What do you think will be the local repercussions and global ramifications of the Flemish government’s decision to declass M HKA’s from its status as a national museum? How can we fight locally and internationally these decisions and the detrimental interference of political power in cultural institutions more broadly? To this end, do you have practical strategies to suggest, either drawn from your personal experience or from other examples of struggles to save or build an institution?
The local repercussions in Antwerp will be profound. The city’s visual arts ecosystem will lose one of its primary anchors connecting it to the international museum and biennial circuits. For Flanders as a whole, the cultural impact is equally severe: with only S.M.A.K. remaining as a national-level museum for contemporary art, the international representation of living Flemish artists will effectively be cut. No single institution can take over the full infrastructural role M HKA has built over decades. This weakening will diminish the ability to contextualise and position local artists within the broader global conversation, a crucial function in today’s multipolar cultural world. Although various art centers and Kunst Hallen (such as Extra City and WIELS) mediate between local scenes and international networks, each actor contributes to that ecology. Losing M HKA as a fully empowered museum therefore constitutes a structural blow, especially for emerging and mid-career artists in Antwerp.
In terms of strategies for resistance, in the short term, it is essential to frame this situation – both nationally and internationally – within the wider erosion of democracy and the rise of what are, as I argue in my books The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude and Trust, ‘repressive liberal’ and illiberal regimes. These regimes increasingly disrupt cultural infrastructure through economic rationalisation, political fiat, or the merging of political and market logics. Likewise, as I argue in the edited anthology Institutional Attitudes, such interventions reflect a broader crisis in which cultural institutions lose their historically autonomous role in defining value frameworks independently of politics or the market. This shift makes the independence of museums even more vital. Short-term strategies therefore should include:
- Organising public debate to highlight the democratic deficit in the decision-making process.
- Forming alliances with political actors who understand that cultural infrastructure is a pillar of democratic life.
- Mobilising civil allies beyond the cultural field, since societal support must extend beyond professional peers.
Long-term strategies require creating institutional structures far less dependent on both political and market forces. As I argue in Trust – which was based on research at M HKA – a commons-based approach offers an important alternative: cooperative cultural models distribute power, strengthen civic ownership, and build what in the book I call ‘heritage communities’, groups of people and organisations who collectively care for cultural assets and thereby help safeguard institutional autonomy. Similarly, as Chantal Mouffe, Mark Fisher and Gerald Raunig argue in Institutional Attitudes, future cultural institutions must become ‘institutions of the common’, offering platforms for political-aesthetic experimentation and resisting short-term market pressures as well as political instrumentalisation. Building such civic support is admittedly a long-term project and perhaps too late for M HKA at this moment, but it remains essential for the future. Historically, M HKA has not sufficiently positioned itself within public debates or demonstrated how contemporary art engages with broad societal issues. Strengthening this civic presence is crucial. Museums must articulate their societal relevance more clearly, communicate in more accessible language, and embed themselves more deeply in the communities they serve.
Through the logic of economic rationalisation, political administrations can dictate radical overhauls of the cultural landscape with unimaginable damaging effects for the local arts ecosystem. In the face of a populist economic discourse that increasingly pits investment in the arts and culture sector against the funding of other fundamental social services, how do we defend the vital value that a museum of contemporary art such as M HKA plays in its situated context?
Museums and cultural institutions have too easily aligned themselves with the dominant economic logic, often defending their existence in strictly economic terms by pointing to visitor numbers, financial efficiency, or market value. Yet the primary value of a museum is cultural, not economic: it keeps a culture dynamic, reflective, and connected to its past and future. This cultural role must be emphasised much more clearly. A crucial step is to re-establish dialogue with populist, conservative, and right-wing politicians, as well as with their constituencies: farmers, entrepreneurs, workers, many of whom no longer understand or recognise the relevance of contemporary art. If contemporary art is to matter, the museum must demonstrate its relevance in ways that resonate with these groups. This is not a call for populism, but for clarity and accessibility: museums must articulate, in understandable language, what complex artworks do and why they matter. The current discourse is too inward-looking, too idiosyncratic, and too oriented toward professional peers; such a closed discourse cannot build public support.
As I argue in Trust, semi-public cultural institutions such as museums generate a ‘third space’, neither private nor fully public, in which citizens can encounter one another around a ‘common third’ such as an artwork or exhibition. In this space, trust can be built, emotions can be mobilised, and people can feel part of a larger civic body. This semi-public function is essential for any democratic society. It is precisely because museums cultivate this shared cultural space that they cannot be reduced to economic outputs: their value lies in enabling moments of collective meaning-making, reflection, and encounter.
Institutional Attitudes looks at how cultural institutions also carry historic depth, symbolic authority, and verticality, values that are increasingly under pressure in a ‘flattened’ repressive liberal world that measures everything in terms of efficiency, numbers, and quantifiable outcomes. The museum, when it embraces its institutional role, offers a space where cultural memory, long-term thinking, and alternative value systems can be cultivated. Defending the institution therefore means defending society’s capacity for critical depth and imagination. For all these reasons, museums must reclaim their role as platforms for dissensus and agonistic democracy. They should remain places where different ideological worlds meet, confront one another, and negotiate conflicting visions of society, not to give uncritical platforms to any group, but to ensure that culture remains a vital arena for democratic encounters. Without such spaces, a society impoverishes itself politically, socially, and culturally. To defend the value of M HKA, then, we must articulate its role not only as an arts institution but as a civic institution: a place where communities negotiate shared meanings, where cultural memory is produced, and where democratic life is rehearsed, challenged, and renewed.
The meaning and value of a collection is inextricably connected to its context and its history. What are the implications and costs of dismantling and relocating a site-specific and long-standing museum collection – in cultural, social, legal, political and economic terms? What intangible and not easily measurable values are lost in this process? And how do we surface and make visible such a loss in a language that is plain and understood by both political interlocutors and the public at large?
What is lost first and foremost is the possibility for a museum to remain culturally and socially embedded within its local context and civic community. Museums play a crucial role in mediating history: they help determine what is considered culturally and historically significant, and they provide symbolic anchoring points for younger generations, students, residents, and citizens more broadly. When a long-standing collection is dismantled, this mediating role collapses. Politically, one of the few ways to make this visible is to show how museums have historically built alliances with political actors by demonstrating their societal relevance. Bart De Baere (director of M HKA since 2002), for instance, once succeeded in convincing the Flemish nationalist party N-VA (New Flemish Alliance) of the importance of a new museum building. The current political conflict, however, is driven by a divide-and-rule logic. Repressive liberal administrations and politicians no longer negotiate; they impose. In such a context, the only remaining path to influence is to reach their voters directly.
For a museum of contemporary art to convince local politicians, it must first convince the electorate of its relevance. Today, too few voters, even highly educated ones, understand the importance of contemporary visual art. Thus, the museum’s primary task becomes explaining, in accessible and comprehensible language, what contemporary art does and why it matters. Again, this is not a plea for populism, but for clarity. The current discourse is too closed, too idiosyncratic, and too oriented toward professional peers. Such a discourse cannot generate a broad civic foundation. As I said, museums are semi-public spaces that function as ‘common third’ environments where individuals with different social, political, and cultural backgrounds can gather around shared cultural objects. This semi-public sphere creates trust, emotional engagement, and civic attachment: values that cannot be quantified but that are essential to democratic life. Removing a collection from its rooted place destroys the fragile ecosystem of relationships, rituals, memories, and civic emotions that have formed around it.
In Institutional Attitudes, I examine how museums hold ‘vertical’ value: they provide historical depth, continuity, and symbolic authority in a flattened neoliberal landscape obsessed with metrics, quantity, and efficiency. A collection that has grown over decades within a specific city embodies not only artistic choices but also a local cultural memory. When this is undone by political fiat, what disappears is not merely a set of objects but an entire institutional identity: a cultural infrastructure of meaning. The intangible losses include:
- the erosion of civic trust in public institutions;
- the destruction of embedded cultural narratives;
- the disappearance of a shared historical reference point for local communities;
- the weakening of long-term relationships with artists and donors;
- and the loss of a cultural home where people could negotiate their place in history.
To make these losses legible to politicians and the broader public, we must translate them into clear civic language: a dismantled collection means the dismantling of cultural memory, of local identity, and of the community’s ability to recognise itself within its own historical and artistic narratives. It is, literally, a dismantling of the democratic fabric that binds citizens to their cultural institutions.
M KHA’s collection is both internationally oriented and firmly rooted in the local art scene, particularly in post-war avant-garde art in Antwerp and Flanders. While contemporary art is often mistakenly seen as globalist, it is arguably the interplay between the local and the global in collections such as M HKA’s that enables one to make sense of an increasingly multipolar world. How do we articulate the importance of maintaining this dialogue between the here and the elsewhere within a museum collection? And what specific instances from M HKA’s collection or other museums can help us to support this case?
One way for me to articulate the importance of maintaining the dialogue between the local and the global is by actively bringing young people, school groups, neighbourhood communities, and Antwerp residents into the museum daily, and by confronting them with what is happening both locally and internationally. This requires large-scale engagement with schools, civic organisations, and local associations. Crucially, these visitors should not only be shown artworks but should be invited to do things inside the museum: to participate in the everyday rituals of life: celebration, mourning, social encounters, and forms of collective making. Such participatory formats help reveal how contemporary art from both local and international contexts plays a meaningful role in the civic fabric of the city.
But I believe strongly that this effort can only succeed if the museum reconnects itself far more profoundly to everyday life, precisely as the historical avant-garde attempted to do. As I argue in Trust, the museum must be a place where art is not separated from lived experience but intertwined with it, creating moments of resonance that bind people emotionally and sensorially to their cultural environment. For too long, museums have tried to build this connection primarily through intellectual or discursive strategies. These remain important, but they cannot stand alone.
A museum must first allow people to feel, to experience through aesthesis; that aesthetic experience is the basis of every political community. Before any political idea can be understood, it must be sensed: through the body, through affect, through shared atmospheres. As stated in Institutional Attitudes, institutions must reclaim this aesthetic and affective agency if they wish to cultivate civic imagination and democratic attachment.
This argument is central to the position paper I recently wrote for CIMAM, the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art. At the invitation of CIMAM’s Museum Oversight Committee (Museum Watch), I authored a document titled Best Practices for Museums Working with Living Artists. The paper introduces a Memorandum of Care and Understanding (MoCU), a pre-contractual ethical framework in which museums and artists articulate their needs, promises, and limits. It emphasises integrity, reciprocity, and care as the foundational grammar of sustainable cultural relationships. As the text highlights, digital culture has led to a form of aesthetic deprivation: the narrowing of our sensory capacities, the acceleration of responses, and the flattening of complexity through instantaneous reactions. In such an environment, museums carry a civic responsibility to cultivate multisensorial, embodied, and affective experiences to offer what the digital world increasingly denies: slowness, depth, and vulnerability. This is why I insist that museums must not only explain but also enact the importance of aesthetic experience. They must create spaces that invite proximity, slowness, contemplation, touch, shared affect, all of which counteract algorithmic acceleration and the reductive logic of likes and dislikes. When we restore aisthesis to the core of museum practice, the institution becomes not only a mediator between local and global worlds but also a guardian of our sensory and affective commons. M HKA’s own history offers concrete examples: the pedagogical and socially embedded projects of Jef Geys, or the deeply site-specific significance of the Panamarenko House. These works show that when art becomes embedded in everyday life, its local specificity and international resonance reinforce rather than contradict one another.
Collections are established through relationships of mutual trust and responsibility. A museum has a duty of care towards its collections and donors, towards the artists – dead or alive – whose work it preserves, and towards the diverse publics and local communities it caters for. How do we defend the will of donors who entrusted a collection to a particular institution when that collection is at risk of being dismantled and relocated? What legal instruments and ethical protocols can we appeal to?
Defending the will of donors begins with articulating clearly that a museum collection is not simply a legal entity but a relational and ethical construct. Donors entrust their works not to a building, nor to a government, but to a specific institutional culture, staff, community, and history. This is why international ethical codes, such as the ICOM Code of Ethics and UNESCO conventions, explicitly emphasise contextual integrity, donor intent, and the safeguarding of collections within the environments for which they were entrusted.
However, legal and ethical protocols are only one part of the argument. As I argue in Trust, collections function as cultural commons held together by sustained relationships of care, reciprocity and long-term commitment. Donors become part of a ‘heritage community’, a collective that co-produces and safeguards cultural value across generations. Relocating or dismantling a collection breaks this chain of cultural trust, a form of trust far more fragile and valuable than contractual obligations alone. Museums carry not only legal authority but also symbolic and moral authority, grounded in their historical continuity, public responsibility and embeddedness in civic life. When a government intervenes to dismantle a collection, it violates this institutional promise and erodes the ‘vertical value’ that museums embody: the depth, stability and historical consciousness that give meaning to cultural memory.
My CIMAM Position Paper provides further crucial arguments. There, I describe museums as institutions rooted in:
- Integrity: the institution’s ethical obligation to honour commitments made to artists, donors and publics;
- Reciprocity: the mutual exchange between a museum and its community, donors and the artistic ecosystem.
- Care: not only as conservation, but as a moral practice that binds institutions to their material and immaterial responsibilities.
- Moral vs. Legal legitimacy: political authorities may possess legal power, but museums derive their moral authority from public trust, professional ethics and international standards.
The MoCU (Museum of Care and Understanding) I proposed is a model emphasising that museums are stewards of cultural wellbeing, not instruments of political cycles. All these principles strengthen the argument that relocating or dismantling a collection is not merely a logistical decision but an ethical breach that harms the civic fabric and violates the social contract between museum, artists, donors and community. Thus, defending donors will require a multilayered strategy:
- Mobilise international ethical frameworks: Invoke ICOM and UNESCO standards, demonstrating clearly that the political intervention contradicts globally accepted principles of heritage care, donor intent and institutional integrity.
- Activate donors and artist estates: Their moral authority carries exceptional weight. Many donors entrusted their works not simply to a ‘Flemish museum’, but specifically to M HKA, its staff, its mission, and its civic community.
- Translate ethical loss into civic language: We must make visible the intangible loss, that is the erosion of care, the breaking of trust, the dismantling of reciprocity, and the destruction of a cultural home.
- Build civic mobilisation: Engage in public advocacy the museum’s wider ecosystem, including collaborators, service providers, partner organisations and publics. Museums cannot defend themselves alone; they need allies.
- Emphasise moral authority over legal authority: If politics has legal power, museums possess moral power – the power of cultural memory, ethical commitment, and public trust. It is essential to articulate this difference publicly and politically.
Ultimately, the strongest defence of donors’ will is to make visible that dismantling a collection is not the moving of objects, but the breaking of a cultural covenant: a covenant rooted in trust, care, responsibility and a community.