Glenn Lowry, the longtime director of New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), will assume the prestigious Louvre Chair on November 17th, bringing with him decades of experience defending cultural pluralism against political attacks. After three decades leading MoMA, Lowry warns that cultural institutions must actively defend their values, stating: "If we believe in a museum that protects the rights of minorities, we will have to actively defend our values."

Lowry's appointment comes at a critical time when museums worldwide face increasing political pressure and questions about their role in society. In a recent dialogue, he joined two prominent artists who challenge museums from within: Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who recently received the Nobel Prize for Arts, and German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. Together, they explored whether museums can still serve as the "laboratory of the future" that André Malraux once envisioned.

For Lowry, an art historian and now director emeritus of MoMA, museums function as living laboratories where experimentation takes precedence over definitive answers. He references Malraux's "Imaginary Museum," conceived in 1947 just after World War II as a means to elevate the spirit of a France traumatized by war. "The museum is a laboratory, a place of experiments, where we seek questions instead of finding answers," Lowry explains.

De Keersmaeker has regularly explored museum spaces to create bridges between live performance and visual arts. Her ephemeral performances challenge what she calls the "illusion of permanence" in museum collections. Invited to perform at both MoMA in New York and the Louvre in Paris, she has conceived performances within the museum collections themselves, creating unique dialogues between dance and displayed artworks.

"When dance dialogues with exhibited works, it invites another way of looking at dance through painting and another way of looking at painting through dance," De Keersmaeker explains. "A triangular relationship between the audience, the paintings, and the dancers is established, and the space and time we share become completely fluid."

Anselm Kiefer, whose "never-finished" paintings embody the instability of the world, adds a philosophical dimension to this artistic dialogue. "All artists dance," Kiefer notes. "In my studio, when I paint, I dance. Nietzsche once said, 'when I think, I dance.' Dance is within us, it is life, and it must be expressed."

The conversation takes on particular urgency as museums face unprecedented challenges in an era where art comes under political pressure, institutions waver, and history itself is contested. These cultural leaders and artists are grappling with fundamental questions about the role of museums in contemporary society and their ability to remain spaces of free expression and cultural diversity.

As Lowry prepares to take on his new role at the Louvre, his experience defending cultural pluralism at MoMA becomes increasingly relevant. The dialogue between these three figures represents a broader conversation about how cultural institutions can adapt and survive while maintaining their essential mission of preserving and presenting art to diverse audiences in an increasingly polarized world.