What we notice insufficiently: How challenges may install institutional precarity
Crises as Symptoms of Crisis — Opinion Text Series
Introducing a new series of reflections from CIMAM's Museum Watch Committee
While the Museum Watch Committee’s role often involves responding to critical situations that threaten museums' professional and ethical standards, its mission also includes fostering reflection on broader systemic issues affecting the field. These discussions may lead to long term projects, such as the one on good governance that lead to a focus on this question in the new ICOM ethical code, or the new project on best practices in committing to artists. More often, however, they stay without a public outcome.
The challenging times at present demand for action but just as well for thoughtful analysis. As a museum community we also need to continue to take a step back, reflect, and engage in meaningful debate about the current state and future of our institutions. In this vein the Museum Watch Committee decided it might be meaningful to share also short texts as an outcome of its broader reflections on the challenges, responsibilities, and evolving dynamics facing modern and contemporary art museums today.
The third of these three texts, called "Crises as Symptoms of Crisis", was developed from the conversations and reflections shared within members of this committee over the past year.
Series#3
The success of contemporary art museums and its consequences.
What we notice insufficiently: How challenges may install institutional precarity
June 23, 2025
Is art lost in the new standardization of museums? The idealistic origin of these institutions still persists, but it often seems marginalized nowadays. It can still affect decisions within museums, and directors tend to evoke it in arguments to their funders as well as junior staff. In real terms, however, operational targets get more focus than strategic ones and hold the vision hostage. As a consequence, the improvisational agility of the early days is no longer possible. Decisions are an outcome of intricate balancing and good planning. This must consider not only the limits of the different functions within the organization but also their need to continuously function.
Today’s modern and contemporary art museums can’t slow down. They need to keep abreast of growth in the art world in order to meet all the many expectations of diverse stakeholders, not to mention their own staff and operational targets. While the initial contemporary art museums were low budget and limited in staffing, current standards require massive resources to keep everything running.
Except for billionaire gestures and those rare cases where national decision makers really want to follow up on what they decided, the focus on diversifying sources of income has become a normality and a norm. This is often interpreted as an inability of governments to carry these costs anymore, which is a grotesque simplification. Governments worldwide spend more money than ever on culture, but they too seem to have lost the systemic capacity to make decisions, both in the overall picture – how many public institutions and where – and in the specifics – whether all these museums indeed need to be run with all these different expectations that make their costs skyrocket. As the costs to maintain museums have soared over the years, the income side has struggled to keep pace.
There are cases where costs and income seem to find an acceptable balance, but those situations are rare. The development of a model contemporary art museum has exchanged social marginality for economic precariousness. There are three ways to square this capitalistic circle: by finding substantially more income, although the incessant demand for larger budgets makes that a real challenge; by lowering costs, which professional requirements prohibit; or by letting the system run by itself, hoping that the solution will emerge from the process, while making quick patches, repairs, and feints all the time.
Calling attention to this systemically organized form of precariousness reveals how the struggle by museums to constantly square the circle formed by capitalism is a Sisyphean task. Perhaps this precariousness is one of the reasons why, in recent years, contemporary art museums have so often been a battleground for ideological maneuvering by selected politicians and various forms of activism, and even more often a stage for ideological pirouettes in which the actor scores easy media attention.
Perhaps our public analyses of situations of crisis have become too topical. One of the metaphors used in recent analyses has been that of toxicity. Toxicity in relations within the museum system is, at this moment, only assigned to leadership. Relational toxicity has at least four components, though. There are the two parties involved – in this case both leadership and staff – but there is also the space in which they interact – the museum as a system and a culture on its own behalf – and there is the wider environment that affects those.
Over the past decades, museum directors seem to have been forced into managerialism, but museum leadership has been trying to square their circle and more. They end up addressing both funders, middle-aged seekers of added value, youngsters that may make the future, all of the audiences deemed marginalized before, and the different sections of the museum staff, its board, the diverse media, and politics at large. Oh yes, and art and artists and the art community.
Museum directors cannot be content with addressing all of those mentioned above. They are also expected to communicate to the whole world, and to be ready for unexpected pirouettes of dancers, or for other accidents that overtake the museum stage of mediatic visibility.
They find themselves in a place that is between the two commitments that may have made them decide to move there to start with, between art and the public appeal of art. Their position is awkward, and even at times, contradictory.
They have so many antagonistic vectors pulling at them from the different corners of the market place.
They often try to take responsibility for that: often as well as they possibly can.
It is not that contemporary art museums have to go back to a “glorious past” of low budget, fringe freedom, and jazzy improvisation for small audiences. There are colleagues who still work within those circumstances, who know all too well why it is also crucial to break out of that old circle for a sustainable future. But it is equally important to be self-reflexive of this situation of continuous institutional precarity, and perhaps even more so than we have been in the past, where people were held responsible, rather than changing the system of endemic overstretching. Sharing an awareness that the development of contemporary art museums also tends to develop systems that result in less intimate contact with the pulse of art, would be a good beginning. Sharing the awareness that an optimally functioning contemporary art museum is a quasi-fiction may be a good next step, which might bring different stakeholders on the same or at least, adjacent pages.
The notion of the contemporary art museum was founded upon a paradox: that of an institution wanting to be both of the moment and of eternity; an institution wanting to be both a museum geared and open to a contemporaneity that is still taking shape. Today, contemporary art museums must live with more paradoxes. If an awareness and understanding of these contradictions is shared by all the people committed to a museum, its staff, its directors, and its stakeholders alike, tensions may be addressed in a different way. A broken circle is just as good as a closed one, if its stakeholders agree upon that being so. Instead of internalizing the tensions caused by the impossibility to meet all the diverse expectations, museums might then find a new resilience, collectively assuming and negotiating limits in order to be able to focus on what they’re really about.
The CIMAM Museum Watch Committee:
- Zeina Arida, (Chair) Director, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar.
- Bart De Baere, Director, M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium.
- Amanda de la Garza, Artistic Deputy Director, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), Madrid, Spain.
- Malgorzata Ludwisiak, Ph.D., Museum Management Expert / Freelance Curator / Academic Teacher, Warsaw, Poland.
- Agustin Perez Rubio, Independent Curator, Madrid, Spain.
- Kitty Scott, Strategic Director, Fogo Island Arts / Shorefast, Toronto, Canada.
- Yu Jin Seng, Director (Curatorial & Research), National Gallery Singapore, Singapore.
CIMAM – International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art – is an Affiliated Organization of ICOM.