Changes Happened

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 led 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, these conversations have no public outcome.

The challenging times at present call for action and 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 would be meaningful to share a series of short texts as an outcome of its broader reflections on the challenges, responsibilities, and evolving dynamics facing modern and contemporary art museums today.

The first 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.

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Series#1
The Success of Contemporary Art Museums and its Consequences.
Changes Happened

June 10 2025

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 deeper reflection on broader systemic issues affecting the field. Through the lens of ethical principles, good governance, and best practices, the Committee aims to support museum professionals in navigating both immediate crises and long-term structural concerns.

This new series of articles is conceived as a platform for thoughtful analysis, encouraging the museum community to take a step back, reflect, and engage in meaningful debate about the current state and future of our institutions.

Modern and contemporary art museums frequently seem to fall into crises. At the same time, the global proliferation of new contemporary art museums continues apace. Is the perception of crisis a reflection of reality, or are we overly focused on the large-scale perspective while overlooking local social and political contexts and conditions? Can we reframe these moments of crisis as situations that call for attention and communication?

Over recent decades, the contemporary art world has transformed from a societal niche, centered predominantly in the “West,” into a global phenomenon that draws massive audiences and constitutes a significant economic sector for countries. This astonishing development has often had a major impact on the market for art, which has led to a growing number of artists who can now live from their praxis compared to half-century ago — even if they are still a minority within the artistic community.

Contemporary art has also become a global sociocultural phenomenon, an integral part of exciting lifestyles and a key tool for city branding. This focus on economic issues, however, obscures a broader and more substantial development. At the same time, it provides a haven of resistance and a possible platform for activists of many kinds. Once again, it has proven to be a heterotopia that can enhance the understanding of various aspects of an increasingly complex, diverse, and ever-changing society. If it is deeply compromised by different powers, at the end of the day, it can allow for more breathing space than well-organized domains such as academia or activism.

Rather than its economy, it is the publicness of contemporary art that has skyrocketed — a social fact to which we have paid insufficient attention. The multiplication of contemporary art museums is an outcome of deepening relationships between contemporary art and the public.

CIMAM started in the 1960s as a group of colleagues who knew one another, their shared situations, and their organizations. Their institutions existed without the expectations to meet audience targets. When they called themselves “museums,” the term signaled a principled commitment to the long haul; they didn’t simply present contemporaneity, they wanted to present more specifically the contemporaneity that might make a difference for the future. It was a contemporaneity of equal importance to the art of the past, even as it differed fundamentally from it, including the cutting-edge conditions of the present. They were a space of oxygen for those who wanted to venture into a contemporary art that engaged with urgent social, political, and cultural issues. They were marginal, they had to work with limited funding, and presupposed a huge commitment from the people working in them. They were often housed in repurposed buildings. They were improvisational and agile, and if no opportunity arose, they might reduce their speed of activity. Media attention was meagre.

Today’s contemporary art museum is entirely different in nature. It is highly professional and highly visible within society, often through impressive architecture and infrastructure. Modern and contemporary art museums now challenge the traditional fine art museums that used to be the standard-bearers of the museum landscape. They may eclipse them both in terms of audience numbers, symbolic value, and societal presence. Societies in this fast-evolving world seem to feel more familiar with – and more in need of – contemporaneity.

The ethos of contemporary art museums has always been both reflective and open ended. This led them to extend their limits in different directions. They were not only geared to the future, they were also key in establishing the radicality of modern art as a canonical reference. They were a harbor for adjacent domains, concrete and visual poetry, film, design, architecture and urbanism, especially when those went beyond their disciplinary practices and aimed to be visionary, reflective, experimental, open ended. The encompassing societal drive of contemporary art welcomed them.

This spontaneous interdisciplinarity has by now become an institutionalized phenomenon. Contemporary art is often the motor for institutions which are identified as such, while they are actually structurally far wider in scope, addressing visual culture at large in diverse ways. The spontaneous societal drive of contemporary art museums metamorphosed into mighty public machines.

As much as the sense of crisis determines them, as a phenomenon they are also a phenomenal success.

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.