The third in a series of books investigating the future of the museum, following on The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues (2020) and Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues With Architects (2022). Rounding out the previous volumes, which examined the “software” and the “hardware” of the museum, the 38 dialogues in the third installment of the trilogy survey the social, cultural, economic, institutional, and technological conditions of the wider ecology in which museums operate. The conversations include leading figures from around the world, engaging voices not heard in the prior volumes: artists, curators, collectors, members of the art trade, sociologists, entrepreneurs, and others. Together, they offer a portrait of an art world seeking to adapt to a rapidly changing society.

András Szántó (*1964, Budapest) advises museums, cultural institutions, and leading brands on cultural strategy. An author and editor who oversaw the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, his writings have appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, The Art Newspaper, and many other publications. Szántó, who lives in Brooklyn, has been conducting conversations with art-world leaders since the early 1990s, as a frequent moderator of the Art Basel Conversations series and as the moderator of the Global Museum Leaders Colloquium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museums of Tomorrow Roundtable at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.