CIMAM releases a new Best Practices Initiative

CIMAM launches a landmark position paper that aims to redefine how museums and living artists collaborate, introducing the ‘Memorandum of Care and Understanding‘ (MoCU).

CIMAM, the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art, launches a position paper that could quietly redefine how museums and living artists meet. The research Best Practices for Museums Working with Living Artists - commissioned by CIMAM’s Museum Watch Committee and directed by Belgian cultural sociologist Pascal Gielen - introduces a ‘Memorandum of Care and Understanding’ (MoCU).

Read the position paper

The MoCU is not a contract, but an ethical choreography, a pre-contractual space where both museum and artist articulate not only what they want, but what they need; not only what they promise, but what they can bear. It is a memorandum of candor: a framework in which integrity, reciprocity, and care replace the bureaucratic language of risk management and compliance.

'As Chair of the Museum Watch Committee, I believe that this position paper represents a vital step towards reimagining the relationship between museums and living artists. The 'Memorandum of Care and Understanding' demonstrates our dedication to cultivating an environment of trust, honesty, and mutual respect in all areas of collaboration. Recognising the precarious situation in which many artists find themselves today, the study aims to provide a supportive and uplifting framework for them. By prioritising the values of care and ethical engagement, we aim to transform the way art institutions connect with artists, ensuring these relationships are sustainable and enriching for all involved.' Zeina Arida, CIMAM Board member and Director, Mathaf (Arab Museum of Modern Art), Doha, Qatar.

'While writing this position paper and speaking with artists and museum professionals across five continents, I realized that the question of ethics in art reaches far beyond the museum walls. It mirrors a global crisis of trust between people, communities, and institutions, fed by repressive liberalism, illiberal regimes, and geopolitical conflicts.' comments Pascal Gielen.

Beyond the Contract

Over the past decade, the art world has become increasingly articulate about ‘fair pay’ and ‘best practices’. These frameworks are necessary and long overdue; they anchor professional accountability and basic justice in a field often marked by opacity. Yet, as this paper argues, they also tend to stop short of something more fundamental: the ethical, affective, and civic texture of collaboration itself.

What this position paper insists on is that ethics in art cannot be reduced to administrative correctness or economic equivalence.

Integrity, in this triadic framework, means coherence between words and deeds, an insistence that museums live up to their own missions and that artists respect the institutional ecology that hosts them. Reciprocity is fairness expanded beyond money: the alignment of recognition and redistribution, so that neither respect replaces payment nor payment substitutes for respect. And care is the shared capacity to respond to needs, exhaustion, grief, or difference—without sentimentalizing them.

Together, these principles form what the position paper calls ‘a triadic ethic for sustainable artist–museum relations’. They are not moral ornaments added after the fact, but the very grammar by which trust can still be spoken in a world of projectization, platformization, and precarity.

The Courage to Share Imperfection

The position paper arises from global fieldwork - interviews and focus groups across continents - revealing how both artists and institutions live under converging pressures: shrinking public funds, performance audits, illiberal politics, ecological anxiety, and digital outrage. The result is a shared vulnerability that rarely finds institutional language.

The MoCU proposes such a language. It begins with conversation, proceeds to a concise concept note, and only later - if necessary - translates values into legal modules. Among these are Fair Pay, Fair Care, Fair Green, Fair Culture, and Fair Aesthetics, each addressing one dimension of contemporary ethics, from remuneration to ecology to the sensory life of art itself.

Crucially, the memorandum is morally binding but legally light. Its authority is the authority of coherence. It asks parties to confront asymmetry without humiliation, to design relations that acknowledge dependence without erasing autonomy. ‘To curate is to care’, the document states, turning a professional cliché into a civic task: to design for vulnerability without fetishizing it.

A World of Shared Fragility

CIMAM situates this new framework within a broader geopolitical and cultural landscape marked by what Gielen names ‘repressive liberalization’: a world where artistic freedom is eroded not by censorship alone but by managerial logics of efficiency and self-precarization. In such a field, ethical collaboration becomes an act of resistance. Integrity resists hypocrisy; reciprocity resists commodification; care resists indifference.

Museums and artists, the paper suggests, mirror one another’s fragility. Both navigate bureaucracies that privilege metrics over meaning, and both risk burnout under the regime of visibility. The MoCU is less a cure than a form of collective therapy. It’s a way to slow down and to make time itself a medium of care.

From Governance to Commoning

CIMAM’s initiative also signals a shift from governance to commoning. Where older ethical codes focused on stewardship of objects, this document focuses on the ethics of relation. Museums become not guardians of things but custodians of trust and our cultural commons. The artist is no longer a supplier but a civic partner and commoner.

The paper’s subtitle, Integrity, Reciprocity & Care, might read like virtues from another century. Yet in the algorithmic agora where outrage circulates faster than empathy, these virtues sound almost radical. They offer what the digital world denies: slow attention, contextual sensitivity, and the courage to stay in dialogue even when dialogue hurts.

An Invitation Rather Than a Rule

CIMAM’s position paper does not decree. It invites. It asks museums to declare their budgets as clearly as their intentions, to align missions with means. It asks artists to articulate their limits as openly as their desires. It asks both to recognize that fairness begins not in legal text but in the shared willingness to appear vulnerable.

Presented ahead of the CIMAM Annual Conference in Turin (November 28-30, 2025), the document does not close the conversation but opens it toward a future in which collaboration itself becomes an aesthetic and ethical practice.

In a time when contracts protect institutions but rarely relationships, CIMAM’s Memorandum of Care and Understanding offers something quietly unique: the possibility that ethics, like art, begins where trust meets imperfection.

Methodological Approach

Commissioned by CIMAM Museum Watch, and written by Pascal Gielen, Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, Culture Commons Quest Office - University of Antwerp.

The study employed a qualitative research methodology, grounded in literature study, online interviews, and focus group discussions conducted between August 26 and October 1, 2025. The objective was to capture diverse perspectives from professionals across the global museum ecosystem and from organizations representing artists’ interests, ensuring a balanced and dialogical understanding of the current dynamics between museums and living artists.

Two main respondent groups were consulted:

• Museum professionals, including museum directors, chief curators, and independent curators, all members of CIMAM.
• Artist representative organizations and collectives, advocating for the rights and working conditions of artists.

Interviews with Artist Representative Organizations:

Individual interviews were held with the following organizations and representatives:

• Artists at Risk (AR) — represented by Marita Muukkonen and Ivor Stodolsky, co-founders and co-directors. (Helsinki, Berlin, Barcelona)
• Arts Equator — represented by Anupama Sekhar, Executive Director. (Singapore)
• La Revuelta — represented by Maya Juracán, Director of Projects and Fundraising, and Jimena Dary, Chief Curator and Cultural Manager. (Guatemala City, Guatemala)
• Sophio Dughashvili — Lawyer and Chairperson of the Ethics Commission at the Mediators Association of Georgia. (Tbilisi, Georgia).
• Suzana Sousa — Independent curator (Luanda, Angola).
• Plataforma Assembleària d’Artistes de Catalunya (PAAC) — represented by Natalia Carminati, Artist and President of PAAC.

These conversations were crucial to articulating the artists’ perspective and identifying key ethical and practical concerns from the standpoint of creators and their advocates.

Focus Groups with CIMAM Members:

Prior to organizing the focus groups, CIMAM launched a short survey open to all members over a period of five months, asking a single guiding question:

“What challenges do you consider most urgent in the relationship between museums and living artists?”

The responses to this survey informed the design of the focus group discussions and helped identify key themes and participants.

Three separate focus groups were then convened with CIMAM members — museum directors, chief curators, and independent curators — representing a wide geographic and institutional diversity.

These sessions explored the operational realities and ethical challenges faced by museums when working with living artists, providing essential insights that helped shape the emerging framework of best practices.

• John Alexander, Director of Collections and Exhibitions — Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco, USA
• Ilaria Conti, ED and Chief Curator — La Nueva Fábrica, Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala
• Molly Donovan, Acting Head and Curator of Contemporary Art, Modern and Contemporary Art — National Gallery of Art Washington, Washington, USA
• Christian NANA, Senior Curator and Director, Chairperson — Blackitude Museum and ICOM Cameroun, Yaoundé, Cameroun
• Victoria Machipisa, Curator — African Renaissance Foundation, Harare, Zimbabwe
• Sebastian Cichocki, Senior Curator — Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
• Carina Plath, Curator — Sprengel Museum Hannover, Hannover, Germany
• Elvira Dyangani Ose, Director — Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
• Martha Kazungu, Director — Njabala Foundation, Kampala, Uganda
• Shayari da Silva, Chief Curator — Geoffrey Bawa Trust, Colombo, Sri Lanka
• James Luigi Tana, Independent Curator, Manila, Philippines
• Rebecca Coates, Director — Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne, Australia

The 2023–25 Museum Watch Committee consists of seven board members of CIMAM:

• Zeina Arida (Chair), Director, Mathaf (Arab Museum of Modern Art), Doha, Qatar
• Bart de Baere, Director, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium
• Malgorzata Ludwisiak, Ph.D., Museum Management Expert / Freelance Curator / Academic Teacher, Warsaw, Poland.
• Amanda de la Garza, Artistic Deputy Director, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), Madrid, Spain
• Kitty Scott, Strategic Director, Fogo Island Arts / Shorefast, Toronto, Canada
• Yu Jin Seng, Director (Curatorial, Research & Exhibitions), National Gallery Singapore, Singapore
• Agustin Perez Rubio, Independent Curator, Madrid, Spain

About CIMAM

CIMAM – International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art – is an Affiliated Organization of ICOM (the International Council of Museums), and is constituted as an association, acting as a non-profit organization, under the Spanish National Registry of Associations.

CIMAM is the only global network of modern and contemporary art museum experts. CIMAM members are directors and curators working in modern and contemporary art museums, collections, and archives.

Founded in 1962, CIMAM’s vision is a world where the contribution of museums, collections, and archives of modern and contemporary art to the cultural, social, and economic well-being of society is recognized and respected.

CIMAM's mission is to foster a global network of museums and museum professionals in the field of modern and contemporary art and provide a forum for communication, cooperation, information exchange, and debate on issues of common interest among museums, non-profit collections, artists, and museum professionals interested in modern and contemporary art to represent their interests in accordance with the ethical principles and values of the ICOM Code of Ethics and CIMAM’s Code of Ethics. In addition, CIMAM encourages scientific research related to the field of modern and contemporary art museums to inspire professionals with best practices in the field and to ensure that appropriate ethical and professional standards are established and adhered to.

By generating debate and encouraging cooperation between art institutions and individuals at different stages of development around the world, CIMAM plays a key role in the growth of the sector.

About CIMAM’s Museum Watch Committee

In 2012, CIMAM initiated a series of news publications regarding the different critical situations of Museums and Collections around the world, especially in regions affected by world economic and political crises. The Museum Watch Program that came out of this serves as an advocacy program addressing specific situations that impact museum professionals and not-for-profit institutions of modern and contemporary art.

Public Museum Watch actions since 2012

Through the support of ethical principles, good governance, and best practices, the Museum Watch Program is intended to be a tool to assist modern and contemporary art museum professionals in dealing with critical situations that affect the museums’ ability to maintain their codes of practices and individuals to undertake its profession. It does so with the aim of stimulating reflection and generating debate.

The Museum Watch Committee aims to generate deeper understanding within the field by analyzing and discussing relevant cases that lead to documentation archived by CIMAM; to uphold ethical principles, good governance, and best practices for modern and contemporary art museums, including the development and dissemination of related codes and guidelines that may inform future conference topics; to inform the CIMAM community and the broader public about critical situations affecting museums’ abilities to fulfill their missions; to express concern grounded in CIMAM’s core principles; to enact support and solidarity when necessary and feasible, including through forms of activism; and to provide a network of mutual assistance and advocacy for CIMAM members.

About Pascal Gielen

Pascal Gielen (b. 1970) is a writer and cultural sociologist whose work explores the delicate ties between culture, politics, and everyday life. He is a full professor of Sociology of Culture and Politics at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA) at the University of Antwerp, where he also leads the Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO). As editor-in-chief of the international book series Antennae – Arts in Society (Valiz), he curates critical reflections on how culture shapes – and is shaped by – society.

Gielen was awarded the prestigious Odysseus Grant by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) for his outstanding international research achievements. His books have been translated into English, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Ukrainian. Through his writings, he traces the intersections of creative labor, the commons, ecology, and (cultural) politics, often venturing into the field to study how culture takes root and resists in conflict zones such as the Amazon and Ukraine.

www.ccqo.eu

https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/research-groups/aria/

pascal.gielen@uantwerpen.be

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