Radical Museology

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