Rutger Bregman’s ‘One Big Venice’ Warning Puts Museums on the Spot
If Europe is drifting toward becoming “one big Venice,” what does that make its museums: guardians of a glorious past, or civic institutions with obligations to the present?
That question sits at the center of a new argument about museum responsibility, sparked by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s 2025 BBC Reith Lectures and his book Moral Ambition. In the lectures, Bregman casts Europe’s future in stark terms, likening the continent to Venice after its 14th-century decline: still beautiful, still visited, but no longer shaping the world. “Today the whole of Europe risks turning into one big Venice,” he said — “a beautiful open-air museum,” admired by American and Chinese tourists as a monument to former power.
The provocation is not only geopolitical. It is also a critique of cultural institutions that, in Bregman’s view, have grown cautious at precisely the moment public life is being tested. He attributes today’s societal deterioration to political leaders who are “unserious” and morally compromised, and to a culture he describes as “the survival of the most shameless.” His counterproposal is a “moral revolution,” grounded in the idea that authoritarianism and a technology-driven takeover of civic life are not foregone conclusions. History, he argues, offers repeated examples of small groups of committed people changing the direction of societies.
Applied to museums, the implication is direct: institutions that present themselves as neutral stewards of heritage may be underestimating their own democratic function.
Museums as trusted public infrastructure
The argument hinges on a striking asymmetry in contemporary culture. While public trust in expertise has eroded across many fields, museum professionals — particularly curators and librarians — remain among the most trusted. Yet many museums, the piece contends, have been reluctant to acknowledge what that trust confers: the ability, and perhaps the duty, to act as part of a democratic ecosystem.
This reluctance has consequences. When institutions avoid taking meaningful positions on the political and informational pressures reshaping public life, they can become easier to intimidate or co-opt — more likely, as Bregman puts it, to “bend the knee” as authoritarian politics gains ground.
The UK’s public museums are singled out as uniquely positioned to intervene, in part because of the country’s culture of free entry. In this view, the museum is not merely a destination but a civic space: a place where ethical standards can be articulated and modeled in ways that extend beyond exhibitions.
From influencer culture to public ethics
What might that look like in practice? The article points to concrete, if contentious, examples. Rather than defaulting to programming optimized for social media visibility — the familiar cycle of Instagram-friendly moments and influencer partnerships — museums could align themselves with campaigns that address the conditions of public life.
Among the proposals: supporting efforts to limit smartphones in schools, and taking a more active role in countering misinformation, including on platforms such as TikTok. The piece also gestures toward the broader anxieties that museums increasingly encounter in their audiences: the rise of anti-democratic politics, the addictive mechanics of social media, and the reality of climate breakdown. For younger visitors in particular, the stewardship of “shared human heritage” now sits alongside a pervasive doubt that a livable future is still on offer.
The National Gallery and the ‘bigger picture’
In London, the National Gallery is presented as a telling case study. Its current advertising campaign, built around the phrase “bigger picture,” is read as more than marketing: an implicit claim that museums can help visitors think beyond the churn of daily politics.
The museum’s physical setting reinforces that symbolism. A visit to Trafalgar Square can feel like stepping into a public forum where art is encountered on its own terms, while the machinery of government plays out nearby along Whitehall toward the Houses of Parliament.
Expectations are likely to intensify with the National Gallery’s plans for a new Modern wing in a new building on Orange Street. The long-term ambition, as described, is to build a collection of “paradigmatic” works — largely 20th-century painting — arranged chronologically to tell a story about modernity. The 20th century, after all, was the period in which democracy was repeatedly shaped, threatened, and defended. If the museum follows the logic of Bregman’s challenge, the selection of works would be guided not only by aesthetic achievement but by the moral urgency art can carry.
The larger claim is that museums are not condemned to become elegant repositories for a fading civilization. If they choose to act like democratic institutions — trusted, public, and ethically legible — they can help make “good” socially compelling again, and reassert the museum as one of the few places where long-term thinking still has a home.
