The Future of the Museum:
28 Dialogues by András Szántó
As museums shuttered during the 2020 novel-coronavirus pandemic, New York-based author and cultural strategist András Szántó conducted a series of virtual conversations with international museum leaders. At this pivotal moment, the directors spoke candidly about the challenges and untapped potential of art museums.
About the Book
Read the press release
The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues reflects a rapidly growing, changing, and varied museum landscape in which dynamic experimentation is happening worldwide, with institutions in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Australia often leading the way in developing new models. It is a sector experiencing a moment of reckoning about inequality and social justice, pressed to achieve more diversity in staffing, governance, programming, interpretation, and collections. Meanwhile, the pandemic has exposed the underlying weakness of many museums’ temporary-exhibition-driven business models, as well as the limits of public and private support. The dialogues reveal the diverse ways in which the search is on for new sources of income, new ways to engage the public, new ways to run institutions.
28 dialogues with museum leaders from 14 countries.
What emerges from the series of in-depth conversations is a composite portrait of a generation of museum leaders working to make institutions more open, democratic, inclusive, experimental and experiential, technologically savvy, culturally polyphonic, attuned to the needs of their visitors and communities, and concerned with addressing the defining issues of the societies around them. The dialogues offer glimpses of how museums around the globe are undergoing an accelerated phase of reappraisal and reinvention.
Each of the twenty-eight conversations in the book explores a particular topic of relevance to art institutions today and tomorrow.
Marion Ackerman
Director General, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD) Dresden, Germany
Cecilia Alemani
Director & Chief Curator, High Line Art, New York City, United States
Meriem Berrada
Artistic Director, Museum of Contemporary African Art Al Maaden (MACAAL),
Marrakesh , Morocco
Thomas P. Campbell
Director & CEO, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, United States
Tania Coen-Uzzielli
Director, Tel Aviv Museum of Art (TAMA), Tel Aviv, Israel
Rhana Devenport
Director, Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), Adelaide, Australia
María Mercedes González
Director General, Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM), Colombia
Sandra Jackson-Dumont
Director & CEO, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, United States
Brian Kennedy
Director & CEO, Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), Salem, Massachusetts, United States
Koyo Kouoh
Executive Director & Chief Curator, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa
Adam Levine
President, Director & CEO Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, United States
Victoria Noorthoorn
Director, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (Museo Moderno), Argentina
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London, United Kingdom
Adriano Pedrosa
Artistic Director, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), Brazil
Axel Rüger
Secretary & Chief Executive, Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom
Katrina Sedgwick
CEO & Director, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne, Australia
Eugene Tan
Director, National Gallery Singapore & Singapore Art Museum (SAM), Singapore
Marie-Cécile Zinsou
President, Fondation Zinsou/Musée de la Fondation Zinsou, Cotonou & Ouidah,
Republic of Benin
Selected Press & Programming
Feature: András Szántó on the Future of Museums
András Szántó spoke with Karen Rosenberg of apropos of his new book, The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues, for Artful. Read More call_made
The Brooklyn Museum Virtual Roundtable: The Future of the Museum Dialogues
How do museums fit into the calls for social change that echo around the globe today? Learn about some exciting approaches to inventing and reinventing the museum with two back-to-back conversations in conjunction with the U.S. publication of museum strategist András Szántó’s book The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues. Szántó will be in conversation with Sandra Jackson-Dumont, director of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles andMarie-Cécile Zinsou, President and Founder of Benin’s Zinsou Foundation. Then, get an inside look into how museums are reshaping their institutions as Anne Pasternak speaks with Victoria Noorthoorn of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and Franklin Sirmans of the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Read More call_made
The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues by András Szántó Released
The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues has just been released in Europe and will arrive in the US and worldwide in January 2021. A product of the pandemic lockdown, the book contains interviews with museum directors conducted from late May through mid-August, 2020. Taken together, the interviews offer a generational portrait of institutional leadership with a global range. “As one reads though the dialogues, a distinctive and more or less unifying philosophy emerges about what an art museum is and what it should aspire to be,” writes András Szántó writes in the introductory essay. “If the late twentieth century ushered in a liberating pluralism in art and cultural expression, it can only be hoped that the twenty-first century will do the same for the institutions of art. This sense of open possibility would be the ultimate guarantor of the enduring strength and relevance of the museum form.” Read More call_made
A new kind of museum is emerging—here’s what the future holds
Expanding upon the conversations in his new book about what the future holds for museums, in this article in The Art Newspaper, András Szántó surveys how museum leaders are shifting approaches and drawing conclusions from a difficult 2020. “2020 cemented the embrace of an expanded museum mission, already reflected in the International Council of Museums’s inconclusive attempt last year to come up with a new definition of the museum, one that goes beyond the custodianship of objects to position it as an institution committed to serving communities and addressing social needs. For today’s museum leaders, these two imperatives are not contradictory but complementary—and by all accounts, the Covid experience has deepened the sentiment.” Read More call_made
The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues review by Stefan Kobel in Handelsblatt
Stefan Kobel from Handelsblatt has published a review of the András Szántó’s new book, The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues. In it, Kobel writes, “The volume is a treasure trove of analyses, food for thought and models for the future. In addition, the respective introductions of the interviewees and their narratives from their own world of experience and biography make for exciting reading.” Read More call_made
Art Newspaper Podcast: Is the future of museums in Africa?
In this episode of the Art Newspaper podcast, The Week in Art, host Ben Luke looks at museums and Africa, exploring the future of museums and African institutions’ central role in in, as well as the 19th-century looting of the Benin Bronzes and what it tells us about museums and colonialism, then and now. Speakers include Sonia Lawson, the founding director of the Palais de Lomé in Togo, and András Szántó, on the occasion of his new book The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues. Read More call_made
ACMI on The Future of Museums
As part of the 2021 Melbourne Art Book Fair, András Szántó, Rhana Devenport, Suhanya Raffel, Katrina Sedgwick reflected on the unforeseen events of 2020 and discussed the challenges and opportunities facing the future of museums. Read More call_made
András Szántó and Corinne Erni on The Future of the Museum
On February 12, Corinne Erni, Senior Curator of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, and museum strategist and author András Szántó will come together in a live-stream conversation to discuss his new book, The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues. Read More call_made
Excerpt from The Future of the Museum on Lit Hub
Literary Hub has published “A Moment of Reckoning: Thomas P. Campbell and András Szántó on Museums and Public Trust,” an article featuring András Szántó’s interview with Thomas Campbell from The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues, published this past winter. In it, Campbell, who works as Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, considers cow institutions can be more inclusive. Read More call_made
Technology & the Future of Museums
The role of the museum as a repository of physical objects that give access to collective memory is changing. New digital recording technologies that, among other things, allow exact facsimiles to be made, are providing access to a global audience, while new display technologies are inviting us to look at the nature of the object with new eyes. This panel, presented by the Art Newspaper and Factum Foundation with Il Giornale Dell’Arte, discusses the purpose of a museum, its role, what should it show, how and to whom. It will look at the way technology is making a ‘museum without walls’ possible and realigning the relationship between the original and the authentic. Read More call_made
Entrevista a András Szántó amb motiu del llibre The Future of the Museum. 28 Dialogues
L’any 2020, en un moment de crisi filosòfica i institucional i de trànsit cap a una nova era, el professor i assessor cultural András Szántó consagrava el seu temps de confinament a explorar el replantejament del futur dels museus. Read More call_made
The View from Up There: a Review of The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues by András Szántó
Robert J Weisberg reviews Andras Szanto’s book: “A 2020 leader-focused book on the future of museums is more than meets the eye”. Read More call_made
“As one reads though the dialogues, a distinctive and more or less unifying philosophy emerges about what an art museum is and what it should aspire to be…
If the late twentieth century ushered in a liberating pluralism in art and cultural expression, it can only be hoped that the twenty-first century will do the same for the institutions of art. This sense of open possibility would be the ultimate guarantor of the enduring strength and relevance of the museum form.”
–András Szántó
