The Museum of the Future

Abstract

The Museum of the Future, edited by Gerhard Bott, offers new perspectives on the museum. It was time to leave behind the notion of the museum as an ivory tower of science, as a place where items in collections were merely inventoried and studied in terms of their cultural and art historical value. It was time for something new. It was time for the museum to (re)establish its relationship to society and to take on the role of an educational institution. In her book La Fin des Musées, Catherine Grenier, codirector of Centre Pompidou, challenges the discourse pointing to the "end of the museum". Similar to her predecessors in the 1970s, she argues the museum needs to be understood as a current institution, whose interests do not only revolve around itself but as one that actively engages with urgent questions concerning our world and society today. What would happen if the "museum of the future" were a para-museum? What would it be like? If we conceive of the para-museum as something that is simultaneously inside and outside and in a parasitic relationship to the museum, then a form of subversion may just Together, they form the association schnittpunkt. Exhibition theory and practice, an extra-institutional network for actors in the exhibition and museum field. They are also the joint directors of the graduate course in exhibition theory and practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna/ ecm-educating/curating/managing.