New Museum visit = lots to think about

So I was lucky enough to spend the weekend in New York City, perhaps the center of the universe for curiosity- everywhere you look there are interesting people, buildings, artwork, noises, etc. I was really excited to go the the New Museum and something that struck me there was this exhibition that they had called, "Museum as Hub: In and Out of Context". The exhibition was in the education center and introduced the concept of a hub as: "It reveals a partnership of arts organizations looking to pursue experimental methods of exhibition, communication, and collaboration, and considers the consequences of being part of a “hub”—what it means to displace conversations and activity from elsewhere to New York." So I am really excited by this idea- and want to investigate this exhibition and the ideas behind it in more depth. New York makes sense as a hub, and so does the museum- this exhibition includes both- a museum that is in New York. But I want to reflect on ways that we already work to make the museum a hub and also consider ways that we can further cultivate the museum as hub? To take this even further I was struck by the second part of the exhibition title, "In and Out of Context"- to try to understand all the different ways to interpret context I wrote down the many different ways to interpret context- geographic, thematic, chronological, personal, etc. It seemed that in this exhibition the context they were referring to was largely geographic- and that this exhibition brings the artwork out of the original geographic context and into a context that is the museum. I left the museum that day thinking about how lucky it is that the museum can offer an additional context for this work- this allows for the work to be seen by people and fosters intense thinking like that which I am currently doing. All of these ideas were further complicated by my next museum visit where I visited The Met and viewed a traveling exhibition of work from the Afghanistan National Museum- I viewed this exhibition with the concepts of context and hub fresh in my mind. I haven't come to concrete conclusions on this thinking yet, but am firmly in the stage of considering all the interesting angles of these ideas.