 |
| Claudia Roth, German Minister of State for Culture, at Belinale. Photo: Andreas Rentz | Geety Images (taken from The Guardian) |
I was in an international group discussion a few days ago, where the subject was museums and declining democracies. We heard about the woes of Polish museum directors, widely reported in the international press (examples from 2017 onwards: here, here, here, here, here); we heard about museums in Hungary, expected to “interpret for the people the wills of the government” or getting censored because of a participatory art project depicting the President or, more recently, seeing a director getting sacked for ignoring the law against the “promotion of homosexuality”, which he had voted for when he was a member of parliament. We also heard about the Netherlands, where the extreme right has been attacking museum narratives for some time and is now trying to form a government, after winning the elections in November.
