This feels discouraging to me—that Americans thirst for entertainment so much more than information that even a great museum website won’t draw many visitors and even fewer patrons. But Levine doesn’t see it that way. “That feels like a big loss, and it is a big loss. But I think that it also [identifies] which institutions are important, resilient, and which institutions will leave a space for something new to come about. I don’t want to say that I’m hopeful but I think that there is the opportunity there for cultural organizations, museums, and art galleries that are able to work very differently from what we’ve seen in the past.” Even in the upcoming months, Levine thinks, museums will bounce back, and the smaller ones—provided they can come up with capital to make it through this period of lockdown—might fare even better, “because they have fewer people. So, that’s gonna mean prescribed routes in museums where you have to follow a certain path. It’s gonna mean much more ticketed times. It’s gonna probably mean very clear divisions of how the space is organized and how people can move around them. That’s going to happen at least moving forward in the next couple of years. I don’t think it is going to be permanent. I don’t think museums are going to stop.” 

If we expect just a kind of ‘show-and-tell,’ aren’t online collections enough? “Museums are the preservers of our history and our material culture and those collections have to go somewhere…” he shrugs. “Economically museums are actually relatively inexpensive compared to the economic benefits that they bring. Study after study shows the economic benefits of cultural institutions to cities and neighborhoods, and that they bring many many more dollars than they cost.” Besides, Levine says, in the wake of all this death and loss caused by coronavirus and the lockdowns, the role of museum will continue as always, “to help people cope with the world around them and to make sense of it. How I can make the world a better place?” It’s a question we all are going to want to have help answering after the year we’ve had so far.