What is the future of the art museum?

How museums should evolve is an urgent question. Uncertain funding, the rise of private museums, changing audiences and the digital landscape have all fundamentally shifted the goalposts over the past decade. And yet, an increasingly diverse range of institutions are bringing new voices, artists, and practices to the fore. So how will museums address the future, and are these issues global? ‘Although there are great differences among regions, we definitely share critical issues,’ María Mercedes González, the director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín in Colombia, tells Art Basel. ‘We need to be flexible institutions with regard to the fluid and ever-changing nature of artistic production and also be approachable for different audiences.’

While her museum grapples with the political climate and its effect on the public sector’s commitment to arts funding, Charles Desmarais, currently the art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and a former director of multiple museums in the United States, notes, ‘it does seem to me that museums in the U.S. are financially as strong as they've ever been – always precarious, but it's not like they're in some great crisis moment. But certainly, we should be asking, how do we make sure that we have audiences going forward in the future?’

An interesting paradox is that the answer, even for the world’s biggest museums, may be found in what small-to-medium size museums have long had to do to cultivate their local base. Looking at the past three decades in the museum world, what stands out to Desmarais today is ‘a greater sense of responsibility to the audience’– a mood he believes has roots in smaller and regional museums, rather than the encyclopedic collections in capital cities. ‘Even the largest of institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are giving greater attention to audience, seeking to engage with, rather than simply present to, the public. That's a gigantic change, and I think it's one that is still in process,' he says.

Audiences are on González’s mind, too, especially as they relate to what the museum acquires going forward. ‘Colombian art museums need to devote more of our resources to build up our collections; it is from it that we reframe and rethink history. We need to build new audiences, a complex task if we consider that most visitors at our museums are walking in an art space for the first time.’

But, at the same time as more attention is paid to serving diverse populations, Desmarais also notes the bind that museum directors may find themselves in if market pressures force them to rely more heavily on powerful donors whose politics may be at odds with progressive programming: ‘That conflict, I think is going to be quite a challenge for the leadership of museums today.’

‘We need to constantly ask ourselves what type of museum are we and what type of museum we want to be,’ adds Gonzalez. ‘We need to be consciously aware of the environment in which we exist and continuously rethink our organizational and financial structures.’

María Mercedes González and Charles Desmarais were in conversation in Art Basel Cities | Masterclass V: Imagining the Museum of the Future, held on September 10, 2018, at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. Find out more about Art Basel Cities here.