The Consequence of a New Standard
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 second 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#2
The Success of Contemporary Art Museums and its Consequences.
The Consequence of a New Standard
16 June 2025
Publicness starts with the building. While long-existing contemporary art museums gradually upgraded their infrastructure to meet changing expectations, many more recent museums grew rapidly. Sometimes the expansion of contemporary art museums is the outcome of a collective effort by both the art community and actors from civil society, as has been the case with the recently opened M+ (2021) in Hong Kong and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2024). The increasing internationalization of museum standards has led to the creation of professional and highly visible museums with aspirations to become key public destinations. But when decision making is concentrated in few hands, as with countries not ruled along democratic lines, museums may pop up more quickly, with outcomes that may be both spectacular and successful. In such cases, what drives these endeavors may range from a profound societal commitment – believing in the importance of contemporary art for a vital society — to art washing – investing in contemporary art as part of a mediatic mix for reputation building.
Contemporary art museums have developed at a different economic scale, very much like contemporary art itself. Not only do these huge buildings cost more to maintain, but they also require huge media attention to bring in the audiences expected for them. That in its turn not only requires professional communication and marketing, but also content that takes those audiences into account in a form that mediates and recognizes them.
It is not only the audience side that has seen a massive increase in requirements, it is also the back-of-house operations. As contemporary art museums have grown as a field, their self-image has grown accordingly. With the best intent, they self-identified ever more with their museum functions. Inside the new infrastructure and in parallel to the new expectations, they introduced new levels of professionalization. Production needed to become flawless, presentation conditions needed to meet the highest standards – standards that museums started to expect from one another as loan conditions. Conservation practices aimed to equal those for medieval masterpieces. These requirements can prove quite challenging, with much contemporary art insisting on its ephemerality, sometimes joyfully discarding permanence or even deliberately aiming for transience and decay in its choice of material. The obsessive focus on conserving and preserving art for posterity so that future generations can enjoy cherished moments of artistic expression has also brought about guidelines, protocols, and expectations that do not accept a subservient position.
All of these moves towards “professionalization,” however valid, are potentially at odds with that other component of the notion of “contemporary art museum,” namely contemporary art itself. As an integral setup, they are in any case at odds with the original ethos of such institutions, which initially prioritized the hypothesis of their new commitments to its publicness.
As in other “‘luxury”’ industries, a focus on professionalism in museums means that as a matter of principle everything needs to be perfect all of the time. For contemporary art, that is not as obvious as for high-end restaurants or hotels. It grows in the world and desires to remain linked to it in its own registers. Art should retain its sovereignty, while the instruments of its publicness remain subordinate.
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.