International Museum Day

In May 1977, delegates of the International Council of Museums gathered for their general assembly in Moscow and passed a resolution that sounded modest on paper: from now on, museums should mark a single shared day each year. The first International Museum Day followed almost at once, on 18 May 1977, and the date was no accident, for it was the anniversary of ICOM’s own founding in 1946. Nearly five decades later that small administrative decision has swollen into one of the largest cultural events on the planet; in 2023 alone, ICOM counted some 37,000 participating museums spread across 158 countries and territories, from national galleries with millions of visitors to one-room collections run by a single volunteer.

The day asks a deceptively simple question: what is a museum actually for? Each year ICOM frames the answer around a theme, recent ones have circled sustainability, decolonisation, inclusion and the future of cultural memory, and museums everywhere bend their programmes to fit it, often throwing open their doors for free and inviting communities to see what is being kept on their behalf, and why.

Where the day comes from

ICOM itself was born in the wreckage of the Second World War. Founded in 1946 as a non-governmental organisation to connect museum professionals across borders, it set out to rebuild a profession scattered and damaged by the conflict, and to agree common standards for how the world’s heritage should be cared for. International Museum Day, launched in 1977, was an extension of that mission: a way to take the conversation out of conference halls and put it in front of the public on a fixed, memorable date. Choosing 18 May, ICOM’s birthday, tied the celebration neatly to the institution’s own origins.

The reach grew steadily rather than overnight. ICOM became patron of the European Night of Museums in 2011, an after-dark event held on the Saturday nearest 18 May, and the two now reinforce each other across much of the continent. The annual theme is the day’s organising spine: it gives a museum in Seoul and a museum in São Paulo a shared subject for the same week, and lets the whole sprawling network appear, briefly, to be saying one thing at once.

A longer history of the museum

The institution being celebrated is far older than the day. The word descends from the Greek mouseion, a shrine to the Muses, and the most famous ancient example, the Mouseion of Alexandria attached to its legendary library, was a research community more than a gallery. For most of recorded history, collections of treasures and curiosities were the private hobby of the powerful: the Renaissance “cabinet of curiosities”, crammed with shells, coins, fossils and oddities, was something a prince showed off to favoured guests, not a public service.

The modern idea, that a collection might belong to everyone and stand open to ordinary citizens, is an Enlightenment invention. The British Museum opened in 1759, built on the bequest of the physician and collector Sir Hans Sloane, and admitted the public, in carefully managed numbers, from the start. The Louvre flung open the former royal collection to the people of France in 1793, a few years into the Revolution, turning a palace of kings into a possession of citizens. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries then produced an explosion of museums of art, natural history, science and industry, from the Smithsonian’s founding in 1846 to the great civic museums of the industrial cities. International Museum Day arrived once this scattered world had knitted itself into a self-aware global profession.

Why it matters

Museums do work that is hard to see and easy to take for granted. They safeguard cultural memory, conserving objects that would otherwise crumble, and they support research that ripples far beyond their walls, the natural history collections that let scientists track species decline, or the archives that let historians correct the record. They are also among the few public spaces left where learning is neither sold nor graded, where a child and a pensioner can encounter the same object on equal terms.

The harder, newer part of the job is honesty about how collections were assembled. Many of the world’s great museums hold objects taken under colonial rule, and the question of who owns the past, and who gets to tell it, has moved from the academic fringe to the centre of the profession. The dispute over the Parthenon Marbles, removed from Athens by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s and held by the British Museum since 1816, has run for two centuries and shows no sign of resolving; Germany agreed in 2022 to return the Benin Bronzes looted from the kingdom of Benin in 1897; France has begun, slowly, to repatriate objects to its former colonies in West Africa. These are not abstract debates but live negotiations, and International Museum Day exists partly to keep that reckoning in public view, prompting museums to ask aloud whether they are serving the societies around them or merely guarding spoils.

The financial reality behind the velvet ropes is rarely glamorous. Most of the world’s 100,000-odd museums are small, under-funded and run on volunteer labour, dependent on grants and goodwill rather than blockbuster ticket sales. The free or reduced admission that defines the day is, for many institutions, a genuine sacrifice of scarce income made in the belief that access matters more, and ICOM’s themes have increasingly turned towards this question of sustainability, both financial and environmental, as a precondition for the rest of the museum’s mission.

How it is celebrated

On and around 18 May, participating institutions lay on free or extended opening hours, guided tours, workshops, talks and special exhibitions built around the year’s theme. The aim is often to reach the people who do not usually come, with family activities, community projects and events designed for those who find a grand museum intimidating. The European Night of Museums turns the evening into something stranger and more festive, with galleries lit late, music in the halls and exhibits seen by torchlight or candle.

The digital side now matters almost as much as the physical. Museums use the day to release virtual tours, behind-the-scenes footage from conservation labs and collection databases, carrying the celebration to anyone with a screen. A storytelling tradition, in which museums share unexpected objects from their stores online, has become one of the day’s most reliable pleasures.

Variations around the world

Each museum tailors the day to what it holds. In Cairo, the institutions guarding pharaonic antiquities turn the focus to ancient Egypt; in Paris, London and New York the headline galleries draw enormous crowds, while in smaller towns a single heritage museum may simply tell the story of its own community. The breadth is the entire point: the day belongs as much to a volunteer-run mining museum in a former pit village as to the Louvre.

Museums also act as guardians of language and the written word, which is why the day sits comfortably alongside literary observances such as World Read Aloud Day and the broader celebration of tongues and scripts on International Mother Language Day; manuscript collections and language archives are, after all, museums of speech as much as of objects.

Symbols and traditions

There is no single emblem to the day, which suits an event meant to embrace everything from dinosaur skeletons to digital art. Its closest thing to a symbol is the open door itself, the gesture of a normally ticketed or guarded space declaring, for a day, that it belongs to whoever wishes to walk in. The recurring theme functions as a kind of annual banner, and the lit-up evening of the museum night has become the day’s most photographed image.

Fun facts

• The Louvre, the world’s most visited museum, was a fortress and then a royal palace before the Revolution turned it into a public gallery in 1793.
• The British Museum exists because of a single hoarder: Sir Hans Sloane left his collection of some 71,000 objects to the nation in 1753, on condition Parliament pay his heirs £20,000.
• ICOM maintains a “Red List” of cultural objects at risk of looting and illegal trade, a kind of most-wanted catalogue that helps police and customs officers intercept stolen heritage.
• The word “museum” once meant a place of philosophical study, not display: the Mouseion of Alexandria was closer to a modern research university than to an art gallery.

A closing reflection

A museum is, in the end, an argument about what is worth keeping, made in objects rather than words. Every display is the result of someone deciding that this should survive and that should not, and International Museum Day is really an invitation to notice that those choices were made, and are still being made, on our behalf. To walk through a gallery is to stand inside the accumulated curiosity and conscience of generations, and the day’s quiet provocation is that the doors only stay open, and only stay honest, if the public keeps walking through them.