ABSTRACT
The contemporary museum is used in this book not as a bland reference to the museum of today but to describe a museum – whether concerned with history, art, science, technology, society or anything else – that sets its agenda according to the peculiar conditions of today. This is not any ‘today’ but the one that many of us around the world experience at this moment. In this today, our lives are oriented towards the contemporary like never before. Technology has undermined an old system of authority: the immediate opinions of ‘people like us’ have become more powerful and convincing than those of professional authorities. Technological change has brought the unfolding experience of globalisation that has delivered to us this new moment in our perception of the world. Now we live in what might be regarded as ‘the global contemporary’: a sense of living in a globally connected world that is preoccupied with that thin slice of time that is the contemporary. This affects how we think about the museum. This book is about how we rethink museums to address our need to live in the global contemporary.
