AI sparks cultural clash in museums as curation enters new digital battlefield

The paper reveals that museums adopting AI-enabled recommendation systems, automated cataloging, and predictive audience analytics are unknowingly ceding interpretative authority to systems that are neither transparent nor neutral. In doing so, they risk embedding biases present in training datasets and reinforcing existing cultural exclusions. This has moved museums from passive participants in digital culture to key sites of conflict over epistemic sovereignty and ideological framing.

A new wave of technological transformation is altering the mission and identity of museums worldwide, as artificial intelligence reshapes curatorial practices and public engagement. Amid the accelerating digitalization of cultural institutions, a critical study argues that AI not only modernizes operations but also heightens political and ideological disputes over representation, access, and cultural authority.

The study, titled “Museums in Dispute: Artificial Intelligence, Digital Culture, and Critical Curation”, published in Arts, explores the tensions between automation and agency in museum environments. Arantes frames the museum not as a neutral container of heritage but as a dynamic battlefield where power, technology, and aesthetic discourse intersect. The paper interrogates how AI tools used in exhibition design, archiving, and audience interaction have created new layers of contention and cultural control.

How is AI disrupting the role and autonomy of museums?

AI technologies have accelerated a profound change in the museum’s institutional logic. Once grounded in physical preservation and in-person curation, museums are increasingly embedded within a wider digital ecosystem dominated by algorithmic decision-making and platform-driven visibility. This evolution has shifted curatorial practices from interpretive to predictive, from scholarly-led to data-guided.

The paper reveals that museums adopting AI-enabled recommendation systems, automated cataloging, and predictive audience analytics are unknowingly ceding interpretative authority to systems that are neither transparent nor neutral. In doing so, they risk embedding biases present in training datasets and reinforcing existing cultural exclusions. This has moved museums from passive participants in digital culture to key sites of conflict over epistemic sovereignty and ideological framing.

Rather than serving purely educational or aesthetic missions, the AI-augmented museum is increasingly expected to act as a responsive, real-time interface - more interactive than reflective, more algorithmically efficient than intellectually critical. Arantes warns that this transformation may obscure the institution’s historical function of contesting narratives and challenging hegemonic knowledge.

What political disputes are emerging from digital curation?

The study highlights that the expansion of AI into museum operations has not occurred in a vacuum. Instead, it has been shaped by geopolitical and socio-economic forces, including the rise of surveillance capitalism, Big Tech partnerships, and the platformization of public life. Museums, traditionally seen as civic spaces for public memory, are now drawn into broader conflicts over data ownership, narrative legitimacy, and identity politics.

Arantes details how AI intensifies cultural disputes by reshaping the boundaries of visibility and participation. For example, algorithms trained on Western-centric art databases tend to privilege certain styles, histories, and identities, while marginalizing others. These algorithmic curations do not reflect global cultural diversity but often reproduce colonial and patriarchal hierarchies under the guise of efficiency and personalization.

As the digital museum absorbs the logic of social media and real-time audience targeting, it risks muting curatorial dissent and aesthetic risk in favor of metrics and virality. In this new configuration, visibility is no longer determined by scholarly merit or historical importance but by algorithmic relevance and user engagement metrics. This signals a shift in cultural power from curators to code, from interpretation to computation.

What is the role of critical curation in resisting technological neutrality?

Arantes proposes the concept of “critical curation” as a necessary strategy for resisting the depoliticization of museum practices under AI regimes. Critical curation does not reject digital tools but calls for a politically conscious approach to their deployment. It emphasizes transparency, reflexivity, and active resistance to algorithmic norms that obscure social, historical, and material complexities.

The study advocates for a re-politicization of museum practices, grounded in feminist and decolonial methodologies. These frameworks prioritize marginal voices, challenge dominant narratives, and interrogate the political stakes of visibility and absence in digital representation. Arantes insists that museums must not simply adapt to the algorithmic turn but must interrogate the assumptions, values, and exclusions embedded in AI systems.

Rather than treating digitalization as inevitable progress, museums should see it as a field of struggle, one where cultural memory, aesthetic judgment, and institutional autonomy are at stake. Critical curation thus becomes a political act, reclaiming the museum’s role as a space for dissent, reflection, and democratic engagement in an age of automation and spectacle.