Social impact, social reporting… social museum?

Last week, in Brescia, within the stunning setting of Fondazione Brescia Musei and within the ICOM Italia network, there was an in-depth discussion about what “social” really means when applied to museums, accountability, and impact.

I’d like to offer a separate reflection—different from the many thoughtful contributions already shared by esteemed colleagues across various platforms. As often happens, I find myself asking a few questions.

Perhaps the time has come to be a bit more explicit about the definitions we assign to our actions, especially with the awareness that every action—or inaction—is inherently political, and that culture, museums included, is never neutral.

The notion of “social” carries an underlying bias. It is often perceived as a universal concept aimed at doing or bringing good to society. Yet, all too often, this “good” turns out to be little more than a trend topic—one that’s readily embraced by the museum community, sometimes a bit uncritically.

Along these lines, social reporting has recently become trendy in the museum world—whether in the form of a social report, a mission report, or a sustainability report, depending on how “social” the museum truly manages to be.

But why produce a social report? What does a “social museum” really mean? What kind of benefits can it bring, and how deep can those benefits actually go?

Let me take a broader view, trying to analyze a wider context than what is usually considered.

Over the past three months, in the wake of Hurricane Donald—an event that has swept across every inch of land and sea, dramatically accelerating global entropy—it feels more crucial than ever to seriously reflect on what we mean by a social museum, and what kind of impacts we actually expect museums to help achieve. The model of participatory museums—pioneered and theorized especially by North American colleagues—appears to have fallen short of its goal to foster an active, conscious citizenry, as seen in the results of the recent U.S. elections. The excesses of woke culture, particularly in environments where existential concerns stop at the lower tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy, have only widened the gap between perceived and actual priorities. An increasingly extreme individualism, paired with the culture of image and appearance, is rapidly eroding the shared values that have long underpinned civil and social coexistence.

Museums, increasingly utopian life rafts—as Robert R. Janes writes in Museums and Societal Collapse (2023)—are left holding up lost and weary migrants in search of places where they can preserve the last fragments of their humanity: suspended oases of well-being, calm, and peace. But then—what is a social museum, if sociality itself is dissolving and social rights struggle to be upheld?

The social museum is one of the last strongholds of political and civic action. For this very reason, museums—today—must not be tourist destinations, nor even informal welfare providers, as I myself have argued in the past.

The social museum is a space of resistance and survival. No longer a hub for the creation of new culture, as I once believed, but a space for the preservation of Culture, of critique, and of coexistence. Its leaders must be near-missionaries, resisting the assaults of blind power. Its spaces must be havens—of welcome, refuge, and regeneration. Advocacy—never a clearly defined goal for Italian museums—must become one of their primary missions. And at this point, we must stop calling them social museums. They are political museums. Rather than launching yet another “adopt a museum” campaign, perhaps now it is time for museums to adopt campaigns—relevant causes for their communities, going beyond the mainstream narratives of environmental and climate sustainability. Campaigns that respond to real needs, real expectations, and the true urgencies of their publics. Only then can a museum’s impact be deep and wide-reaching, more easily assessed by looking at the political actions it inspires and the tangible changes it helps produce in policy—and in people's actual lives. 

And then, by acknowledging the political value of museum action, public administrations and museum-owning bodies would finally recognize the worth of the social report—even in economic terms. Then, the citizen would truly feel at home within a space that protects and supports them.