/ecm diskurs 10: Transforming the Museum

25. Juni 2010, 19.30 Uhr
Wien Museum, Karlsplatz, 1040 Wien

Charles Esche, Direktor Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven
Moderation: Nora Sternfeld, ecm / Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien

Museums are in general defined by their collections, yet in the recent past the (consumerist) desire for the new has led to much more attention being given to temporary exhibitions and spectacular installations. The lecture will seek to describe aspects of museum history that might define a museum's possibility in the near future - a time when most public institutions are likely to be less well funded and rich collectors retreat behind the walls of their own vanity institutions. How can the collections, understood as material distillations of cultural memory and experience, be animated politically and aesthetically. Projects and programmes carried out over the past five years of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven will be used to illustrate and assess how concrete projects might address the demands of artists, theorists and imagined publics.