Analysis
Why museums are putting their storerooms on show
Nine in ten objects in public collections are never displayed. Open depots let visitors walk the shelves, and they are changing what a museum thinks it is for.
Editor-in-chief
7 min read
Visitors book a time slot and walk the racks with a guide.
For most of their history museums have hidden the bulk of what they own. The reasons were practical: light, dust, space and the cost of a label.
A new kind of building turns that logic inside out.
The depot as destination
An open storage building has no galleries in the usual sense. Paintings hang on sliding racks, chairs sit on shelves by the dozen and a conservator works behind glass. Visitors see the collection as the staff do.
People stay longer in front of forty chairs than in front of one. They start comparing. That is what a museum is for.
Attendance at the depots that have opened so far has beaten forecasts, and the visitors are younger than at the main buildings. Curators admit that is partly because nobody tells them what to think.
The cost of showing everything
Open storage is expensive to build and harder to insure. It also exposes how much was acquired and never studied. Several museums have used the move to return objects they could not account for.
Topics
Clara Lindqvist
Editor-in-chief
Clara has led Pressio since its founding in 2019. Before that she edited the foreign desk of a Nordic daily for a decade.
