Are the Walls of Museums Coming Down to Make Them Authentic and Relevant in a New Era?

There is an enormous amount of research that has been completed on today’s museums related to attendance trends, demographics, and financial structures. Indicating success or failure of a museum’s performance is not clearcut. There have been disagreements on key parameters that can provide the well-being of an art institution.

In general, in the United States, museum and gallery attendance by adults has declined from 2002–2012 by as much as 30 percent according to the National Endowment for the Arts. Concurrently, the publication, Art Newspaper indicates that there has been an unprecedented expenditure on new expansions from 2007–2014 in the United States. These expansions at a cost of $5 billion on buildings are more than the other 37 other countries that the newspaper examined put together. This is a massive investment in new structures that reflects a rapid cultural transformation taking place globally.