The museum: a figure of desire and a gateway to eternity

While there are many books and academic texts about how museums are structured, they are rarely discussed in the practical context of the art market. I will try to make this text as useful and concrete as the one about galleries.

Usually people think of the gallery as a tool and the museum as the ultimate goal. I want to show that the museum is also a powerful tool. The “museumification” of an artist does not happen by the artist’s will alone (though the artist is always ready for it). However, if the artist understands how museums work and constantly keeps the museum in mind as a “figure of desire,” they can significantly influence the process. For brevity, I will sometimes use MoCA (Museum of Contemporary Art).

An Invention of the 20th Century

The Museum of Contemporary Art is a 20th-century invention, just like the car, the airplane, or the telephone. Before that, museums only collected and exhibited art of the past.

The change began at the end of the 19th century, when the pace of paradigm shifts in art accelerated dramatically. Previously, an artistic era lasted about 50 years. Now paradigms change every 20, 10, or even 5 years.

This quantitative acceleration led to fundamental qualitative changes. An artist can still be alive and fully active, yet already be recognized as a cultural value whose works are collected by museums.

The Church Analogy

To understand the scale of this shift, consider the emergence of the Church in the 3rd century. Before that, a Christian seeking salvation was in constant personal search, doubt, and need for teachers and interpreters. After the Church appeared, canons, rules, and approved interpretations were established. Follow them — and you are on the right path.

The artist used to appeal to the future in the same way a Christian appealed to Heaven: “The future will judge me, I work for eternity.” Constant doubt, search for like-minded people, moments of insight.

With the appearance of the Museum of Contemporary Art, “getting into the future” became much simpler and more concrete: you need museum curators to notice and acquire your work. Because one of the museum’s main tasks is to preserve and transmit into the future the objects that enter its collection.

A super-expensive yacht will turn into a pile of rust in a hundred years, while a scrap of paper with an artist’s drawing in a museum collection will be carefully preserved, restored, and exhibited for centuries.

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The Museum and the Art Market

The MoCA became a key element — actually the cornerstone — of the emerging art business:

• Since the time it takes for a “wet painting” (freshly created work) to become a cultural asset has shortened from 50 years to 10 or even 5 years, serious investment became possible. Jasper Johns’ Target was bought for $5,000, resold three years later for $300,000, and five years after that for $7 million.
• A living, productive artist recognized by museums turns into a “factory of guaranteed masterpieces.” Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are criticized for this, but the first such factories were Picasso, Dalí, Chagall, and Matisse.

For the art market the museum performs three critical functions:

• Validation of Significance. The museum confirms not just authenticity, but cultural importance. Being in a museum collection is the foundation of market value.
• Creation of Stars (Blue Chips). Solo museum exhibitions turn artists into icons. Museums work with the general public, while galleries serve professionals.
• The Ultimate Sink. This is the most important difference between the art market and any other commodity market. On the jacket market, old jackets are thrown away. In art, old works do not disappear — they appreciate and continue to compete with new ones. Without museums, which never sell works from their collections, the market would have collapsed long ago. Museums permanently remove works from circulation, freeing up space for new artists.

The Museum as an Institution

1. Collecting. Museums are either “universal” (extremely expensive to create today) or “unique” (focused on a specific niche or identity).
2. Exhibitions. The constant struggle for space between the permanent collection and temporary shows is one of the main tensions of museum life. Some museums even produce blockbuster exhibitions that travel to other institutions.
3. Research and Education. Turning an object into a cultural value does not happen automatically. Museum research departments are the “factories” that produce the building blocks of culture. In contemporary art museums, living artists can provide direct testimony, and their archives are preserved.
4. Community Building. Modern museums actively create communities around themselves: volunteers, “Friends of the Museum,” trustees, and benefactors. This is directly linked to the typical “three-thirds” funding model: one third from the founder (state/city/patron), one third earned by the museum itself, and one third from the board of trustees (who usually buy new works for the collection).

Museums often strive to become artifacts themselves — through iconic buildings by star architects and site-specific commissions created especially for their spaces.

The Future

The figure of the museum curator is heavily mythologized today. However, no single curator can dictate what enters history — there are thousands of them, and real consensus is collective.

I believe we will soon see a major transformation of the museum. The great institutions of the 20th century (Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, MoMA, Tretyakov Gallery) will remain, but new types of institutions that better match today’s artistic processes will emerge. And I am not just waiting for them — I am actively looking for them.

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