András Szántó’s new book, ‘The Future of the Museums: 28 Dialogues’, has recently come out in Hungarian, featuring interviews with leaders of 28 institutions reflecting on the pandemic measures and lockdowns of 2020. The internationally acclaimed consultant, researcher and author is widely known in the cultural scene, and made significant contributions to the development of the MOME Brand as a strategic advisor to our university. The book launch and book signing event held at our university gave our university citizenship the opportunity to learn more about the volume that is now available at the MOME library.

As museums shuttered during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, New York-based author and cultural strategist András Szántó conducted a series of virtual conversations with international museum leaders, reports portfolio.hu. The interviewed directors spoke candidly about the challenges and untapped potential of art museums.

The book reflects a rapidly growing, changing, and varied museum landscape in which dynamic experimentation is happening worldwide, with institutions in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Australia often leading the way in developing new models. Meanwhile, the pandemic has exposed the underlying weakness of many museums' temporary-exhibition-driven business models, as well as the limits of public and private support. The dialogues reveal the diverse ways in which the search is on for new sources of income, new ways to engage the public, new ways to run institutions.

The featured museum leaders are responsible for some four dozen institutions and affiliates, with a combined annual in-person pre-pandemic visitation of more than 36 million people and collections totaling well over 7 million objects. Szántó interviewed museum leaders from 14 countries on 6 continents, including heads of major New York museums such as The High Line, a The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, as well as the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in Cape Town, or the Australian Center for the Moving Image in Melbourne.

Each of the twenty-eight conversations in the book explores a particular topic of relevance to art institutions today and tomorrow. The dialogues showcase the defining trends of the museum sector, along with practical insights into the daily work and innovative activities of art museums, including technological innovations and modern marketing solutions, and offer glimpses of how museums around the globe are undergoing reappraisal and reinvention in this changed landscape.

The English language book is published by Hatje Cantz in Europe. The printed or electronic (ebook) version is available on the website.

​​Copies of the internationally acclaimed book are also available at our university’s library in Hungarian.

Source: portfolio.hu