Posterity has arrived

Abstract

This chapter provides to encourage further experimentation and enrich the debate in this nascent and uncertain field of museum practice. It aims to provide the global museum community’s growing awareness of the world around them, and explores how this awareness is beginning to embrace the aspirations, challenges, horrors and misfortunes that mark human society everywhere. The chapter describes the work as museum activism, in the sense of museum practice, shaped out of ethically-informed values, that is intended to bring about political, social and environmental change. It argues that the relentless focus on money, consumption, and marketplace ideology continues to diminish the museum as a social institution and a key civic resource. The chapter suggests that posterity has arrived for the museum’s mission, role, values and responsibilities—all of which require a radical rethinking in the early 21st century. Museums have their own distractions and internal agendas that preclude or discourage responding to the world.