What is the future of the museum?
An interview with cultural strategist András Szántó
In early 2021, New York-based Hungarian writer and cultural strategist András Szántó came out with his book The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues; its raison d’être – the pandemic that had closed down everything, including museums. “This was a perfect moment to talk to museum directors about the future of museums, because that new future had just begun. There was a strong sense that 2020 is the starting point of the next chapter, whatever that next chapter is,” says Szántó, adding that conversations were all that was left.
As alluded to in the title, the book contains 28 conversations with museum leaders. Geographically, it encompasses the world – Europe, Latin America, Asia, North America, the Middle East, Africa and Australia. “It’s an incredibly international group because it was so important to express that whatever that future is for museums, it’s going to be very global. One of the key messages of the book is that globalism is opening up new spaces of opportunity for museums.” The fact that nearly half of his interviewees were women was important to Szántó – “a conscious decision on my part,” he reveals.
András Szántó. Photo: Patrice Casanova
András Szántó is known for his work as a cultural strategist and consultant specialising in museums and art institutions. Face-to-face communication has always been at the core of his life, one in which he has spent numerous hours interviewing and speaking to the principals of the art world (e.g. he regularly moderates Art Basel Conversations); and as he admits himself, many of them are good friends of his. Szántó has overseen the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University and the Global Museum Leaders Colloquium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and is a board member of the Moholy-Nagy Foundation. His writing has been published in the New York Times, Art Forum, the Art Newspaper, and elsewhere.
The Future of the Museum is being translated into several languages with versions in Brazil and Hungary coming soon, and Spanish and Chinese versions underway. "It’s a really interesting moment because we are exactly a year since the moment when I was writing this book and collecting the interviews," says Szántó during our Zoom meeting on a late afternoon in August.
At the beginning of this year you launched The Future of the Museum, a book that includes twenty-eight interviews with museum directors from all over the world. This book is a pandemic-era product.
I’m a consultant who works with a lot of museum directors. Some of my best friends are museum directors, and I care deeply about museums. Last year in March or early April… I forget when Easter was, but I remember it was Easter weekend, and we were in lockdown, which at the time was, of course, a completely new, unparalleled experience for everybody. One of the sad facts about lockdown was that all the museums were closed. I didn’t feel that it made very much sense to close them, because museums are quite adaptable. They’re big, and they can control how many people go in. Anyway, on Easter weekend, I wrote an article for Artnet magazine that basically said, hey, you know, maybe it’s time to think about how we could reopen safely. I outlined a couple of measures, some of which were along the lines of what museums in fact ended up doing. And I finished the article by saying a little bit about why it’s so important at moments like this for people to have access to museums.
It wasn’t a particularly poetic or manifesto-like piece, but it was willing to say things out loud that were on the minds of many people at the time. We couldn’t really understand why you could not go into a museum but you could go into a hardware store, for example, or a supermarket. And the article had tremendous resonance. I felt that there was so much interest in museums and so much willingness to talk—everybody had this need to talk. Nobody had much else to do. So, this was a perfect moment to talk to museum directors about the future of museums—because that new future had just begun. There was a strong sense that 2020 was the starting point of the next chapter, whatever that next chapter might be.
This was a perfect moment to talk to museum directors about the future of museums—because that new future had just begun. There was a strong sense that 2020 was the starting point of the next chapter, whatever that next chapter might be.
That was the moment that museum directors, as well as those for whom art is important and plays a significant role in their lives, began talking about art’s ability to help people live and overcome crises. Do you believe in the healing power of art? It’s often said that museums have nowadays replaced churches; they can be found in practically every village.
There’s a wonderful story about how the National Gallery in London stayed open during the Blitz, in the Second World War. Of course, they were terribly afraid about the risk, because there were daily bombings by Germany. But what they did is they displayed one work of art, and each month they rotated it, bringing in another work of art. There was one work on display, and you could go into the National Gallery to view it. Thus, people could still be reminded of art and normal times and civilisation or whatever words they used to describe that particular experience. I find that to be a beautiful metaphor.
Museums do play this extremely important role in the lives of many people. And when we say ‘church’ (a word that’s often perhaps used in a kind of slightly negative way)… but people do seek meaning and solace and community. Large segments of society, particularly in Europe today, no longer practise institutional religion, but it’s not the ideology I’m talking about. It’s the weekly practice of communing with people in a space around a shared interest. For many people, there’s something truly affirming in that. And, certainly art, if it’s any good, helps us come to terms with our circumstances.
One of the things we’re seeing now is all the great art that was produced during the pandemic that I think will help us process this trauma. This is the biggest trauma as a society that we’ve experienced in our lifetimes. Right? And that’s what great art is supposed to do—help us come to terms with our reality. I’m a romantic in this sense. Actually, my personal feeling is that much of the contemporary art world has been a little bit too preoccupied with itself. It has gotten caught up in insider dialogues, and it has forgotten some of this larger function. There’s actually a deep human need to grasp the world through art. We want art as a catalyst, as a framework, as a vocabulary, as a way of somehow cognitively, emotionally finding our way through life. At least that’s how I look at art.
My personal feeling is that much of the contemporary art world has been a little bit too preoccupied with itself. It has gotten caught up in insider dialogues, and it has forgotten some of this larger function.
But it’s not just the pandemic we need to process. We need art to help us process inequities in our society. We need art to help us understand our environmental predicament. We need art to help us come to terms with a world where, quite soon, in many areas of cognition and skill, machines will be ahead of humans. We need art to understand a world in which science is allowing us to play God with things like lifespan and cloning, and who knows what else. Where questions of ethics and morality and what’s right and what’s wrong and what’s possible need to be thought about. And quite frankly, we need artists to have a seat at the table during these conversations. Art should be present in the discourse around all of the leading-edge issues in our society today.
Too often, art has not been part of that discourse. I think that’s one of the reasons why so much of the public is not tuned in to art—because they don’t feel the urgency. They don’t feel that art is doing something for them. They feel that the artist is speaking an insider language they do not understand, and only collectors can afford to buy it. The people who kind of follow this sort of thing, they take interest in it. But if we’re honest, huge parts of society are not really engaging in a deep way with contemporary art. And that’s too bad.
Event tour. Art 2019 with Dar Bellarj Foundation (single mothers of the Marrakesh medina). Photo: Ayoub El Bardii. Courtesy of the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL)
But isn’t society’s disinterest directly linked with the education system, in which art is always the subject that gets relegated to a less important position? When politicians need to save money, they first cut expenses for art education.
Very true. But it’s easy to demonise politicians, they certainly give us many reasons to do so. And it’s a sad fact that the sort of people who end up being politicians are usually not the sort of people who care a lot about art. But I always look at the other side, too, which is: What have we done lately to put forward our value proposition in such a way that it would be impossible for a politician to not support the arts?
We have to accept some of the responsibility ourselves for not having ensured that the general public feels that art is indispensable, so that cutting it is simply not an option. We do have some responsibility in this situation. I believe that even the way we’ve argued for culture contributes to the problem. Years ago, I wrote an essay for The Art Newspaper about the rhetoric of cultural advocacy. This was at the time when you heard a lot of people talking about what we call the instrumental benefits of art. Basically, they said: “Well, we can’t explain why art is important in the traditional way. So now we’re going to say that art is important because it creates these benefits.” Like, if you invest in art, you’ll have better math scores, or it will attract white-collar workers to your city. Or that people who’ve studied art are more likely to get good jobs on Wall Street, or whatever. Basically, it was quite an effective strategy in some ways. It was something that the politicians could understand.
But unfortunately, it also meant that we’d turned art into a tool to achieve something else, instead of art being an end in itself, something important enough that we would believe in and that we could demonstrate why it’s important. We said, art is just a way for you to get this or that other thing. The comparison I made back then was a cancer hospital. Cancer hospitals do create jobs. The neighbourhood they’re in is probably safer. And you know, people move to cities that have good hospitals. So you can find a lot of instrumental arguments and benefits for them. But a cancer hospital is never going to argue for the importance of itself based on that. It’s going to say, based on facts, that it’s saving lives—that it has an intrinsically relevant role to play in society. And I think, in sum, that in the past fifty years, we as an art world have been having some difficulty in clearly articulating why we’re fundamentally important for the society at large.
You’re linked with the Hungarian artist Moholy-Nagy, who was one of the figures from the legendary Bauhaus school. In Europe, there’s now a growing call for a new Bauhaus. Namely, that it’s acutely important to get scientists, artists, philosophers and so on around the same table, and that their synergy could become a driving force in the further development of the world. It’s a way for art to assert its weight, or influence.
Absolutely. This is a subject that’s very close to my heart. As it happens, I’m related to Moholy. I serve on the board of the Moholy-Nagy Foundation and am currently working with the university in Budapest that’s named after Moholy.
Actually, in the world of design you see much more of this aspiration to use the imagination and creativity for the betterment of society. Design is still much more connected with those agendas. And a significant number of artists also subscribe to these cross-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary dialogues. If you ask most working artists today, they would tell you that art should have a transformative impact on society. But, at the end of the day, it’s just not really happening on a large scale.
We have to recognise that the art world is a small bubble. It’s a little world with a big megaphone. It feels big on the inside, but by some measures it is surprisingly small. Ford Motor Company makes a pickup truck called the F-150. This is the standard pickup truck that every plumber and electrician or guy who likes to go fishing uses in America. And it’s just one of the many lines of cars that Ford makes. On an annual basis, the business of selling F-150s is larger than the entire art market. This is just one truck at one car company, bigger than the entire art market. So, that’s just one way of illustrating how small the world of art is in comparison to the so-called “real world”. It is understandable, then, that making an imoact in that larger world will also be a challenge.
We have to recognise that the art world is a small bubble. It’s a little world with a big megaphone.
To go even further, when you look at audience statistics, you realise thatonly a small fraction of the public –under 5%– are regularly attending these visual art events. What does that mean? It means that if we’re going to have an impact on broader society (as I strongly believe we should). We need to build sturdier bridges out of this bubble—we can’t just expect people to come to us. Do we need to destroy the bubble? I’m not sure. There’s a lot of beauty in this bubble. I love this bubble. But we need to get out of it. That’s why I really admire the efforts of people such as Hans Ulrich Obrist, at the Serpentine, who’s doing 150 partnerships with people outside the art world to think about climate change— because we need to get those ideas out there. We need these wonderful initiatives about the oceans and climate change and all these horrible things that we’re facing, because we’re already staring in the face of societal apocalypse now.
Just yesterday, we heard from the climate change panel that this thing is no longer in the future. It’s here, it’s upon us now. Okay. So, we want to contribute to the effort. But how do we contribute with the tiny little voice we have in this tiny little bubble? We need to get out of there. And in that respect, I do think that the Moholy agenda of not just keeping this conversation to ourselves but really pushing ourselves to engage with scientists, with technologists, with writers and thinkers is what we have to do. A lot of change in our behaviour must start with rethinking art school and art education. We’ve created a bit of a gilded ghetto. We’ve sealed off the art world from a lot of those wider areas in culture, the economy, in public policy, in technology and science. We have only to benefit from growing those relationships.
A lot of change in our behaviour must start with rethinking art school and art education.
At the beginning of our conversation you said that there was a strong sense that 2020 marked the starting point of the next chapter, whatever that next chapter might be. How does the institution of the museum transform? Where is the museum of the future going?
In 2020 it’s not like somebody discovered something completely new. As in many parts of life, the circumstances of the pandemic took things that were already bubbling up, that were already being talked about, and pushed them out front. Zoom existed before the pandemic, but it wasn’t really part of our life. It needed this push to put it at the centre of our lives.
So, as I describe in the book, museums around the world were already engaged in a deep discussion – before the pandemic— about what a museum is. The International Council of Museums, or ICOM, was attempting to rewrite the definition of the art museum. There were a lot of important ideas swirling around on how to open up museums. The history of that democratizing impulse goes way back. Essentially, taking the traditional functions of a museum – collecting, preserving, studying, presenting, conserving – and building around that core mission a set of new functions for museums that hadn’t really been so important before. And a lot of these functions were about opening up to the community, transforming the museum into hub of social life, breaking down boundaries between the city and the building, making the museum more of a public square, a forum for debate about major issues. Along with that, of course, has come a polyphonisation of the telling of art history in the museum, an opening up to the world and to wider range of socio-economic strata. Basically, a series of new agendas, if you will, or purposes were forming around the core museum functions.
Of course, the pandemic was first and foremost a health crisis and an economic crisis. Then, importantly, the reckoning over racial injustice, after the murder of George Floyd, really pushed museums into this new space quickly. When I started out writing the book and collecting the essays, I didn’t have this hypothesis at the ready. I didn’t say, let’s have these conversations to prove that this is happening. When I sat down to write the introduction, I had put all the essays side by side, and as I reread them, I realized, wow, it’s really striking how many parallels there are in what these directors are saying and how really different this philosophy – this sort of new generational philosophy – is from what came before.
Garage Museum Square. Garage Museum of Contemporary Art Photo: Alexey Narodizky
So where is the museum of the future going? Well, first, I think it’s becoming an institution that sees itself in a less hierarchical relationship to society. It’s becoming a more open institution, also digitally pushing beyond the walls of the museum. It’s becoming an institution that sees itself in a dialogue with its audience rather than in a monologue. It’s becoming an institution that’s mindful of its privilege and the ways in which it can contribute to the status quo rather than questioning it. The museum is becoming a self-questioning institution. Physically, it’s turning into a more welcoming and comfortable space, an institution where you want to spend your time – a happier, friendlier, more human place.
I was just recently at a museum in Geneva and watching a mother take her child down to the bathroom, and the child was saying something to her. And the mother said, “Quiet!” And I thought to myself, how interesting. Why is she teaching that child that she can’t speak in a museum? Who said you can’t talk in a museum? A number of changes are occurring to shift these perceptions. It’s not just one thing; it’s a set of things that together amount to an opening up of the museum to a wider, more inclusive community and a wider, more inclusive geography and cultural range.
So where is the museum of the future going? I think it’s becoming an institution that sees itself in a less hierarchical relationship to society. It’s becoming a more open institution, also digitally pushing beyond the walls of the museum. It’s becoming an institution that sees itself in a dialogue with its audience rather than in a monologue.
But is it possible to maintain the intellectual capacity of a museum and at the same time attract and interest an audience? In 1998, the Guggenheim in New York hosted the much-talked-about exhibition The Art of the Motorcycle. For a large part of the people who came to see the exhibition, it was, by their own admission, the first time in their lives they had set foot in an art museum. But critics of the exhibition said and wrote that the museum was not a place for mass entertainment and should instead preserve its status as an intellectual citadel. How does one get people used to art?
The words that come to mind in this context are leadership, strategy and tactics. I think it takes a leader and a group of people in the museum to revise the idea of the museum, to maintain the respect for the seriousness of the enterprise while at the same time making it more accessible. And we simply have to accept that some of our practices are simply outdated and wrong. Which is not to say everything we do is outdated and wrong— to the contrary, museums have accumulated enormous amoiunts of knowledge and specialized expertise that is required to be good stewards of our cultural legacies. It’s not a question of intellectual rigour. It’s a question of tone of means of address.
The language we use is opaque and theoretical. There’s no reason for us to use such coded language. The coldness and unpleasantness of some of our spaces is all wrong. The sometimes extraordinarily arrogant behaviour that you come across on the part of museum teams, not to mention gallerists, towards the public is just wrong. Building a museum on top of a hill with a long set of stairs leading up to it is no longer the right approach. A museum should not look like a fortress or church. We need to move forward from those habits.
At the same time, we don’t want to turn museums into Disneyland. We want to have a strong sense of scholarship and a strong sense of choosing what topics we engage in and which artist we promote. And by the way, that also includes the issue of not just being slaves to the art market but also making independent judgments. It’s ultimately a question of judgment. When you think about your own life, it’s always about finding a balance. How can I live a good life, but a healthy life? How can I find an equilibrium that’s meaningful? The way I see it, there’s a tremendous amount of work we could do in the design of museums, in the definition of museum experiences, in the mediation between the museum and its public. We do not have to sacrifice the quality of what a museum offers. Indeed, what a museum really does, and is meant to do, is take the high-quality ideas that are embedded in works of art, and the scholarship around them, and connect it all to the public.
Indeed, what a museum really does, and is meant to do, is take the high-quality ideas that are embedded in works of art, and the scholarship around them, and connect it all to the public.
Who are the museum goers and potential museum goers? Could you describe them? What are they looking for?
The museum is a multi-dimensional institution. In fact, when you study museums, one of the things you learn about is audience segmentation. There’s no one specific museum audience. The museum analyst John Falk has described different types of museum goers. There are students who go to museums; there are those you’d consider connoisseurs who go to museums; there are people who go to museums, as Falk puts it in his book, because they’re planning to take a trip somewhere and want to learn about that place before they go. There are people who take their mother in a wheelchair on an outing to a museum. There are people who go to a museum on a date – because, as we know, museums are a great place to go on a date.
One of the categories of museum goers that Falk identifies are “spiritual pilgrims”. They’re the ones who often come alone. It’s often a woman who needs space and quiet. She goes to the museum as a sanctuary. The spiritual pilgrim is the kind of person who’d like to sit down on a bench in front of Monet’s Water Lilies and just stare at it. You could say it’s a church-like experience. And that’s an experience that museums need to provide for some of their visitors. However, that does not mean that it’s the only thing they should be doing, because there are other types of museum goers.
There are people who go to a museum to study. I’m a big believer that we need to think of the museum as an everyday space. You know, the Soho Houses and Starbucks where people hang out – why shouldn’t they hang out at a museum? They have Wi-Fi in the museum, they have coffee in the museum, they have air conditioning. I think the successful museum of the future will be a social space that’s anchored in objects, in experiences; that will be the heart of it. But then around that central core – if you imagine a nuclear reactor, the central core is where the actual collisions and reactions happen, making the museum into this living social organism. We need to weave that museum into the daily habits of 21st-century people.
The first thing the incoming director of the Louvre said was that she was going to extend the opening hours of the museum. Even today the Louvre is only open until 5 or 6 p.m. That’s when people get off work. That’s not a way of adapting to people’s ives.
A successful institution will look to engaging many different museum goers, young and old. We now have a wonderful project that revolves around creative aging, around engaging older people. As you know, the fastest-growing part of our society is people over 55 and 65. By 2060, we’ll have millions and millions of people living to 100, and many of them will still be able to go to museums. Obviously, if we want those people to come (and, by the way, they’ll have the time, the interest, the money and the education), we need to cater to them. Maybe we’ll have different food in the cafeteria. Certainly, we’ll have easier access and ramps and places to sit down. What I’m saying is that we need to think about this audience. We cannot forget about the object or the scholarship or the mission, but we need to match that up with relevancy.
Museu de Arte de São Paulo, installation view of Acervo em Transformação, 2020. Photo: Eduardo Ortega
You mentioned arrogance and the desire to make the museum a fortress. But isn’t this exactly what’s happening with all the starchitects, whose museum buildings in recent decades are visible testimony to the egomania of both the architect and the client? I have to admit that sometimes even the art itself gets lost in them.
There are many issues to discuss regarding museum construction, whether it’s private or public. For me, one of the main conclusions from this book has been to start thinking about museum architecture. Clearly, this is an area where an enormous amount of new thinking needs to be done, match the new “software”, as it were, of the museum with buildings that support the new aspirations of the institution. One part of that is projecting the museum beyond its walls via emerging technologies, including some we haven’t even learned about yet. But we really need to rethink architecture and urbanism as they relate to the museum project.
There’s an enormous amount of work that museums can do by simply being accommodating, pleasant, open places.
There’s an enormous amount of work that museums can do by simply being accommodating, pleasant, open places. Starchitecture has been a magnet for tourists but actually, but also a repellent to large segments of the local population, who do not feel that they’re entitled to enter these shiny palaces. The people working in these institutions are usually quite progressive, but the buildings themselves are often quite intimidating and excluding. Functionally, they need to be rethought. Education needs to be placed more at their centre. Community activities can be more in their centre. And of course, a big part of this story is sustainability. Personally, I really hope that the takeaway from the pandemic is not going to be that we stop doing travelling exhibitions, but museums do need to be more mindful of their ecological footprint. I hear people saying, “Well, look at all the jet fuel that’s going to be used for exhibitions.” But you can make an exhibition happen without sending a chaperone with every major work, with an extra plane ticket.
If you care about a museum’s carbon footprint, don’t build a new museum, or don’t destroy it by building a new museum. Use an old building, transform an old building. Consider whether you even need that new wing, because actually, so much of the energy in museums today is not about the wall space. It’s about community space. It’s about the digital, the virtual, the performative, the experiential and all these other things that are not about more wall space.
If you care about a museum’s carbon footprint, don’t build a new museum, or don’t destroy it by building a new museum. Use an old building, transform an old building.
It all comes back, once again, to the question of judgment. So we need to think about this whole issue very holistically.
But what there’s no doubt about is that architects will have an incredibly important voice in articulating and supporting this evolving idea of the museum. Quite frankly, it’ll be good for them to exhibit a bit more humility than they have in the past quarter of a century, in which we got some really extraordinarily flamboyant and egomaniacal museum architecture, which I think we’re increasingly going to see as a kind of historical phase. I think the reset has already begun.
Architects will have an incredibly important voice in articulating and supporting this evolving idea of the museum. Quite frankly, it’ll be good for them to exhibit a bit more humility than they have in the past quarter of a century.
You were born in socialist Hungary. There’s a phenomenon that people born and raised in the Socialist Bloc know, and that’s the high status of art and culture, the important role they played in the societies that lived behind the Iron Curtain and knew how (and had the opportunity) to read the truth between the lines in art.
Exactly. There’s little to feel nostalgic about… I still experienced socialism. I was 24 when I left Hungary in 1988, so I got a good taste of it. But there are, frankly, certain things one can miss about socialism. And one of those was a public that was deeply invested in culture. Because culture always needs a public to respond to it.
Behind the Iron Curtain there was a very, very powerful dialogue between the culture makers and their audiences, in which both sides really knew the rules of the game. They understood the grammar, the vocabulary, the insinuations. And you didn’t need to say much; it was a refined, coded language. I once wrote an essay in which I described how, in the 1970s, I knew someone who got arrested because he was wearing a certain kind of jacket that looked like the American flag. Who would get arrested for that today?! Or, there was a seminal work of Hungarian performance art that consisted of the artist sitting down on a small chair in the middle of a street. Of course, in half an hour the cops were there, and this was considered a major disruption—and the whole point of the piece. Now, you can imagine an artist sitting down on a stool in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and nobody would care! So, culture mattered, and the stakes were high. You could get arrested. Even though the circumstances behind the Iron Curtain were not good, to say the least, they did add relevance to artists.
Behind the Iron Curtain there was a very, very powerful dialogue between the culture makers and their audiences, in which both sides really knew the rules of the game. They understood the grammar, the vocabulary, the insinuations. And you didn’t need to say much; it was a refined, coded language.
We also have to remember that, back then, social hierarchies were not expressed in the form of consumption and wealth and commercial privilege; hierarchies, differentiation and distinction were expressed through the language of culture. So, if you wanted to show you were important in Budapest in 1982, you had a bookshelf in your home with 2000 books – then people knew you were somebody who mattered. That world is gone. I was lucky to come from a place where these things really mattered.
And culture – at least the admissible kind -- was encouraged. You could go to concerts for next to nothing. You could afford to buy all the books from the bookstore that appeared in a given week. As a high-school student I would go to the bookstore every Friday. I would buy every book that had come out that week that I might be remotely interested in reading,a whole bag of them. And the cost of a book was roughly the equivalent of a ham sandwich. Artists had certain special privileges. Many were given an apartment if they were any good, and grants, at least as long as they didn’t stick their necks out too far. For all its boredom and severe restrictions on individual freedoms, that mid-20th-century socialism preserved the kind of cultural life in eastern Europe that western Europe really last saw before the war. There were some nice things about eastern Europe at that time, but also plenty of not so nice things.
Today, important new institutions are coming into view, promulgated by a new generation. The extraordinary Kunsthalle in Prague that’s coming in early 2022. , The institutional systems now being put in place are all an an early stage. Central and Eastern Europe is old, but it’s also new. We need to now give these institutions time to prove themselves, to find their way, in terms of their programming and their organisational ethos. This is a very interesting moment in this part of the world.
Title image: Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, open-air cinema at the square. Image courtesy of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín
