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World museum leadership: ICOM or AAM?

Who speaks for the museums of the world, and the world of museums? Is the International Council of Museums (ICOM) the body to articulate the museum of the future and lead the world’s museum sector? Or is the American Association of Museums (AAM) fulfilling (or at least aspiring to fulfil) this mission? Like most museum directors, I have a multifaceted leadership role that is focused both internally to the organisation and externally to the broader ‘industry’ the sector that embodies and governs the conservation, presentation and understanding of science, material culture and intangible heritage in all its manifestations. We spend a lot of time trying to influence those who influence the industry most which in Australia are our State and Federal governments. Doing so has caused me to search for two things: the international arena or forum in which strategic questions of leadership, direction and state support are discussed by people of interest to me; and the body or forum that advocates on my behalf, at a world scale, for the betterment of the museum sector. This quest led me initially to ICOM, becoming chairperson of ICOM Australia in 2010. Over the years I have also attended several AAM annual conferences. Australia has a particular perspective on the world born of geography and history. Australia sits more or less equidistant from Europe and North America, yet is geographically close to Asia and the Pacific and has a southern hemisphere perspective. Australia is a modern culture of European heritage, now multicultural, imposed on one of the oldest continuous indigenous cultures in the world. From this viewpoint, ICOM is the logical forum for discussing the issues of strategy and direction that are common to museums wherever they may be. But has ICOM, in effect, conceded discussion of the ‘big issues’ to AAM? Following the 2010 Shanghai ICOM conference, ‘Museums for Social Harmony’, I sent a short opinion piece to Australian ICOM members reflecting on the extent to which museums handle and discuss difficult social and political issues. I stated my belief that a world museum forum should openly discuss such questions and regretted that this vital role was not discussed in plenary sessions of the Shanghai conference. While this role for museums was discussed by a few of ICOM’s International Committees, I was disappointed, as were other delegates, that the conference structure and locations made it difficult to attend more than one of these parallel sessions. By comparison, AAM conferences tend to be more centralised,