Museums will multiply in 2024
From Go-Go music, to Shakespeare, to robots in Seoul
By Imogen White
The pandemic plunged the world’s 104,000 museums into crisis. Though masks are now off and lockdowns are over, spiralling living costs and expensive travel mean many cultural institutions are still suffering from what industry figures call “the tourism equivalent of long covid”.
In London, big venues like the British Museum and Tate Modern reported visitor numbers in 2022 well below the heights of 2019. Despite this gloom, some countries have recovered well. Attendances at Danish and Polish museums have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. In Seoul, the National Museum of Korea was more popular in 2022 than 2019.
The Korean capital’s culture-lovers may be thrilled, then, by the opening of the country’s first Robot & AI museum, delayed from 2023. The building’s designers, Melike Altinisik Architects, used robots to construct the orb-shaped 2,500-square-metre museum. Elsewhere in South Korea, a new museum dedicated to Park Seo-bo, the founder of Dansaekhwa, a monochrome abstract-art movement, will welcome guests in 2024 on Jeju Island, south of the mainland. In Japan, meanwhile, Nintendo’s former factory site in Kyoto will reopen as a museum of video-game history.
In 2024 Adriano Pedrosa, a Brazilian curator, will be the first Latin American to organise the Venice Biennale, the world’s most important contemporary-art gathering. His region’s galleries are booming. In March in Argentina, the Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires is opening a second site in Escobar. In late 2024, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo’s 180m reais ($36m) expansion will increase its size by two-thirds.
In February, a small but mighty museum will open in Washington, DC, dedicated to Go-Go music, a style entwined with the history of the city’s black community. In recent years gentrifiers making noise complaints have threatened the genre’s survival. Built on a budget of less than $100,000, the space will push back, loud and proud.
Across the pond in London, Shakespeare buffs will be able to visit a new immersive museum dedicated to the bard, due to make its debut in spring on the site of the freshly excavated Curtain Playhouse, where “Romeo and Juliet” was performed in the late 1590s. Head there to explore the wordsmith’s life through whizzy installations and ai trickery. All the world’s a stage, indeed. ■
imogen white, Co-ordinating editor, Culture, The Economist
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition of The World Ahead 2024 under the headline “Night at the museum”
