Antwerp likes to think of itself as a city that wears its culture lightly but securely: old masters rubbing shoulders with new ideas, tradition accommodating experiment without surrendering its core.
That self-image has taken a sharp knock with the Flemish government’s decision to dismantle the city’s oldest contemporary art museum, M HKA, and fold its collection into an institution based elsewhere. What is being lost is not merely bricks, mortar or storage space, but something harder to quantify and far more difficult to replace.
Officially, the move is about efficiency. The long-planned €80 million redevelopment of M HKA has been scrapped, its collection of some 8,000 works destined for Ghent’s S.M.A.K., while Antwerp is left with a downgraded “arts centre” shorn of curatorial authority. Ministers speak of streamlining, of rationalising cultural assets across Flanders. Yet such language sits uneasily with the scale of the reaction it has provoked.
Artists have been unusually forthright. Luc Tuymans has described the plan as “simply insane”, while Anish Kapoor has questioned the logic of severing works from the institutional context in which they were conceived, collected and interpreted. Their objections go beyond professional self-interest. They point to a deeper misunderstanding of what a museum represents: not a depot of objects, but a living part of a city’s intellectual and civic life.
Antwerp’s leadership was barely consulted. Legal experts argue that the process may violate basic principles of governance, including artists’ moral rights and the legitimate expectations of the city itself. That such concerns could be brushed aside has fuelled the sense that decisions are being imposed from above, with little regard for local identity or sentiment.
This matters because Antwerp is already a city wrestling with questions of continuity and change. Residents speak increasingly of familiar landmarks and reference points slipping away — not through dramatic acts of demolition, but by steady attrition. Cultural institutions are asked to justify themselves in purely financial terms, while other forms of infrastructure advance with far less scrutiny – mosques, for example. The cumulative effect is a growing perception that what once anchored the city’s shared life is no longer afforded the same protection.
The protests in defence of M HKA, which drew thousands onto the streets last year, reflected more than loyalty to a single institution. They were an expression of unease about the direction of travel: about who decides what endures, and on what basis. A museum that once told Antwerp’s contemporary story is now deemed expendable, its role diluted, its collection dispersed. For many, that feels less like reform than retreat.
Ministers insist that savings are essential, pointing to Belgium’s strained public finances. Yet the numbers themselves raise eyebrows. The promised reduction in operating costs is modest, and may yet be swallowed by the expense of expanding storage elsewhere and hiring back works that Antwerp no longer owns outright. Even the state’s own financial watchdog has queried whether the savings are more theoretical than real.
What is striking is how little weight has been given to the intangible costs. A city’s cultural institutions help to create a sense of belonging — a shared narrative amid demographic and social change. When they are weakened or sidelined, the loss is not immediately measurable, but it is felt all the same. Culture, after all, is one of the few things capable of binding together communities that are otherwise pulled in divergent directions.
The Flemish culture minister speaks of dialogue, but only after the central decision has been taken. Consultation offered at this stage feels less like engagement than damage control. It reinforces the suspicion that culture is being managed as an administrative inconvenience rather than a public good worthy of defence.
In the end, the fate of M HKA is about more than Antwerp, and more than art. It is a test of whether European cities still believe that their cultural inheritance deserves active stewardship, or whether it can be traded away quietly in the name of efficiency. Once that logic takes hold, it rarely stops with a single museum.
Antwerp’s greatest strength has always been its ability to absorb the new without erasing the old. Undermine that balance, and the city risks becoming something thinner, more transient — a place where culture happens to pass through, rather than one where it is allowed to take root.
Main Image: By Roger Price from Antwerp, Belgium – Museum van Hedendaagse KunstUploaded by Ekabhishek, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12142970
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