Art Museums and Their Digital Future

With the dramatic growth of museums around the world—over 2,000 built in China alone since the advent of the 21st century and new ones springing up on a regular basis throughout Europe and North America, the Middle East, and Latin America—this is a good moment to reflect on these institutions and their future. Can they sustain this level of growth indefinitely? Will available resources support this many museums? Can museums at the end of the 21st century be as popular as they are today? Will new forms of engagement with the arts replace the unique experiences provided by museums?

The list of questions could go on for pages, but here are two issues that I think merit particular attention from the point of view of today’s concerns about technology and utility: Can museums use new technologies to transform themselves from “analog” institutions into “digital” ones, and can they reallocate their resources in order to fully activate their collections?

(Read Glenn Lowry’s Britannica entry on museums of modern art.)

The rapid evolution of digital technologies has enabled museums to develop an array of platforms—from websites to social media—that have extended their programming and reach within and beyond their walls. But they still think in analog ways. The challenge for museums is to use these technologies to learn to think digitally and thus to imagine new ways of working with each other as well as engaging the public, to move beyond a hierarchical order of organization and thinking to a networked set of relationships and possibilities. In other words, could partnership among museums replace competition? Could sharing replace ownership? Could conversation replace authority?

In short, could art museums develop new conceptual models that build upon digital thinking to transform themselves into 21st-century institutions where collections are developed jointly by several museums? Where audiences are regularly invited to share their ideas about art with the museums and each other and even encouraged to participate in the making of art and the shaping of the intellectual life of the institutions? Where museums work together on joint educational and community-centered programs about art, on site and online?

An equally pressing concern for art museums is whether they can find the right balance between collecting and programming. Most museums have extensive collections, often only a fraction of which are actually displayed but which consume substantial physical, financial, and human resources. At the same time, museums struggle to find adequate funding to support the kind of robust programming essential to expanding and sustaining audiences, especially new audiences who have grown up in a digital world and expect a rich and deeply engaging experience from museums. Moreover, with the rise of hyper-successful commercial galleries like Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and White Cube, among others, which have access to far greater financial resources than museums and look like museums, with their bookstores, restaurants, and well-curated exhibitions, this issue is acute. Unless museums can rebalance the relationship between the growth of their collections (for which there are often endowed funds compelling them to continue purchasing art, which only compounds the problem) and the use of their collections (for which there are rarely endowed funds), they may find themselves unable to generate the breadth and richness of programming required by audiences in the future.

Art museums, as we know them, have been around since the late 18th century and have proven themselves to be surprisingly resilient, inventing and reinventing themselves in response to changing audiences, interests, and opportunities. Although there is every reason to believe they will continue to do so, there remain serious challenges to be dealt with today and in the future for museums to ensure success and fidelity to their mission.

This essay was originally published in 2018 in Encyclopædia Britannica Anniversary Edition: 250 Years of Excellence (1768–2018).