A Museum Cannot Be Defined
By: Sandro Debono
Tags: Culture, Future, Change, Museums, Art

A Museum Cannot Be Defined

Photo by Joseph Greve on Unsplash

I write this piece as news of a second lockdown have been resonating around the world with some countries or regions already back to where things were in February, or quite. This time around, it seems that a sinister deja-vu feeling has made things easier to absorb and adjust and museums are once again adjusting to a new normal that will probably be intermittently the case for months to come. In the meantime, the Network of European Museums Organisations has just launched its second survey taking stock of circumstances that museums are facing. An American Alliance of Museums survey published today suggests that more than half of American Museums have laid off or furloughed staff and that loss of budgeted income for 2020 stands at 35%.

This month’s museum conferences have presented a picture of relative resilience in the face of such adversities. Experimentation has been increasing the case, risks are being taken and to err on the side of caution seems to be a less pursued option. The impact of all this might be early to gauge and I do look forward to what this might be leading to. Indeed, what will the museum idea look become and what will the instituton be in a post-COVID19 world?

Understanding change is a good point of departure.

Yes, sure, let’s go for that.

I find the work of Heather E McGowan, a champion for humans in the learning-centric future of work as most telling in this respect. One of the arguments which struck me, amongst many others, is about the velocity of change and life expectancy increasing close to the centenary mark. As people live longer, societies become increasingly subject to a more frequent cycle of paradigm shifts as generation after generation brings in new modes of thinking. A generation that would be dealing with two, best three paradigm shifts, would now have much more to deal with and the cycle of change much more complex to deal with, embrace and endorse. McGowen says so

We are living longer while adapting and experiencing the greatest velocity of change in human history. Where we once had multiple generations to absorb a paradigm-shifting change like the advent of the steam engine, we will now live through multiple paradigm-shifting changes within a single generation.

McGowan goes on — the success measures of our society have much more to do with learning, agility, adaptability and agency fuelled by purpose. When considering that 65% of the jobs of the future, and the skill-sets that will be sought after, do not exist yet. When considersing that a good percentage of jobs on the market, close to half, will be automated, it is indeed risky to pick a future self and work towards that.

Then comes the COVID-19 pandemic.

McGowan takes her argument further. The rate of technology-driven invention and innovation has been exponentially on the increase in ways and means never before experienced, and this has been happening over the past two centuries. By comparison, human adaptation has been linear and much more constant.

When all is said and done, the COVID-19 pandemic has only accellerated the rate of change, ambitiously striving to be in parallel with the exponential technology-driven rate of change, albeit still far, far away.

Source: Heather E. McGowan, (2020), How the Coronavirus Pandemic Is Accelerating the Future of Work.

My first provocation is simple. Given the huge unprecedented change that we’ve already been living in pre-COVID19 times, now accellerating thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, how can we define such a liquid state we’re in to navigate such an unforseable future? With this in mind what type of institutions in general would contemporary societies need?