Episode III: Attack of the Clones
With Dr. Andreas Beitin
Director, Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen
In conversation with Latika Gupta
Associate Editor, MARG Publications
While focusing on the role of museums, this 3rd episode of
Museum of the Future reflects upon the future of the museum in the context of economic liberalization and privatization of the public good, new models of participation and new forms of exclusion, new ideas of public engagement and new roles of cultural capital.
Today, museums are powerful multi-national players, and along with Biennials, Art Festivals etc, are relevant for city marketing and nation branding; they play an important role as elements of soft power in international politics. While in Europe, the model of the publicly funded museum still plays the most prominent role, in other parts of the world privately funded institutions have similar or even higher importance.
The engagement of private sponsors in private-public-partnerships has, in many cases, the negative consequence of a further decrease in public support and a more resolute withdrawal of government institutions from the task of maintaining museums as institutions of public education, as archives and spaces of collective memory. Where state bodies withdraw from the task or are dysfunctional, it is left to the private patron to assume the responsibility of sustaining cultural life. The predicament arises once these collectors become involved with public affairs and determine what will be considered the history of art of our time and how it will be perceived in the future. Should private engagement find some limitation, and if so, in which way?
© Felix Grünschloss, Karlsruhe
Dr. Andreas Beitin studied art history, applied cultural sciences, as well as modern and contemporary history. This was followed by several years as project director for an international art consulting company. Alongside this he completed his dissertation on the motif of the scream in twentieth century German painting and graphics. He has been working at ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art since 2004. After having served in various scholarly and curatorial capacities, he was appointed museum director in 2010. During his activities at ZKM, Dr. Beitin has conceived and realized numerous internationally acclaimed exhibitions as curator or co-curator. He has published many scholarly articles and held lectures both within Germany and abroad. Dr. Andreas Beitin is a member of numerous art juries and scholarly advisory boards (among others The Watermill Center, New York; Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Munich; Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe; RWE Stiftung, Essen; Volkswagen Foundation, Hannover); he was appointed chairman of the Advisory Board of the department of Visual Arts at the Goethe-Institute in 2013, and Dr. Beitin taught art history from 2014-2015 at the Academy of Visual Arts Karlsruhe. Since 2016 he has been Director of the Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen.
© Latika Gupta
Latika Gupta has worked as a curator at the National Gallery of Modern Art and at KHOJ International Artists' Association in Delhi, besides curating independent exhibitions of South Asian and international art. She curated
Homelands: A 21st century story of home, away and all the places in-between drawn from UK's British Council Collection and Arts Council Collection, that toured Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Colombo, Lahore and Karachi in 2013-2014;
Folk Archive by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane that toured Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata in 2015, and most recently
Jeevanchakra, Kolkata, 2016, as part of the Wellcome Collection's Medicine Corner project in India. She has received fellowships from the Nehru Trust, Charles Wallace India Trust and a Museum Fellowship from the India Foundation for the Arts and INLAKS to curate a permanent exhibition for a museum in Kargil, Ladakh. She was recently a research fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London (2017). Publications include an essay in the
Journal of Ritual Studies, essays in
Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India (University of California Press),
Marg Publications and critical reviews in
Art India magazine, Take on Art and
India Today. Gupta currently works as Associate Editor at MARG publications
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