Charles Saumarez Smith reflects on the problems facing traditional museums, how the pandemic has amplified them, and wonders whether museums would be better replaced by more contemporary “experiences”.
I spent the early days of lockdown writing and rewriting the conclusion to a book on the history of museums since the Second World War (actually, since the opening of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1939), desperately trying to figure out what the effect of a gigantic pandemic is likely to be.
Will reopened museums continue more or less as they are — confident spaces of great civic grandeur, funded by a combination of the state and private sector? Or will they have to retreat and retrench as public funding takes a battering and as private donors are bruised by the attacks on the sources of their wealth and their motives for giving?... Keep reading on The Critic.
I spent the early days of lockdown writing and rewriting the conclusion to a book on the history of museums since the Second World War (actually, since the opening of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1939), desperately trying to figure out what the effect of a gigantic pandemic is likely to be.
Will reopened museums continue more or less as they are — confident spaces of great civic grandeur, funded by a combination of the state and private sector? Or will they have to retreat and retrench as public funding takes a battering and as private donors are bruised by the attacks on the sources of their wealth and their motives for giving?... Keep reading on The Critic.