Museums increasingly have to fight for, and justify, their existence in the 21st century. Government money is becoming scarcer. Government guidelines on how museums should reach out to a wider public are becoming more demanding. Corporate sponsorship for special exhibitions, both in the US and the UK, is on the decline. The demands of private sponsors, and a new breed of ‘exhibition companies’, who run exhibitions exclusively for profit, batter at the doors of museum independence and integrity. At the same time, museums themselves have to fight for audiences, who have a myriad of alternative entertainments to choose from, and who often claim that museum exhibitions are uninspiring and unengaging.

This summer, I have been working with 15 museums across the US, Canada and the UK to analyse these challenges, the pressures they create, and the potential ways forward for museums in the 21st century. Covering 20,000 miles from the British Museum in London, to New York’s Metropolitan Museum on the East Coast and LA’s Getty Museum on the West Coast, I met and debated these issues, in over 30 hours of interviews, with the directors of 15 major museums, whose direction in the next decade will be critical for establishing the roles that museums play in 21st century society.

At each institution I met with the Director and an exhibition designer, as well as often with a curator and educator. At each institution, I was interested in how the museums understood their role in society, the factors that affected the role they could play (sources of finance, organisational structure etc) and how that perception of their role, the internal tensions of the institution, as well as their perception of potential audiences, influenced the way they choose to design the museum layouts and collections. That is to say, how did all these important factors which have been under the microscope in different arenas contribute to create the museum experience: the point at which the audience interacted with the museum on the museum floor.

In my report, I outline three of the major problems currently faced by museums in the UK and North America and show how they have the potential to affect the museum experience. Those three problems are: first, the acquisition and control of sufficient private and public funding; second, the way in which museums create and design their exhibitions and permanent collections; third, the way in which museums conceive of, and interact with, the audience. I look at each of these problems in detail, analysing some of the different experiences of, and perspectives on, these issues in different museums before highlighting possible solutions to the problems. In conclusion, I sum up and develop some of the ideas presented for tackling these three areas.

Please review a copy of my paper Museums in the 21st Century in Word format.