Radical Museology: or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art?

With austerity cuts to public funding, many contemporary art museums have been forced to scale down their budgets, staff and acquisitions. In Radical Museology, New York-based art historian Claire Bishop argues that the incommensurability of fiscal and cultural temporality–one fast, the other slower–points to an alternative world of values in which museums (and by extension, culture, education and democracy in general) are not subject to the banalities of a spreadsheet, but enable us to access a rich and diverse history, to question the present and to realize a different future. She discusses creative solutions implemented at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museo Nacional de Reina Sofia in Madrid and MSUM in Ljubljana. This book is a manifesto for the importance of a politicized representation of the contemporary in today’s art.