by Jon Lackman | 28 June 2010 | Modern, Museums
MoMA director Glenn Lowry recently delivered the keynote address at “Museums of the 21st Century” at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne (video).
He laid out six issues for museums of modern art. My rough and abridged transcript:
1. The moment a museum of modern or contemporary art is predictable is the moment it is no longer either modern or contemporary.
2. There is a profound shift that is occurring at many art museums, a move from being repositories or treasure houses to social spaces where the relationship between what is seen and who is seeing it and with whom becomes as important as what is on the wall. This is a shift away from the idea of the aura of the object, as Walter Benjamin might have understood it, to the idea of the aura of the public, and successful museums will figure out how to navigate this shift without losing the ability to foreground the experience of the public in the works of art they believe in.
3. A concomitant shift away from passive experiences to interactive or participatory experiences, from art that is simply hung on the wall to art that literally invites people to become a part of it.
4. The idea of a center, Paris in the 20s, New York in the 60s, is simply a untenable idea today … Every museum of modern art is going to have to develop a strategy for dealing with this problem, how to know about what you don’t know, how to cover the world … in the kind of depth that’s appropriate … There is no periphery.
5. A consequence of operating in the global environment is that the scale and cost of doing so will compel museum to experiment with a whole range of practices … from setting up satellite institutions to forming partnerships and alliances with existing ones to inventing entirely new models of collaboration. A second consequence of this will be a search for art that is meaningful and authentic, to use Andreas Huyssen’s terminology, that is, art that is grounded in local experience but that can speak at a universal or global level.
6. Art museums must learn to deal with the fact that their audiences are going to increasingly come from the world wide web and may never actually set foot in their physical space. MoMA in fiscal year 2010 will have 3 million visitors who actually come in our door and 18 million discrete visitors who connect to us on our website … You need to have literally a parallel space on the web. It’s no longer simply a means of providing information about what’s taking place inside the museum. The web itself has become a central space for any museum that takes its mission seriously.
