Museums and Digitalisation – Walk the line between auratic experiences and the urge to follow contemporary digital trends

When it comes to Digitalisation in the context of museums, one cannot avoid to come across Max Hollein. He is celebrated to be in the vanguard for digital initiatives on the museum sector. The digital strategy for the Städel Museum in Frankfurt and the Digital Stories at the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco are two of his most mentioned digital endeavours, we can find in the press. Mr. Hollein » manages to walk the line between art and commerce«, states the Website Deutsche Welle. Digitalisation endeavours for museums and cultural institutions are complex. Art and commerce are just two aspects in this optimization game. Resolving contradictory requirements is a very special challenge in the museum context compared to other disciplines, whereas the requirements come from a vast number of stakeholders: museum units, business units, service units, the educational mandate, archiving departments, external , such as visitors across all targeted segments, patrons and the public; etcetera. But what makes the cultural sector so special? Just let us mention only two major issues here: 1. Usually, when art comes in to play, it is getting arduous. Preserving the integrity of art often conflicts with other requirements, especially with the unreflective urge of adapting digital artefacts for the sake of a hype. 2. Against the background of restoring the auratic experience in the digital domain, digitalisation endeavours become a balancing act between the real and the imitation, the physical and the virtual, the auratic and the ordinary, the ambitious and the skin deep, openness and exclusivity, culminating in the area of tension between art and commerce.