UNCHAINED
GALLERY
Museums preserve the past. I realized that as a child,
when my parents took me to the Natural History
Museum in my hometown of Maastricht. The bones of
local dinosaur varieties, primitive flint tools and long-
lost plant species were all displayed in glass cabinets.
Yawn. Although I found visiting our local contemporary
art accommodation, the Bonnefanten Museum,
much more engrossing, I unfortunately also found it
daunting. The fact that I hardly met any other visitors in
either museum therefore did not strike me as odd.
Several decades later my outlook on
museums has changed completely. In the Netherlands,
museum visit numbers have been increasing by double-
digit percentages year after year. This can be attributed
partly to the streams of tourists that mainly visit the
big cities. But the Dutch themselves are also showing
up in museums more often than ever. Compared with
the institutes of my childhood, museums have changed
unrecognizably. Dwindling subsidies have forced them
to become more enterprising and to market themselves
better. They want to attract a more diverse audience:
not only white nationals from the upper-income
bracket, but also ethnic minorities and lower-income
earners. Some museums even employ special diversity
staff for this purpose.
As a result, museum programmes focus less
on the white West and managers critically evaluate
the structure of their collection and the way in which
artefacts are described. The Amsterdam Museum,
for example, has decided to stop talking about the
‘Golden Age’, because although the age it refers
to was economically profitable for many of the white
people living in the Netherlands, this was only the
case because the Netherlands colonized countries
and enslaved people.
Through discussions such as these, museums
make it clear that they no longer want to play a passive
part, but would rather be actively involved in the public
debate. In this issue’s Lab, we discuss how non-Dutch
museums are creating distinct profiles for themselves.
The world’s leading Western museums are increasingly
stepping onto the political stage by entering into
partnerships with institutions in China (V&A, Centre
Pompidou) or opening branches in cities such as Abu
Dhabi (Louvre). French institutions in particular seem
to adopt an opaque role in a geopolitical power play.
Other museums monopolize attention by
flexing their architectural muscles in special locations,
hoping for their own variety of the Bilbao effect. And
then there are the museums experimenting in the
digital domain. Thanks to technologies such as AR,
they can literally operate outside their walls or make
visitors part of works on display.
Once sleep-inducing, museums now briskly
play the cultural domain; no wonder my children like
to visit them.Robert Thiemann
Editor in chief6 Editorial