Museums Must Stop Being an Industry and Start Being the Heartbeat of Our Shared Imagination

At this year’s Museums Association Conference, Justin O’Connor,  author of Culture Is Not an Industry, delivered a keynote that felt less like a lecture and more like a wake-up call. It was a rallying cry for cultural professionals who have grown weary of being told their worth lies in their economic output. His message was uncompromising: if museums continue to define themselves by the metrics of growth, innovation, and “impact”, we risk hollowing out the very soul of what culture is meant to be.

O’Connor’s address acknowledged the “turbine” of the wider cultural landscape,  that relentless hum of policy, funding, and performance metrics that powers the so-called “creative economy.” But his provocation was clear: by continuing to operate within this model, we tacitly endorse the idea that growth is good, that industry is inevitable, and that culture must justify itself economically. It is this logic, he warned, that leaves us vulnerable to being devoured, first by the tech giants, then by AI, and finally by the flattening logic of efficiency that cannot comprehend the ineffable, the emotional, or the shared.

Instead, O’Connor offered something far more radical, and far more hopeful. He called for museums to reclaim their purpose as spaces of plurality: places where contradictions can coexist, where dialogue replaces doctrine, and where shared understanding is not measured in footfall or revenue but in the quality of encounter. Plurality, he argued, must become the scaffold upon which we build our cultural future.

This is not a retreat into nostalgia. It is a reassertion of the museum as one of the few remaining civic spaces capable of holding difference without demanding consensus. It is a reminder that museums are not “brands” in a cultural marketplace but living forums for exchange; emotional, intellectual, and human.

At KCA London, this call resonates deeply. Much of our work has been rooted in precisely this belief: that museums are at their strongest when they cultivate dialogue, not dominance. Whether designing visitor experiences, training teams, or supporting intercultural programmes, our focus has always been on enabling connection, that fragile, vital space between people where understanding can grow. In a sector increasingly squeezed by the language of productivity and performance, O’Connor’s challenge feels like permission to remember why we started doing this work in the first place.

Stephen Bush, Associate Editor at the Financial Times, offered a sharply contrasting response. Speaking, as he wryly noted, from “the belly of the beast,” he questioned whether museums could ever truly decouple themselves from capitalism’s long shadow. After all, he pointed out, the very buildings in which we sit,  those great marble halls of enlightenment, were so often built with the profits of empire and industry. The uncomfortable truth, he suggested, is that museums are products of the same economic forces they now seek to critique.

And yet, even Bush’s pragmatism seemed to concede something vital. He proposed that museums occupy the “market of the heart”, a poetic if problematic phrase that inadvertently proved O’Connor’s point. To frame the emotional and communal power of culture as a “market” is to fall once again into the trap of commodification, translating care into capital and meaning into measurable output. The idea that museums must compete for attention, affection, or funding on the same terms as tech startups or entertainment brands is precisely the logic that needs dismantling.

There was, regrettably, no time for rebuttal. But perhaps the true response will come not from the conference stage, but from the museum floor, from the curators, educators, front-of-house teams, and facilitators who daily choose dialogue over division, and depth over data.

O’Connor’s provocation leaves us with an urgent question: what might it mean to build a museum culture that measures its success not in GDP, but in generosity? Not in growth, but in grace?

It is a challenge the sector must now take seriously. Because if we continue to let the logic of industry dictate our worth, we risk becoming little more than beautifully lit showrooms for a world that no longer believes in its own imagination.