The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues - (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The world's leading museum directors discuss the future of museums in the wake of 2020's pandemic and social upheavals

2020 ushered in a new decade and with it a series of unforeseen events that have reoriented the future. As the coronavirus forced businesses and institutions to close all over the world, museums likewise shuttered. New York-based cultural strategist András Szántó took this abrupt halt of art-world activity as an opportunity to interview 28 of the world's leading museum directors. Here, each director addresses the potential of art museums as both spaces for change and democracy, and as reflections of larger sociopolitical dilemmas, offering a glimpse into the many possible futures of museums in an accelerated phase of reappraisal and reinvention.

Contributors include: 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 Ruger (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).

Review Quotes

All too often, museums tell their stories, uncritically. They don't tell the stories of the Indigenous peoples that the colonial empires were looting, raping, and pillaging. In America, they don't tell the stories of African Americans, slaves, and the holocaust of Native Americans. We are clearly at a moment of reckoning with that. And the museum industry, which intentionally or otherwise has been complicit in this societal narrative, is experiencing an awakening to these multiple blind spots. [This book aims] to figure out how to be part of this correction.--András Szántó "Lithub"

At the book's heart is a thesis: that thanks in part to postmodernism (which, by championing multiplicity, overturned modernism's grand master narrative) the museum, as a concept, has come increasingly under attack...now, 'it's more about the visitor experience.'--Alastair Sooke "Telegraph"

Experiment and enthusiasm make this book indispensable for those interested in the way a diverse set of possible futures for the museum are being envisioned and achieved.--Daniel Herwitz "Financial Times"

Takes the form of both philosophical inquiry and pragmatic problem-solving--all enlivened by Szántó's familiar repartee with his sources... Contributes widely divergent answers to the questions of what a museum is, can be, and should be.--Karen Rosenberg "Artful Jaunts"

A new kind of museum is emerging--here's what the future holds...--Andras Szanto "Art Newspaper"