Europe’s “Big Museums” and Covid –

the biggest museums talk about the impact: present and future

March, 30 2021 – 13:00 (GMT)

Free access (up to the limit of the web-room) at:

https://zoom.us/j/92276753910?pwd=K2xnRzQ2RFR5Q3RtWkVZVnpna1llUT09

To be confirmed. Please, do check this address closer to the webinar (http://network.icom.museum/europe/activities/conferences/)

As obligatory this year, the annual spring seminar of ICOM Europe will take place under the modality of a webinar, focusing in one of the hottest topic in European museums, a topic where trends already in development intersect in the most dramatic way with the current pandemic crisis. Putted in simple terms: what happened, and most of all, what will presumably happen in the future to Europe’s biggest museums, which are also among the biggest in the world, assuming here “biggest” as synonymous of most visited.

10 speakers from the 2019 top 20 of the most visited European museums will address these issues, developing preferentially perspectives for the future, by facing an not avoiding “sensible questions”.

Will the pandemic crisis originate consequences in “being a big museum”? Will these museums, especially the ones that in recent years took the new market-oriented directions, “turn back to basics” again, namely to consider their mission as essentially to promote citizenship? Focus on mass tourism will diminish? Temporary and travelling blockbuster exhibitions will reduce and, in cases where it happened the opposite, will permanent or fundamental galleries return to their traditional centrality and maybe be reconfigured? In which senses? How will digital remote offer articulate with in loco visiting? And what about management and funding: will public, state dependent models be relaunched?