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66 “There’s currently an admirable tendency to try to represent globally,” said Mr Marlow, opening the discussion. “But at the same time there is a danger of producing a global bog-standard, where everything becomes similar and the very localism, diversity and traditions that we set out to explore get negated.” Telling new stories about modern and contemporary art from Africa is a matter of filling in the gaps, championing artists that have been overlooked or who deserve to be showcased, and of being part of a “global village”, said Ms Brundyn. “But I think there has to be more focus on curators to make sure that the blandness doesn’t happen as we look at our shared humanity.” For Ms Tamati-Quennell, New Zealand and Oceania’s distinctive mosaic of cultures, the relative geographical distance from major centres of the art world and relatively modest funds all act as breaks on any tendency towards sameness and help focus the attention on the local and the specific. Rather than giving in to an institutional impulse to co-opt everything into an ever-expanding mainstream, Mr Rüger expressed the hope that as more diverse voices and histories were starting to be heard, that this would result in greater sensitivity to different perspectives and modes of presenting ideas. “The sad truth though is, at the moment, that if you look around at museums in places that people travel, they kind of look the same and collections seem to have become interchangeable, at least on an international level,” he said. The tendency, Mr Rüger observed, is a drift towards a general model of an art museum where everyone has works by the same, admittedly important, contemporary artists - a list that would, he said, include Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Yayoi Kusama and others. “People that I know, 98 per cent of them can’t travel, they only see my museum,” said Ms Brundyn, calling for a reconsideration of privilege in discussions about museums becoming increasingly the same. “I have to remind myself that my reality is not their reality. We are trying to balance