Thursday, November 7, 2024

12:05 - 12:30

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Overview

Museum Acquisitions: Everything, from everywhere, for everyone, forever and non-stop

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Details

Nickos Gogolos, M+ Museum, Hong Kong, Hong Kong During the past few decades, acquisition challenges for contemporary museums included dealing with time-based mediaworks, co-commissions with an artist or gallery, installation works and performance/live art. More recently, institutions aretroubled with acquiring Non-Fungible Token art, internet art, co-commissions between multiple museums or evenbiennales, works with multiple shared ownership and even, Artificial Intelligence. Registrars are increasingly called to grapple with emerging and often transient technologies that do not necessarily fit inthe context of the museum’s duty for perpetual preservation. We must open our collection storage for a more democraticmodel of ‘access to all’ making it no different to gallery spaces. We must ponder what sustainable collecting means, in aworld that demands climate action from everyone. We must have the ability to manage complex legal risks around artists’intellectual property in a global culture of appropriation for social-media promoting. While contemporary museums continue to collect new media, from unconventional sources, by untested methods ofacquisition, and we must follow the artists who push the boundaries from physical to digital, there is still no school forregistrars and no trusted curriculum that will help them manage all the challenges. This paper offers insights from the M+Museum’s last twelve years of building a collection in the 21st century collecting. It considers opportunities andchallenges, and proposes practical ideas on the acquisition, care, display and access of collections for public engagement