Collecting the contemporary, defining the museum of contemporary art: the case of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde

Over the last three decades, museums of contemporary art have proliferated, attracted attention and instigated discourses. The identity of the museum of contemporary art, however, remains unfixed. This is due to the ambiguity of the term ‘contemporary art’, the diversity of the museums that address it, and the blurred boundaries between the contemporary and the modern.

The museum of contemporary art emerged as a paradigm shift from the museum of modern art and developed within the globalised and neoliberal condition of contemporaneity. In that context, museums of contemporary art can be seen to move around two tendencies: the discursive and the spectacularised. This thesis focuses on the discursive museum of contemporary art and examines it from the perspective of permanent collection.

The thesis begins from the premise that the collection both defines and is defined by the museum’s identity. As a sequence of critical evaluations resulting from the situated approach of the museum, collecting reveals the museum’s significations of contemporary art. Meanwhile, the collection narrative that a museum constructs fulfils the museum’s own purpose and role. An analysis of collecting theory and practice will therefore shed light on the identity of the museum of contemporary art.

Taking the case of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MFSK) in Roskilde, Denmark as a discursive paradigm, the thesis examines the museum’s changing approaches to collecting contemporary art and its shifting perceptions of the permanent collection. It addresses the MFSK’s negotiation of the contemporary as a temporal and a critical signifier and the construction of its critical and situated collection narrative in theory and in practice. Finally, it discusses underlying but definitive factors, such as physical space and funding, that considerably affect collecting within the museum of contemporary art.