When Museums Become Assemblies: In the UK (and Beyond), Art Is Governed “by Sortition”

From Audience to Decision-Makers: A Shift in Cultural Governance

Imagine receiving a letter from a museum—not an invitation to a private view or a new membership offer, but a request to take part in a decision. Not an online survey with predefined answers, not a generic “tell us what you think” that vanishes into an archive, but an invitation to sit down with other citizens—selected like you—to deliberate on what a cultural institution should be, who it should serve, and what public responsibilities it should uphold.

In the United Kingdom, this idea is taking on a concrete and increasingly recognizable form. Museums and cultural institutions are experimenting with citizens’ assemblies and deliberative juries, selected through civic sortition, supported by professional facilitation, extended timelines, and clearly defined mandates. This marks a subtle yet radical shift: the public is no longer merely an “audience” to be attracted or educated, but an active component of cultural governance.

What makes this development particularly significant is that it does not remain confined to the UK. Similar experiments are emerging in Germany and other European contexts, where participation is treated not as a communication tool or symbolic gesture, but as a political and cultural mechanism.

The National Gallery and the NG Citizens’ Assembly

London currently offers one of the most closely observed examples. The National Gallery has launched a multi-year initiative called NG Citizens, beginning with an assembly of fifty people randomly selected from thousands of invitations sent across the country.

The objective is not to ask the public to vote for their favorite painting or to turn curatorial practice into a reality show. Instead, the assembly addresses structural questions:

• What public value should a national museum produce today?

• How should priorities be defined?

• How can institutions build meaningful relationships with those who feel excluded or never enter museums at all?

This is not participation as a one-off event, but a long-term process with scheduled sessions and a commitment to respond to recommendations. The assembly is not a decorative element of the “inclusive museum” narrative—it represents a different way of constructing institutional legitimacy.

A crucial detail lies in the selection method. Participants are not self-selected volunteers (who often already feel culturally aligned), but are chosen by random draw, with criteria designed to ensure representativeness. This fundamentally changes the nature of the dialogue: the room fills with people carrying diverse expectations, vocabularies, cultural habits, and even skepticism. The museum must learn to hold this plurality without neutralizing it.

Beyond London: Birmingham and Nottingham

In other British cities, the model has been tested even more directly. In Birmingham, a citizens’ jury worked for dozens of hours on a starkly pragmatic question: What does the city want and need from its museums, today and in the future?

What matters here is not only the final recommendations, but the process itself. Participants receive information, hear testimonies from staff, experts, and community members, debate alternatives, and produce ranked priorities. These are not spontaneous opinions, but structured deliberations. The fact that such projects have received recognition within the UK museum sector signals a broader shift: they are no longer viewed as eccentric experiments, but as practices with measurable impact on the relationship between museums and society.

Even more radical is the case of New Art Exchange in Nottingham, widely covered by the mainstream press. Here, a residents’ assembly does not merely advise—it directly influences programming and resource allocation, supported by a dedicated budget. Decisions have gone so far as to alter physical aspects of the space when elements were perceived as unwelcoming or intimidating.

In these examples, the term “popular” takes on a concrete meaning. Not popular because it seeks universal approval, but because it acknowledges that cultural institutions exist within a living social fabric, not above it.

Cultural Democracy Across Europe

At its core, this is not a British phenomenon—it is European, and perhaps global. In Germany, several major institutions have incorporated citizens’ assemblies into exhibition-making and strategic planning processes that explicitly address cultural democracy.

In projects linked to exhibitions about “redesigning democracy,” the assembly is not an accessory but part of the conceptual infrastructure. The museum does not merely speak about democracy—it performs it. The recommendations that emerge are often strikingly practical:

• Less specialist language in texts and communication

• More welcoming spaces (including more seating and places to linger)

• Clearer signage and orientation

• Co-creation tools that are continuous rather than episodic

These may appear to be service-level details, but they are deeply political choices. They determine who feels entitled to stay and who quickly understands that “this place is not for them.” In parallel, cultural funding programs are increasingly supporting models that treat institutions as commons, encouraging museums to rethink not only what they display, but how they distribute voice, attention, and power.

Expertise, Representation, and a New Paradigm

For professionals and scholars in the arts, the most interesting question is not the simplistic provocation: “Is the public replacing curators?” That is a false dilemma. Citizens’ assemblies do not replace research, conservation, or art history. What they can do is reorder priorities.

They can say: before increasing the complexity of discourse, make it clear why this place belongs to everyone. Before programming another “must-see” exhibition, ask who remains invisible in the narrative. Before designing an ideal audience, listen to the real one.

This represents a paradigm shift—from cultural delivery (“we bring you culture”) to cultural relationship (“we build meaning together, with different roles but shared dignity”).

The Risk of Performative Participation

There is, of course, a significant risk: participation can become theater. Assemblies can be used as proof of virtue, a badge of inclusivity, without producing real change. This is the most delicate point, because it can generate active distrust. Inviting people to deliberate and then ignoring their recommendations is worse than never inviting them at all.

The most robust experiments counter this risk in two ways:

1. Transparency—publicly stating which recommendations are adopted, which are not, and why.

2. Continuity—treating assemblies not as events, but as ongoing bodies that accompany institutional decision-making over time.

Only then does the assembly become a genuine component of governance rather than a temporary gesture.

From Temple to Deliberative Square

If all this makes museums sound more “popular,” one clarification is essential: popular does not mean simplified or crowd-pleasing. It means shared. Paradoxically, it can make museums more complex by bringing into decision-making what is often excluded: value conflicts, social differences, divergent expectations, and tensions around language and symbolic power.

Yet it is precisely this complexity that may protect institutions from becoming self-referential. The modern museum was also born as a civic technology, a place where society tells stories about itself and educates itself. Today, it is testing an update: from temple to deliberative square.

If the trend continues, we will see fewer museums asking the public merely to look and applaud—and more museums asking a harder, more vital question:“What must this place be, to deserve to exist, here and now?”