Museums on the internet? Get real
Excited talk about digital museums is just futuristic babble – museums are all about the physical artefacts
‘Museums, where every encounter is solid’ … Robert Therrien’s table and chairs installation at Tate Modern. Photograph courtesy of Anthony d’Offay Ltd
Neil MacGregor and Nick Serota, the two leading museum directors in Britain – and some would say in the world – shared a platform the other night at the London School of Economics and apparently they were getting very excited about the internet. They seem to have competed to say the most apocalyptically futuristic things they could think of. Museums in the future will be totally transformed by the online utopia! The ones who don’t adapt will go to the wall! It’s virtuality or nothing for the modern museum.
I, for one, don’t like the sound of this cyber-museum of the future at all. It sounds like a place where nothing is real and beauty becomes just a word.