Foto (c) ZEITORT Jürgen Hohmuth
Museums are traditionally sheltered spaces for art; museums – under normal circumstances – offer the appropriate space to enter into a direct dialogue with original works of art, culture, nature, technology or history etc. In the meantime, most of the approximately 7,000 museums in Germany are using various social media channels in a more or less structured manner, based on a strategic brand-based communication concept; they are writing blogs or posting video recordings on the Internet.
With COVID-19, a new age is now dawning – overnight, so to say: The comprehensive medialization of exhibition contexts is now imminent. It is exciting to observe at what speed – what media, which visual language and dramaturgy – the media content is currently being produced.
A new era is beginning: For 2000 years, time in the Christian Occident has been measured according to “A.D.”. This traditional chronological orientation will now – in a global context – be joined by a new era: “w.C.”. (with Corona).
The traditional museum landscape is under considerable pressure to innovate – in view of the COVID19 crisis. Museums celebrated themselves as “places of originality”; as places where the aura of originality could be experienced. Museums are currently deprived of this unique selling point. It is evident that museums are not considered systemically relevant in these times. Rather, they are perceived as places which, due to the accumulation of larger, anonymous groups of people, are more likely to be seen as a source of danger and must therefore be avoided.
Against this background, it makes sense to use this situation of crisis for a media analysis. Different media representations will appear on the market – but only a few will be able to establish themselves as successful formats in the long term.
One does not need a prophetic gift to predict that the sector of cross-medial/digital communication in particular will probably experience a boom in the near future.
There will be four different categories: