museumdenken is an initiative for a broad and diverse debate on the future of museums.
The immediate cause is the crisis of the social valuation of museums. Thousands of museums worldwide are affected by the pandemic, sent into lockdowns, forced into austerity measures, threatened with permanent closure. What weighs heavily is that the importance of museums is considered to be neglected. They are considered to be of little systemic relevance. For the first time, the symbolic capital that the institution of the museum has acquired since its creation seems to have been permanently damaged.
