[INTERVIEW]
Rethinking the Museum
Our wide-ranging conversation with Paola Antonelli—Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA—reflects on the evolving role of design in a world shaped by ecological crisis, technological acceleration, and shifting cultural narratives. From speculative world-building and digital curating to the future of museums and the ethics of belonging, Antonelli shares her insights on how institutions can remain relevant and responsive. At the heart of her work is a belief in design as a tool for justice, imagination, and human connection—both in the gallery and far beyond it.
We want to start by speaking more specifically about how the field of design is changing in the face of increased environmental, social and cultural unrest.
Design is a gigantic field. When we say design, it ranges from products that you find in stores to speculative fictions that imagine future worlds. So it is very, very vast. I would say that more than the field of design in itself, it's the field of design education, and what designers choose to do in their profession that has changed.
When I say design, I also incorporate architecture, and there are designers like Liam Young, who have become filmmakers that essentially practice world-building. They combine the tools of science fiction and architecture to discuss possible solutions to social injustice, overpopulation, and environmental collapse. Then, there are designers like FormaFantasma, who are hybrid. They work for companies, and, sometimes with the support of those companies, they also conduct research-based and speculative projects to highlight issues related to materials, life cycles, and supply chains, for instance. There are designers who focus on very specific issues that are sometimes local, other times global, and whose works are not merchandise that will be found for sale. I would say that that's the biggest difference, not to mention the very welcome disappearance of the term “design thinking”, which has, for too long, been polluting the field of design. Thankfully, that’s gone out the window.
Paola Antonelli at a MoMA R&D Salon.
How do you see these shifts impacting the role and design itself of the museum?
There's never really a cause and effect dynamic, or an action and reaction, but rather reverberations. Museums are composed of many different parts. The permanent collection, for one. Many museums already collect design forms that are more concerned with exploring the present and speculating about the future than making one more piece of furniture. MoMA was the first art museum to really tackle video games, a good example of that. Then, design has a role in the operational side of the museum. There, I can think of design’s intersection with technology and of the impact of new ways to communicate way-finding, through the use of QR tags and augmented reality, for example, in the attempt to create a more layered landscape of information within the museum. And then there are the design exhibitions, which tend to be about much more than furniture. There are many exhibitions about interspecies design, about sustainability, and ancestral knowledge and design...
And many museums (but not enough of them yet) have understood that design is a way to make a more direct contact with audiences. Of course, visitors come to museums to see Goya, Matisse, Picasso, or Bosch, but often, design is the discipline that cements that relationship because it makes people feel that they belong. I think that design should have a much more important position in museums worldwide, but it doesn't have it yet because of an established hierarchy of the arts that positions it towards the bottom. But hopefully, people are going to catch up.
Pirouette Exhibition - January 26–October 18, 2025. IN2583.1. Photograph by Jonathan Dorado.
How do you see emerging technologies shaping the evolution of the museum going forward?
In the same way they shape the evolution of society at large, organically. Sometimes because of individuals I coded the first website for MoMA in 1995. I just wanted to archive the checklist for my first exhibition online and available to everybody, and that checklist is actually still available today. Then Barbara London, another MoMA curator, started using the web to make a blog when she was traveling through China and seeing video art. And then another, and another…Then at the turn of the millenium, we started having elaborate exhibition websites that complemented the show. So you would have the exhibition, the catalog, and the website––3D, 2D and 5D, in a way… What the web represented to a museum had evolved right at that time.
Then, the tech came that allowed the mimicking of an exhibition online. That was never of interest to me, somehow. I think that now we know that people cannot have a real experience of the works online. They will be able to access something else — the stories around the works maybe, or some kind of constructed simulation. But the works themselves will only be seen in IRL, in the actual place. In the flesh.
When it comes to works that were created to live online, our acquisition of video games is an interesting case study because it had many different implications on how and what to acquire, and how and what to show in the galleries. The kind of agreement we make with the video game companies allows visitors to play them in the galleries, but we cannot make them available online so as not to infringe on copyrights.
What's important is to understand that technology is always a means to an end. And it's important to understand what the end is, what justifies or what gives the impetus for the use of different technologies. When we worked with Refik Anadol, his project was in the physical galleries [at MoMA], in the main lobby. An online-only presentation would not have been satisfactory, you need to be in it, IRL. So, I think that the fact that technology makes museums more accessible is a myth. It makes them more discursive, more talkative, more curious, more experimental, but not more accessible per se. There’s social media, of course, but that’s a different kind of accessibility. It definitely expands the scope of the museum in an interesting way, but you're not going to get Starry Night online.
“The fact that technology makes museums more accessible is a myth. It makes them more discursive, more talkative, more curious, more experimental, but not more accessible per se.”
— Paola Antonelli
And this is interesting because obviously, the primary purpose of museums is to host these works. But what we really like about the R&D Salon series that you started is that it also starts hosting conversations and more community-based investigations into the present and the future. Could you tell us more about your thinking around the museum as expanding what it does, what it communicates, what it stands for, and who or what it hosts?
The MoMA R&D Salons are a product of the desire to expand the museum in different directions. They are especially about connecting the museum with real life. They were born of the financial crisis in 2008, as an attempt to prove to the world that a really important sector that has in its purview the interests of humanity is the cultural sector, not the financial one. We started having these salons about urgent topics that matter to people, to show that museums are not only places where you come to look at art on walls, but also to reflect on issues that you might be faced with in your life. It was an interesting challenge and also a new outlet for experimentation. They keep going, we are now at number 54!
What I’ve found is that curators nowadays have many more means to curate than before. It used to be just the gallery and fighting for budget or for space on the schedule, and right now there are so many other ways to be a curator. I consider my salons to be part of my curatorial practice, they are really fulfilling for me. And I think they seem to be fulfilling also for the audiences.
Technology truly enables curators people and galleries to do much more. Another example is Design Emergency. At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, design critic and author Alice Rawsthorn and I started doing Instagram lives, which I really loved, with designers that were involved in the COVID-19 crisis. As that crisis ebbed, we moved on to other crisis because there is always a design emergency––that’s our motto. After a while, however, people stopped watching Instagram live, which is why we migrated to a podcast, even though I personally don't particularly like it as a medium.
Interestingly, we completely stopped the R&D salons during the pandemic. We started again only when we could gather in a theater, which is very funny, because I've always experimented with technology, but this just didn't feel right. Online had become a different kind of place, during the pandemic. And for me, the best events on Zoom were not interactive events where people would try to speak, but those that were more meditative. For instance, if you've ever followed Universe in Verse, created and produced by Maria Popova, I found it magical online. he has great authors and actors read deep poems about space and science. I'm not a poetry person, yet I would try and attend the yearly IRL event to be supportive. I have to say, I really loved it when they happened online. And I loved online memorials because I could concentrate on the memorialized person instead of being self-conscious among dozens of other self-conscious people.
Understanding the medium that is right for each different situation is important. Sometimes, an exhibition or a curatorial project does not really work in galleries. I'm thinking of a project that I did years ago, called Design and Violence. It had been rejected as an exhibition. So Jamer Hunt, my co-curator, and I brought it online, where it worked really well because people could also send comments, etc. Sometimes a project turns into a video, sometimes it can be done on social media, and there are so many other ways. That's what technology has given us: The freedom to communicate and to work more (although, sometimes too much).
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli, published by Phaidon Press, 2022. Cover design by Studio Frith.
You've suggested that instead of talking about museums, we can talk about curators or different roles within that museum. How can curators and designers collaborate to challenge some of the more dominant cultural narratives to perhaps promote more empathy for different communities? Perhaps tying this back to what you said about the role of design and allowing people to feel like they belong in a particular space. How can that feeling of belonging be fostered for more diverse communities?
This has long been a central question and a crucial goal for the whole museum, been in the works for so many years. It is the number one priority at the moment. For 15 years or more, we've had study groups that are about our historical lacunae, about other modernisms, about other histories and other parts of the world. Serious funds have been offered by trustees and raised to allow MoMA curators to take advantage of expansive collegial expertise and to travel abroad and study this question. Regarding the communities in New York, a major challenge is also one of our strengths––the actual museum building itself. MoMA is in Midtown. Not a place that all New Yorkers find inviting, right?
Many people don't feel that the museum is for them, even though the art inside is also about them. It's a lot of different challenges that we're all trying to grapple with. But I can tell you that in terms of priority, it's priority number one, and it has been so for a while.
What are some of your main preoccupations today or some of the things that you're most excited about?
Well, I'm interested in what you are interested in — the idea of considering ourselves as guests on the planet, and therefore having a different attitude towards our presence here. It's not about atonement, it's just a shift of attitude. I'm also interested in what design can do to help that, and also, to help not make it become something that is only for liberals and Democrats. And then, of course, I'm very preoccupied with the idea of justice and empathy. And of course, I am seriously, seriously concerned about the destiny of democracy, of this country, and of the whole world. So I have these big preoccupations that really inform pretty much everything that I do!
Paola Antonelli is Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA and the museum’s founding Director of Research and Development. Trained as an architect in Milan, she has expanded the definition of design to include everything from video games to biotechnology. Her exhibitions and public programs, including the MoMA R&D Salons, explore design’s role in shaping life across disciplines. Antonelli has been recognized with the AIGA Medal, the National Design Award, and the London Design Medal, among others.