I saw David Maljkovic’s exhibition in Rome on the same day the Italian association of contemporary art museums (A.M.A.C.I.) had called for a general meeting in the capital, to discuss the impact of the economic crisis and protest against the government’s indifference toward all its requests. The assembly was held in the open-air courtyard of the MAXXI, under the imposing volumes of Zaha Hadid’s concrete mammoth, which opened just two years ago. With its futuristic design and uncertain future, the museum looked uncannily akin to one of the deserted memorials often represented by Maljkovic. And some of the past questions posed by Maljkovic’s trilogy Scene for a New Heritage (2002–06) were suddenly a thing of the present: what happens when a “progressive” project faces the obsolescence of its ideology, when the (intellectual, political, financial, emotional) investment in it fades away? What new strategies of display and encounter with its viewer might be imagined? Despite all the “maximizing” architectural efforts of the last decade, contemporary art institutions—in Italy, at least—are still largely “invisible” to the general public. If they were to disappear tomorrow due to a lack of funding, who would notice anyway? After all, scientists have supposedly proven that people …