András Szántó. The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues

by András Szántó (Editor)

As museums worldwide shuttered in 2020 because of the coronavirus, New York-based cultural strategist András Szántó conducted a series of interviews with an international group of museum leaders. In a moment when economic, political, and cultural shifts are signaling the start of a new era, the directors speak candidly about the historical limitations and untapped potential of art museums. Each of the twenty-eight conversations in this book explores a particular topic of relevance to art institutions today and tomorrow. What emerges from the series of in-depth conversations is a composite portrait of a generation of museum leaders working to make institutions more open, democratic, inclusive, experimental and experiential, technologically savvy, culturally polyphonic, attuned to the needs of their visitors and communities, and concerned with addressing the defining issues of the societies around them. The dialogues offer glimpses of how museums around the globe are undergoing an accelerated phase of reappraisal and reinvention.

CONVERSATION PARTNERS Marion Ackermann (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), Cecilia Alemani (The High Line, New York), Anton Belov (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow), Meriem Berrada (MACAAL, Marrakesh), Daniel Birnbaum (Acute Art, London), Thomas P. Campbell (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), Tania Coen-Uzzielli (Tel Aviv Museum of Art), Rhana Devenport (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide), María Mercedes González (Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín), Max Hollein (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Sandra Jackson-Dumont (Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles), Mami Kataoka (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo), Brian Kennedy (Peabody Essex Museum, Salem), Koyo Kouoh (Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town), Sonia Lawson (Palais de Lomé), Adam Levine (Toledo Museum of Art), Victoria Noorthoorn (Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires), Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Galleries, London), Anne Pasternak (Brooklyn Museum), Adriano Pedrosa (MASP, São Paulo), Suhanya Raffel (M+ Museum, Hong Kong), Axel Rüger (Royal Academy of Arts, London), Katrina Sedgwick (Australian Center for the Moving Image, Melbourne), Franklin Sirmans (Pérez Art Museum Miami), Eugene Tan (National Gallery Singapore & Singapore Art Museum), Philip Tinari (UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing), Marc-Olivier Wahler (Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva), and Marie-Cécile Zinsou (Musée de la Fondation Zinsou, Ouidah)

ANDRÁS SZÁNTÓ (*1964, Budapest), PhD, advises museums, cultural institutions, and leading brands on cultural strategy. An author and editor, his writings have appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, the Art Newspaper, and many other publications. He has overseen the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University and the Global Museum Leaders Colloquium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Szántó, who lives in Brooklyn, has been conducting conversations with art-world leaders since the early 1990s, including as a frequent moderator of the Art Basel Conversations series.

Genres: Art, Museums, Nonfiction

316 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 18, 2020

Reviews

[Georgina Brooke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was brilliant. The book hangs around the premise that our understanding of what the english word ‘museum’ means is changing. In 2019 ICOM (the International Council for Museums) attempted to settle on a single definition -and failed. The central disagreement was between to what extent museums are repositories preserving precious objects and on the other how much they should be social spaces for exploring issues around contemporary identity and/or civic spaces directly addressing and facilitating social change. The point Szanto is making is that ICOM’s inability to agree on what a ‘museum’ is in 2020-1 is symptomatic of the sector as a whole having an identity crisis.

What’s fascinating about this book is it is the collected perspectives and answers to this quandary ‘what is a museum today? What should it be? What will it be?’ all in the backdrop of COVID and George Floyd. A few of these directors I’d heard of before (Max Hollein, Hans Ulrich Obrist) but most I hadn’t. Whilst I’d heard of the Director of the Met and Serpentine, a great number of the directors Szanto talks to are not in the West, there was the fascinating 39 year old director of a self financed museum in Benin, Marie-Cecile Zinsou (Foundation Zinsou) “I didn’t decide to do something in culture, I just had to. It was the emergency of sitting in front of thirty kids and asking them, “Okay, explain what your culture is”, and these kids not knowing what to say.” There’s entries from Hong Kong, Russia, Argentina, San Paolo, Morocco. And what’s fascinating is that many of these countries where the cultural sector is developing have the freedom to be more nimble and reinterpret what a museum can be based on the needs of society at the time and can challenge the received ‘western’ model of a museum.

What was striking (to me) is how many of the participants spoke about being led by artists - that good contemporary artists drive social change and invite comparisons between historic pieces, historic stories of human interaction and development and relate that to contemporary concerns and identity.

“In September 2019, a few months before the city of Wuhan, China, diagnosed the first case of the novel coronavirus, the International Council of Museums, commonly known as ICOM, convened in Kyoto, Japan, to debate an updated definition of “the museum.”...

Museums are democratizing, inclusive, and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations, and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people. Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary well-being.

ICOM’s arduous effort to redefine the museum was an expression of a disruptive but ultimately constructive tension coursing through the art-museum field today. Institutions are grappling with how to balance their multiple mandates, old and new. Museums have been striving recently to broaden their impact, in particular in engaging younger generations and meeting the needs of marginalised groups. The contrast between the art museum’s traditional functions- to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit- and its expanded role as an agent of community life and social progress has intensified in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, yet it was already felt well before.” p.7-8

“Museums-products of the European Enlightenment that until recently were concentrated in the world’s more prosperous regions-have proliferated geographically in the last few decades. Some of the most exciting, paradigm-smashing experimentation now happens in Africa, Latin America, Australia, and parts of Asia. There are the places there the next chapters of the museum’s story are being written.” p.9

“Another facet of change has to do with the demographics of museum leadership, which are expected to shift in years to come, opening the door to yet more adaption in museums’ activities and attitudes. The wave of global unrest that followed the killing of George Floyd-as interview for this book began-has created a heightened awareness of social inequity and insensitivity in museums. As several directors in these pages unequivocally note, tremendous work remains to be done to diversify museums-their executives, curators, trustees, staffs, donors, audiences, not to mention their collections. When it comes to the gender gap in museum leadership, institutions may be trending in the right direction, though by no means achieving parity as yet: it is a hopeful sign that half the museum leaders in this volume are women.

Young museum leaders are also injecting new energy and a fresh point fo view, and there are several in this book - two directors were thirty-three years old at the time of our conversations; one was twenty-one when she started her first museum. Youth tends to correlate with healthy scepticism about received wisdom and, these days, with a digital native’s fluency with new technology.” p.9

“The pandemic exposed both operations and reputational vulnerabilities in art museums.” p. 11

“The museum leaders in this book, born between 1960 and 1986… came of age in a postmodern, multidisciplinary art world, with a taste for artistic pluralism. Their careers unfolded in the large after the Cold War, in a relatively peaceful, prosperous time of globalism and affordable travel.” p.13

“It stands to reason that this generation’s perspective on museums is different from those that came before… they repeatedly emphasized the museum’s role as a “meeting place”, an “agora” for “a certain kind of communal experience”- a “sanctuary for idealism” and a “place of conversation” where “opinions are given voice” and where art can be a “catalyst” for “raising awareness, promoting critical thinking, and empowering communities.”... Museums, as “reality producers”, can “point the way forward for our societies” and “facilitate people’s “creative engagement with their own futures,” they noted.” Particularly in countries where civic institutions are weak, the museum can be “a place where you are free to be right”, a “free zone” p.14

“Museums “need to let go of this obnoxious idea that they are an authority on all things… museums have become “too institutional” and “too cautious”” p.14

Suhanya Raffel, Executive Director, M+ Museum, Hong Kong, China
What qualities do you think future museum leaders will need? What advice do you have for them?
It is essential to have patience and persuasiveness. We have to be resourceful and passionate. We have to believe in our project. We have to believe in the meaning of that project for people. We have to be tireless in this purpose. P.28

Franklin Sirmans, Director, Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami, Florida, United States
There is an instagram account @show_the_boardroom, where they are posting photos of senior staff and board members of major arts institutions. Its a reckoning.” p.42

We have a program called Art Detectives, which uses art to bridge differences and catalyze difficult conversations. It brings together Miami-Dade police with kids from what we could call underserved communities. They literally go through art learning together. “What do you see? Why are we standing in front of exactly the same thing and yet seeing different things?” It is all about forming bridges. P.46

How would you define a ‘museum’?
I think of it as a civic sanctuary for idealism, for free thought, and for providing a space and palace for conversation and for bringing people together-using art as a catalyst for those conversations. And all the while believing that it is the job and duty of artists to point us in the right direction, and that we’re trying to learn from them.” p.48

Marie-Cecile Zinsou, President, Foundation Zinsou/Musee de la Fondation Zinsou Cotonou & Ouidah, Republic of Benin
People who go to visit museums online are people who know what they are searching for. And you cannot search for something you don’t know. The fact that you are looking for them means you have a high level of education. I don’t believe someone from Parakou is going to try on Google terms like “finding contemporary art museums in my country.”

“We can’t continue to show vintage photos from the 1950s on fragile paper that can be destroyed by the humidity, We can print them on vinyl, the kind you put on buildings… we put 300 of his pictures in large formats on the street- and we had 1.2 million visitors. Everyone in Benin knows Malick Sidibe now.” p.55

“I didn’t decide to do something in culture. I just had to, It was the emergency of sitting in front of thirty kids and asking them “Okay, explain what your culture is” and these kids not knowing what to say. There was no place to understand our culture. The closest exhibition of the continent’s contemporary creations, Africa Remix, was six thousand kilometers away, in Dusseldorf. An important curator from the Musee de Quai Branly, Germain Viatte, was visiting Cotonou at the time, and I said to him “I think we really need a museum.” He said, “Just open it. Take any place and put up a sign that says “Museum”, and I did that.

Truly a museum from scratch
I didn’t have a choice, I was twenty-one. I just had to do it. P.56-7

You start exhibitions on the streets, in other neighbourhoods. Then you go on TV and explain why this is so interesting. And most important, you go to every school principal, and you buy them a beer. After the beer you explain that maybe schoolchildren should come. And they come.
We also had people singing, every exhibition has a song.” p. 57

To adapt to this future, what will institutions need to unlearn? What habits do they have to shake to stay relevant?
Museums have become too cautious. And being cautious means not being relevant when it comes to contemporary art-or art in general. If you’re a museum. You shouldn’t feel like a cupboard. It shouldn’t feel like you’re putting the works in a cupboard that you close and only open sometimes, and after a while not at all, because all you want to do is protect them.” p. 59

Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, Museu de-Arte de Sao Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), Sao Paulo, Brazil
We have always been quite invested in the museum’s digital presence, with a strong curatorial direction, and recently we’ve moved a curatorial assistant to the communications team. With the museum closed, twice a day a curator is writing a post, either about something from the collection or a memory or a recollection related to the museum. In addition, these texts and posts generated thorough Instagram are being fueled into what we are calling “illustrated captions” for works in the collections display. With Instagram, one can write 2,200 characters about a pictures and illustrate it with a carousel of nine additional images. This same maternal will generate new text shorts for the works in the collection, installed on the back of iconic glass easels, along with small reproductions. It’s an updated version of the old “didactic panels” revised by the Museum’s founding director, Pietro Maria Bardi (1900-1999). This innovation came about during this time of social distancing and deeper engagement on social media.

We also developed a new workshop - a “challenge”. Each week we invite people to draw an iconic work in the collection. We have had a tremendous response. As many as 1,500 people submit drawings on social media. Speaking to our topics of decolonisation or de Westernisations, for our Ingres challenge- a nineteenth century painting entitled The Blessing Christ (1834)- the most interesting entries turned out to be representations of a Black Christ, a trans Christ, and an Indigenous Christ. People got really involved.

This is the space where we exist right now - through social media, and, at least at MASP, above all through Instagram.” p.76

“Each year we dedicate our program to a particular set of histories, articulating all exhibitions, publications, and public programs in this manner. In 2016 it was Histories of Childhood; in 2017, Histories of Sexulaity; in 2018, Afro-Atlantic Histories; in 2019, Women’s Histories, Feminist Histories. This year, 2020, would have been Histories of Dance. In the coming years we will organise Brazilian Histories (2024), which are really queer or LGBTQ histories; and Histories of Ecology (2025). This program has a strong inclination towards social or political histories, less so proper art history, and it is of course very much connected to present day issues and concerns, and to a liberal or progressive agenda (in US terms). There is also the notion of plural histories, and in fact historias in Portuguese (as in French and in Spanish) can encompass both fictional and non fictional narratives. It is not a matter of ignoring art history altogether, but understanding that it is one of many other possible layers of these historias.” p.76

Tania Coen-Uzzielli, Director, Tel Aviv Museum of Art (TAMA), Tel Aviv, Israel
During the pandemic, we spoke about social distancing, but that’s the wrong word. We were practicing physical distancing, while remaining active socially. The projections felt like the right project to do in this context. The museum screened video works on buildings around Tel Aviv, which were visible from windows and balconies. This was in resonance with the Italian “songs from the balconies”, which developed as a spontaneous response to the lockdown there. It was very well received and appreciated by the public.” p.86

Eugene Tan, Director, National Gallery Singapore & Singapore Art Museum (SAM), Singapore
So neither model is perfect. But in this age of Internet and social media, we get a sense of possible new economic models that allow us to diversify our fundings sources. Most museums raise funds through donations and memberships, but I think it has to be something more radical-the most radical approach being a crowdsourcing-funded museum. Such a museum would demonstrate that the community believes in it and supports its work. Or perhaps we can borrow from capitalist structures in another way. For example, could we imagine a museum that has shareholders?

We can and must find a balance between serving our communities and being sustainable. We need to start thinking in these ways, because if museums don’t change, we will become dinosaurs. We will become irrelevant and lose our public trust, our most important asset.” p.100

[Judith Fernández · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy inspirador y lleno de ideas y reflexiones interesantes.
Se merece un 4.5 en mi opinión. Quizá un poco repetitivo en algunas temáticas (sostenibilidad, poscolonialismo…) y tristemente contextualizado en la época del COVID, aún así, merece la pena conocer las perspectivas de todas estas personalidades que tienen mucho que aportar.

[Nicholas Kalogeresis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the most intelligent, thoughtful dialogues on museums I have come across. I feel good about the future of museums after reading this book.

[Lourdes · Rating 3 out of 5]

By interviewing 28 museum directors from all over the world, this book offers such a huge insight into the museum world and how it might evolve after the pandemic (this book was written during the pandemic with most interviews being held via zoom) by answering questions such as what is a museum?, how the museum of the future would look like?, what drove the directors to work in such field? These dialogues expanded my understanding of the role that museums play nowadays.

[Olga Kuplivanchuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most useful book for understanding the changed role of museums and contemporary art over the past two turbulent years. 28 curators and museum directors all over the world answer the questions: what is museum, what drives them working with artists every day, what was their way to the art and how important museums are to society existence. This book motivates me to continue my art journey.

[Keston Ellars · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely devoured this, Zinsou’s interview was thrilling and inspiring and I truly feel as though I have done nill with my life after reading it. I resonate with her understanding of museums as spaces of change, responsibility, and action rather than neutral stewards of history. Very nice read

[ab · Rating 4 out of 5]

very excellent critical dialogue on museum spaces + helpful for someone who wants to work in the art world after covid 👍

[Bella Stenvall · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was assigned this for work but enjoyed it immensely. Really expanded my understanding of what purpose museums can serve as dynamic community centers in the future.