Museums as the R&D of Society
During the COVID-19 pandemic, cultural institutions in New York State were relegated to Phase Four—along with theaters and outdoor professional sports, and after restaurants, hair salons, and clothing stores. Deemed the least essential among businesses, they had to wait until July 20 to reopen. All the while other socioeconomic, political, environmental, and humanitarian crises both local and global proliferated like fungi on the devastation wreaked by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, connecting in networks and feeding off each other’s ecosystems.
We who work for them, like to think that cultural institutions of all types and sizes are crucial, especially when major crises hit, and the events of 2020 seem to have reinforced our faith. Some institutions and curators (I, for one) however are wading through a productive identity crisis. How can we be of service, whether our physical doors are open or not, when people are losing their jobs to economic paralysis or their homes to wildfires, protesting deadly racism, trying to save democracy, or succumbing to the virus by the hundreds of thousands? Who do we serve, and can we offer them something they really need? In “normal” times, the answer varies widely depending on whom you ask in which institution, and where. In times of deep turmoil, though, urgency trumps granularity in favor of a clear-cut and shared agenda: survival—of peoples, of cultures, of the institutions themselves.
I believe that museums can be R&D labs for society. Because of my anxious nature, MoMA’s R&D Department, which I founded in 2012, has always been focused on survival. It began as an idea during the crisis of 2008, when the financial world’s betrayal became an opportunity to demonstrate that the cultural sector—often discounted as superfluous, an optional feature external to the real economy—can instead contribute the kind of dependable, sustainable slow progress that can truly benefit society. Culture, in other words, is essential for any social system to survive and thrive.
Between 2012 and 2019, R&D complemented MoMA’s exhibitions cycle, publications, and public programs with small but wide-reaching forums discussing topics that mattered to all—from ageing and death to anger, truth, and the importance of words—with the goal of showing that museums can support and inspire citizens in every facet of life, well beyond their hallowed halls and walls. We called them R&D Salons and convened them in one of MoMA’s theaters. They were preceded by a thoughtful reading list circulated a few days ahead, culminating in a live conversation with speakers from diverse backgrounds, punctuated by video contributions, all live streamed, and followed by a reception where we would keep discussing, sometimes for hours. All R&D Salons are gathered on a website, for future perusal.
The last live salon, on February 10, 2020, was about dogs. When the lockdown descended upon us and migrating online might have seemed the natural course, I was surprised to feel that such existential matters were best tackled in physical communion and with the shared focus of a few dozen other humans. I used the time to ponder whether the department’s mission should change to adapt to the circumstances but the list of our offerings—incitements to hope and resolve; examples of creativity, perspective, and criticality; parables of empathy, tolerance, and respect—seems to transcend even the whiplashes of this year. If anything, this crisis brought me back to the beginning: in order to survive and thrive as a society, we need to remind all that culture is essential business.
Paola Antonelli is Senior Curator at The Museum of Modern Art in the Department of Architecture & Design, as well as MoMA’s founding Director of Research & Development. Her most recent MoMA installation, Broken Nature—a version of the XXII Triennale di Milano by the same name, which she also curated—opened in November 2020. In collaboration with critic Alice Rawsthorn, Antonelli is currently working on @design.emergency, an Instagram and book project on the role of design in building a better future for all.
