantitative (or at least qualitative) measurements: museums will need to prove to funders
that they are achieving their impact targets.
On the bright side, the presentation of objects (especially unique ones) will remain
a powerful dimension of museum programmes. However, the line between art and things
that are simply remarkable will have become considerably blurred. If were lucky, the
museum of the future will look little like the museum of today but it will be just as
compelling and transformative, if not more so.

Yilmaz Dziewior
Yilmaz Dziewior is the Director of Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany.
I foresee two possible scenarios:
1) Dystopian, pessimistic. In 2040, museums will be defined more by their architectural
shell than by the collections and activities they contain. This development began with
Guggenheim Bilbao, and will reach its apogee with the starchitect museums of Abu Dhabi.
There will also no longer be a need to distinguish between private and public funding, as all
institutions will depend entirely on patrons and corporate sponsorship. As a result,
museums will only host blockbuster shows designed to maximize visitor numbers.

2) Utopian, optimistic. In 2040, museums will be able to focus wholly on preservation,

research and communication, because the public will have recognized the importance of
the institution in engendering a functioning, civilized society. Quality will take precedence
over quantity. The items on display will no longer be viewed as objects divorced from the
social context from which they emerged. In addition, the western-oriented canon of
modern art will have been extended, incorporating art from Africa, Asia and Latin
America, as well as work by artists from other regions that are currently still marginalized.
With free entry to all museums, and increased efforts on the part of institutions to
communicate their content democratically, art and culture will no longer be the exclusive
preserve of the middle and upper classes.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell.

Andrew McClellan
Andrew McClellan teaches art history at Tufts University, Massachussetts, USA, and is
the author of numerous books and articles on the history of museums, most recently The
Art Museum from Boulle to Bilbao (University of California Press, 2008). He is currently
completing a book on the development of curatorial training in the USA.
Over the next 25 years, globalization will accelerate, as will technology; as a consequence,
customary borders between nations, cultures and media will become more fluid,
challenging how museums are organized and how they connect with their audiences.
The push to remain relevant and cutting edge, favouring the contemporary over the
historic, competes with a simultaneous drive for museums to act as a respite from the
relentless 24/7, sound-bite culture that envelops us. In an often-confusing, ephemeral
world, museums appeal (to mostly bourgeois audiences) as an oasis of the real, offering
access to timeless products of human creativity and fantasies of transcendent beauty
uncomplicated by the sociopolitical forces that bring works of art into being. So, museums
can be palliative as well as acting as platforms for global dialogue, and will thrive to the
extent they successfully manage their dual identities as zones of engagement and escape.
Money, always important, will only become more so. The rarely acknowledged truism that
without private wealth there would be no public museums looms larger as public
investment in culture diminishes and an unstoppable art market fuels more private vanity
projects. The rich get richer, with unfortunate consequences for disadvantaged

communities and the cherished ideal of museums for all. Those with access to, and at ease
in, museums will be happier than ever.

Architects rendering of Louvre Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, under construction. Courtesy: Ateliers Jean
Nouvel, Artefactory, TDIC and Louvre Abu Dhabi

Suzanne Cotter
Suzanne Cotter is Director of Fundao de Serralves Museu de Arte Contemporanea,
Porto, Portugal.
Twenty-five years from now, I imagine the contemporary art museum will reflect the
convergence of todays diverse models; it will be a place of collection and display, of
education and discussion, of individual and group interaction and of performance. The
scope of content, while varying according to context, will continue to expand to encompass
future art forms as well as relationships between cinema, architecture and literature.
Undoubtedly, world markets will crash again, and possibly the art market will go down
with it, but museum collections will maintain their relevance and their symbolic and
intrinsic value due to the prescience of the curators and directors who have come before. It

is hard to know where technology will take us but, if the present day is anything to go by,
museums in 2040 will be places people navigate with personal communication systems;
interaction with the public will continue to be valued but the emphasis will be on the
empowered visitor. The contemporary art museum will increasingly become a socialized
space, a plaza where people spend time together.
Judging by the geopolitical shifts we are witnessing today, the museum is likely to become
a necessary sanctuary for the free exchange of ideas and cosmopolitan tolerance. My hope
is that it will not have to erect barricades to protect this freedom.

Mariana Castillo Deball

Mariana Castillo Deball is an artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her solo exhibition
Reliefpfeiler is at Barbara Wien Gallery, Berlin, until 14 November.
The museum of the future will offer a compelling experience based on the premise of
silence. Surrounded as we are nowadays by overwhelming visual and auditory stimuli in
our everyday lives, the museum will provide meditation halls where visitors can experience
emptiness. Pioneering a radical approach to time and space, the future museum I envisage
will be built on the site of an old train station, and extend for miles along the defunct
tracks, offering a journey through art and meditation.
Visitors will be able to walk for hours though an endless series of rooms, which alternate
between galleries filled with old master paintings and vacant spaces suitable for peaceful
contemplation. Traversing the whole space on foot, observing how the rooms become
increasingly empty, visitors will gradually become more and more exhausted, until, finally,
they realize there is no way back.

Solveig vsteb
Solveig vsteb is Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Renaissance Society,
Chicago, USA, which celebrates its centenary this year.
Privatization of the institutional field will continue to dominate through the rise of singleowner collections, showcased in increasingly flamboyant museum buildings that mimic the
castle collections of 16th-century European aristocrats. For better or for worse, these

collections will have the appearance of public institutions, but will still be manifestations of
private taste.
Mega-galleries will expand further and take on public roles through educational
programming, lectures, archiving and libraries. With a few exceptions, mid-size public
non-profit institutions will develop into smaller research stations, as they will be unable to
compete with the former in terms of budget, space or public outreach. These institutes
will provide independent platforms for art production, inquiry and institutional
experimentation where failure is considered a working tool.
The next 25 years will witness technological development and transformation on a scale
that will reduce the need for human labour and completely alter our viewing public. As the
computing powers of our devices grow, our ability to perceive and care through our bodies
will remain our unique human traits. A new public will interact with art and glocal
institutional models. The next Documenta will be curated by an audience member.

Sam Thorne
Sam Thorne is artistic director of Tate St Ives, UK, and a contributing editor of frieze. His
book, School: Conversations on Self-Organised Education, will be published by Sternberg
Press in May 2016.