Museums Open at Night: A Neoliberal Critique

Since 2005, museums have increasingly opened at night, a trend that became a European event in 2018 with thirty cities participating. Marcello Faletra, in an editorial on Artribune, critiques this phenomenon as a neoliberal imposition that transforms museums into 24/7 cultural supermarkets, erasing the distinction between day and night. He argues that nocturnal museum openings serve to capture the night-time public and insomniacs, not in the surrealist or Walter Benjamin sense of creative experimentation, but as a form of biopower that aligns individual time with market demands. The museum becomes a piazza, extending the noise of nightlife and requiring a small army of employees to facilitate learning, without which artworks remain enigmas. Faletra links this to the slogan "chi dorme è un perdente" (who sleeps is a loser) and the concept of deregulation, which dismantles individual time to expand market time. He also references the formula "la scuola adotta un monumento" as inversely proportional to the privatization of monuments, which must now yield returns. The article concludes that the 24-hour museum leaves no peace, as it adapts to the non-stop rhythm of markets.