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News

December 17, 2025

Museums are in dynamic change, and their collections should be too

Our co-founder and partner Gail Lord recently spoke at the MuseumNext Forecast Summit, challenging museums to rethink their collections. 

Collection expansion is a source of both dynamism and disaster, with the vast majority of museums lacking the wealth and power to make international acquisitions.

Here's the situation: 14% of the world’s population has access to 2/3 of the world’s museums. And these museums display fewer than 10% of what they possess – the more they collect, the more the storage grows, the bigger the buildings and the higher the costs.

Why not open the bursting storerooms of major museum collections to make works of art available on long-term loan or as gifts to the thousands of less affluent museums that want them? Will advances in AI now make this approach finally possible? 

"Now is the time to embrace a more generous approach to sharing the objects we care for, so more people can enjoy them."

Watch the talk