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92 Grynsztejn, the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Suhanya Raffel, Director of M+, a new 65,000 square-metre mega- museum of visual culture in Hong Kong. The panel discussion was moderated by Richard Armstrong, who has served as Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation since 2008. “We don’t just reflect art history, we produce it,” said Ms Grynsztejn, musing on the role played by increased audience expectations. “And today we go by the mantra that we are artist-activated and audience- engaged, 50-50 in everything we do; but back in 1974, if you saw Chris Burden lying under a sheet of glass and you didn’t get it, we didn’t care, whereas today we \[had\] better care.” For Ms Grynsztejn, focusing on issues of diversity, equity and access in the museum’s programmes and staff, is vital given that the United States is soon to become a minority/majority country. “What this is all about is how to be relevant, and the way to be relevant is to think about how we can reflect our demographics and speak their language,” she said. For Museum MACAN, which has a collection that is 50 per cent non- Indonesian, this means communicating with a wider South-East Asian region and an audience that is multi-religious, multi-ethnic, young and largely female, which predicates museum practices that are designed to promote empathy. “We need to find ways to allow people to see themselves reflected in our programmes, for them to feel like they are part of the museum, to spark something off in the mind of a young person,” said its director Mr Seeto. Modern museums have to be places where people want to go if these museums are to be a success, said Mr Yantrasast, who describes himself as a “matchmaker” between art, institutions and people. “It is competing with shopping malls, cinemas, with our phones...” Questioning the rush towards relevance by contemporary museums, Mr Armstrong looked back to a time when museums were seen differently. “Part of the charm of irrelevance is that you’re not seeing the ordinary,