Museum future is virtual says BM

Salon IFA reported the following:

The virtual museum

One Fellow has already suggested that the simple answer to the British Museum’s need for more exhibition space is to ‘move most of the museum to the Olympic site in 2013 — good access and all the rest, and just leave the favourites well spaced out in Bloomsbury’. But the BM’s own Director has come up with an even less space-hungry suggestion: in a debate on the museum of the future held at the London School of Economics to celebrate sixty years of the publisher Thames & Hudson, our Fellow Neil MacGregor said that the relationship between institutions and their audiences would be transformed by the internet and that museums would become more like multimedia organisations. ‘The future has to be, without question, the museum as a publisher and broadcaster’, said Neil MacGregor, a view that was shared by the Tate’s Director, Nicholas Serota, who said: ‘I am certain that in the next ten to fifteen years, there will be a limited number of people working in galleries, and more working as editors commissioning online material … the possibility for a greater level of communication between curators and visitors is the challenge now.’

Even so, Neil MacGregor did not see an end to the challenges of transporting museum objects safely around the world. Speaking about the Parthenon sculptures, he said that the question of their return to Greece was ‘yesterday’s question’ and the real question is about ‘how the Greek and British governments can work together so that the sculptures can be seen in China and Africa’. ‘But the Greek government has a clear position that their removal [from the Parthenon] was illegal and therefore this conversation cannot happen, which is a matter of great sadness’, he said.


Internet predicted to transform museums' relationship with public | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

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