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European standards. Through the pressure of this politics linked to the standards imposed by

the European Union, the official political institutions should finally become interested in

developing structures and favorable conditions for contemporary art. At the very least

recognizing it as a cultural strategy for overcoming marginalization, as one possible

ambassador of local culture in the international world of art and the European culture scene. 7

In spite of this, this interest has yet to be declared as part of an official cultural politics, andthe corresponding institutions do not look prone to overcome their thinking on culture and art

in categories of the national and marginal.

In this barren landscape of culture-political ruins, a number of new art institutions have

emerged, many of them initiated by artists, who have developed a variety of strategies for

economic and artistic survival. They each represent their own nature of production principles

based on international standards and polyphonic artistic practices across international art

world networks: Interspace, the Institute for Contemporary Art, the Art Today Association,

the Red House and numerous others. They have each expressed their desires for setting up a

public museum for contemporary art, but have not managed to involve all others in a closer

examination of what exactly the discussion could look like that could lead to new visions onunderstanding the design of this future public museum of contemporary art in Bulgaria.

Besides the existing interested institutions such a discussion would need to include museum

experts, curators, artists, as well as the media, sociologists, economists, philosophers,

politicians, architects, urbanists, citizens, funding institutions. A discussion in a broad

multidisciplinary framework of influences and interests in a broad field of reflections and

social interactions in which relationships will give rise to a different format: working

seminars, round-table discussions, research projects, panel discussions, exhibitions, local and

international conferences, consulting with experts, the creation of a temporary body that could

push this process ahead, but would at the same time guarantee a democratic approach and

social dialog. Even if there is no result on the horizon, however possible and adaptive, the

mere raising of questions should change the situation in a positive direction: How can adebate be created in such a way as to express the broadest range of interests and issues, in

order to allow us to start thinking of the future museum? What type of institution should it be?

How should a future public museum of contemporary art in the Bulgarian capital be

structured? Whose interests should it represent? What should be its representative functions,

what its functional logic?

There are very different points of view about the museum as such. Especially over the past

fifteen years, with the global changes in the economical and political conditions, the notion of

the museum and its functions has undergone dramatic and dynamic changes. The interaction

of the museum with the past and present have changed with the collapse of the hegemony of

the white, colonial and national perspective with its symbolic hierarchy. The museum can nolonger be static, and under ever growing economic pressure it has to remain competitive in the

arena of entertainment and the spectacle of mainstream culture by discovering ever new ways

of interacting with its public, with art, with different historical perspectives continuously

being reinterpreted, and by continuously producing new exotic images and allows the

possibility of social integration in various movements, communities and identities. Today the

visitors of the big museums of contemporary art around the world, not only are recognized,

but also more and more treated as a new class of global consumers. Consumers for whom the

7 Contemporary art has never been so popular but what is its role today and who is controlling its future?Julian Stallbrass, Art Incoorporated, 2004, on the sleeve.