Museums of contemporary art are expanding and in crisis. They attract ever-larger audiences, architects constantly redesign them, and the growing number of artists is producing more massively than ever; at the same time museum funds are dwindling in the economic crisis and an overheated art market. This text gathers together interviews with international artists, architects and curators of the contemporary art world.

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, Cecilia Alemani, Anton Belov, Meriem Berrada, Daniel Birnbaum, Thomas P. Campbell, Tania Coen-Uzzielli, Rhana Devenport, María Mercedes González, Max Hollein, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Mami Kataoka, Brian Kennedy, Koyo Kouoh, Sonia Lawson, Adam Levine, Victoria Noorthoorn, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Anne Pasternak, Adriano Pedrosa, Suhanya Raffel, Axel Rüger, Katrina Sedgwick, Franklin Sirmans, Eugene Tan, Philip Tinari, Marc-Olivier Wahler, Marie-Cécile Zinsou

Towards the Museum of the Future explores, through a series of authoritative essays, some of the major developments in European museums as they struggle to adapt in a rapidly changing world. It embraces a wide range of European countries, all types of museums and exhibitions and the needs of different museum audiences, and discusses the museum as communicator and educator in the context of current cultural concerns.

The Future of Museum and Gallery Design explores new research and practice in museum design. Placing a specific emphasis on social responsibility, in its broadest sense, the book emphasises the need for a greater understanding of the impact of museum design in the experiences of visitors, in the manifestation of the vision and values of museums and galleries, and in the shaping of civic spaces for culture in our shared social world. The chapters included in the book propose a number of innovative approaches to museum design and museum-design research. Collectively, contributors plead for more open and creative ways of making museums, and ask that museums recognize design as a resource to be harnessed towards a form of museum-making that is culturally located and makes a significant contribution to our personal, social, environmental, and economic sustainability. Such an approach demands new ways of conceptualizing museum and gallery design, new ways of acknowledging the potential of design, and new, experimental, and research-led approaches to the shaping of cultural institutions internationally. The Future of Museum and Gallery Design should be of great interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of museum studies, gallery studies, and heritage studies, as well as architecture and design, who are interested in understanding more about design as a resource in museums. It should also be of great interest to museum and design practitioners and museum leaders.

This book explores―at the macro, meso and micro levels and in terms of qualitative as well as quantitative studies―the current and future role of museums for art and society. Given the dynamic developments in art and society, museums need to change in order to remain (and in some ways, regain) relevance. This relevance is in the sense of a power to influence. Additionally museums have challenges that arise in the production of art through the use of permanent and rapidly changing technologies. This book examines how museums deal with the increasing importance of performance art and social interactive art, artistic disciplines which refuse to use classical or digital artistic media in their artistic processes. The book also observes how museums are adapting in the digital age. It addresses such questions as, “How to keep museums in contact with recipients of art in a world in which the patterns of communication and perception have changed dramatically,” and also “Can the art museum, as a real place, be a counterpart in a virtualized and digitalized society or will museums need to virtualize and even globalize themselves virtually?” Chapters also cover topics such as the merits of digital technologies in museums and how visitors perceive these changes and innovations. When you go back to the etymological origin, the Mouseion of Alexandria, it was a place where – supported by the knowledge stored there – art and science were developed: a place of interdisciplinary research and networking, as you would call it today. The word from the Ancient Hellenic language for museum (ΜΟΥΣΕΙΟΝ) means the “house of the muses”: where the arts and sciences find their berth and cradle. With the “Wunderkammer,” the museum was re-invented as a place for amazing for purpose of representation of dynastic power, followed by the establishment of museums as a demonstration of bourgeois self-consciousness. In the twentieth century, the ideal of the museum as an institution for education received a strong boost, before the museum as a tourism infrastructure became more and more the institutional, economic and political role-model. This book is interested in discovering what is next for museums and how these developments will affect art and society. Each of the chapters are written by academics in the field, but also by curators and directors of major museums and art institutions.

Given the current panorama of growing private initiatives, The Private Museum of the Future tackles this central issue in museology and contemporary society.It asks the questions: What inspires private collectors to build a museum? How do they view their relationship with other institutions? What plans they have for the future of their museums? In what forms private museums can contribute to innovative ways of dealing with contemporary art? What can they do that other institutions cannot? And how can they establish an ongoing relation with the public and society?Private museums have existed for a long time, but over the past decade many major collectors have founded new museums all over the world, from Cape Town to Dhaka, Athens to Los Angeles. These projects are often greeted as generous initiatives combining innovative architecture with the visibility of contemporary art. They could also be seen as competitors to public institutions.This book features interviews with 24 renowned private museum founders including: Ziba Ardalan (Parasol unit, London), Eli Broad (The Broad Museum, Los Angeles), Jochen Zeitz (Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town), Eugenio López Alonso (Museo Jumex, Mexico City), and Dakis Joannou (Deste Foundation, Athens), among various others.Essays by the editors, Cristina Bechtler and Dora Imhof, and also an afterword by Chris Dercon (General Director of the Volksbühne Theater, Berlin and former Director of Tate Modern, London) explore the topic and the relationship between public and private institutions and museums worldwide.The book is part of the Documents series, co-published with Les presses du réel and dedicated to critical writing.

Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change explores the way museums tackle the broad global issue of climate change. It explores the power of real objects and collections to stir hearts and minds, to engage communities affected by change. Museums work through exhibitions, events, and specific collection projects to reach different communities in different ways. The book emphasises the moral responsibilities of museums to address climate change, not just by communicating science but also by enabling people already affected by changes to find their own ways of living with global warming. There are museums of natural history, of art and of social history. The focus of this book is the museum communities, like those in the Pacific, who have to find new ways to express their culture in a new place. The book considers how collections in museums might help future generations stay in touch with their culture, even where they have left their place. It asks what should the people of the present be collecting for museums in a climate-changed future? The book is rich with practical museum experience and detailed projects, as well as critical and philosophical analyses about where a museum can intervene to speak to this great conundrum of our times. Curating the Future is essential reading for all those working in museums and grappling with how to talk about climate change. It also has academic applications in courses of museology and museum studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, digital humanities, design, anthropology, and environmental humanities.

Natural history museums are changing, both because of their own internal development and in response to changes in context. Historically, the aim of collecting from nature was to develop encyclopedic assemblages to satisfy human curiosity and build a basis for taxonomic information. Today, with global biodiversity in rapid decline, there are new reasons to build and maintain collections, while audiences are more diverse, numerous, and technically savvy. Institutions must learn to embrace new technology while retaining the authenticity of their stories and the value placed on their objects. The Future of Natural History Museums begins to develop a cohesive discourse that balances the disparate issues that our institutions will face over the next decades. It disassembles the topic into various key elements and, through commentary and synthesis, explores a cohesive picture of the trajectory of the natural history museum sector. This book contributes to the study of collections, teaching and learning, ethics, and running non-profit businesses and will be of interest to museum and heritage professionals and academics and senior students in Biological Sciences and Museum Studies.

What is the future of curatorship? Is there a vision for an ideal model, a curatopia, whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia? Or is there a plurality of approaches, amounting to a curatorial heterotopia? This pioneering volume addresses these questions by considering the current state of curatorship. It reviews the different models and approaches operating in museums, galleries and cultural organisations around the world and discusses emerging concerns, challenges and opportunities. The collection explores the ways in which the mutual, asymmetrical relations underpinning global, scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into more reciprocal, symmetrical forms of cross-cultural curatorship in the present, arguing that this is the most effective way for curatorial practice to remain meaningful. International in scope, the volume covers three regions: Europe, North America and the Pacific.

How hip-hop culture and graffiti electrified the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and his contemporaries in 1980s New York In the early 1980s, art and writing labeled as graffiti began to transition from New York City walls and subway trains onto canvas and into art galleries. Young artists who freely sampled from their urban experiences and their largely Black, Latinx and immigrant histories infused the downtown art scene with expressionist, pop and graffiti-inspired compositions. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) became the galvanizing, iconic frontrunner of this transformational and insurgent movement in contemporary American art, which resulted in an unprecedented fusion of creative energies that defied longstanding racial divisions. Writing the Future features Basquiat's works in painting, sculpture, drawing, video, music and fashion, alongside works by his contemporaries--and sometimes collaborators--A-One, ERO, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Keith Haring, Kool Koor, LA2, Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones, Rammellzee and Toxic. Throughout the 1980s, these artists fueled new directions in fine art, design and music, reshaping the predominantly white art world and driving the now-global popularity of hip-hop culture. Writing the Future, published to accompany a major exhibition, contextualizes Basquiat's work in relation to his peers associated with hip-hop culture. It also marks the first time Basquiat's extensive, robust and reflective portraiture of his Black and Latinx friends and fellow artists has been given prominence in scholarship on his oeuvre. With contributions from Carlo McCormick, Liz Munsell, Hua Hsu, J. Faith Almiron and Greg Tate, Writing the Future captures the energy, inventiveness and resistance unleashed when hip-hop hit the city.