In Taiwan, research into the history and governance system art museums are relatively few, although some research focuses on the subject of exhibition and education. This research aims to investigate the ‘new art museum boom’ in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It presents the process of understanding the evolution of art museums in Taiwan, as well as analyzing their changing system in governance for the last two decades.

The development of art museums in Taiwan began when the government supported public art museums for social educational purposes, and some establishments of private ones with the economic growth since 1980s. It was on its first peak in the last decade of the twentieth century as art museums seemed to promote the city branding. With the political, economic and social changes, art museums triggered new possibilities in the early twenty-first century: contracting out and outsourcing services are becoming popular, while a new system of independent administrative institution is formed. Art museums are also widely spread in different counties in Taiwan, which is also called 'the second wave of art museums'. Almost every county and their governor determines to establish its own art museum. It is clearly that this is a new wave of art museum at present in Taiwan.

The phenomenon not only exists in Taiwan, but also in Europe, USA and Japan since the end of last century. The variety and diversity of art museums is unprecedent, from public to private, national to local, traditional to modern and contemporary art museums; it also covers paintings, sculpture, art and design as well as multi-media, or even participatory mobile art museums. As a result, art museums are regarded as a symbol of urban life, progress of civilization and a platform to experience arts. This research will focus on the situation and development of art museums in Taiwan. The researchers have visited several art museums for on-site observations, along with in-depth interviews with their directors or curators, in order to collect primary data.

The researchers conclude that the trends of art museums in the twenty-first century is under the political impact. Although many art museums have faced the operational or governance issues after their grand opening. One big dilemma is that each art museum is not too much different from others. With the consideration of economic and social influence, more art museums are considering to change their governance from public governmental agencies to outsourcing or even independent administrative institutions. The researchers believe that fast growing art museums are in the trust of all people to promote their artistic literacy, through a better governance model, they might also attract more attentions and better support from the public. The new wave of art museums is hopefully to help to make Taiwan as an island of art museums and connect to the world.

Rapid progress in artificial intelligence and virtual reality technologies makes it possible to imagine new virtual and interactive worlds: metaverses. The development of these virtual universes is a priority for large digital multinationals, such as Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Sony, Tencent, Baidu, or Alibaba (Zallio & Clarkson, 2022). While researchers and professionals anticipate the impact of metaverses on social relations, business, and education, relatively few studies are devoted to the future of museums and heritage organizations in the metaverse (Resta & Dicuonzo, 2024).
Yet some of these institutions are pioneers in the adoption of technologies such as augmented reality and artificial intelligence (Gombault et al., 2018). Many innovative museums, large or small, can even be considered laboratories, testing technologies including virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things, to optimize the visitor experience, offer new services, better manage resources, and guarantee optimal artifacts preservation (Virto & López, 2019). Virtual reality is a revolutionary new way of visiting places that transcends space and time: (1) it becomes possible to visit places that are inaccessible because they are too far away, too dangerous, too fragile, or in inhospitable environments; and (2) these places can be recreated as they were in different periods (Cecotti, 2022). Immersive virtual reality raises the question of whether digital experiences lived via an avatar will substitute some tourism tours (Guttentag, 2020).
The Lascaux Cave is an example of an emblematic place which is no longer accessible to the public due to its sensitivity to variations in temperature, light, and humidity. Visits authorized between 1948 and 1963 caused irreversible damage to the site, access to which has since been reserved for scientists (Baquedano Estevez et al., 2019). The question then arises of maintaining a form of public access to this heritage treasure and of disseminating the associated knowledge (Duval & Gauchon, 2021). A fiber-cement replica of part of the cave called Lascaux 2 was inaugurated 200 meters from the original one in 1983. Then Lascaux III, a traveling replica of another part of the cave, was designed to hold international exhibitions, starting in 2012. The International Center for Cave Art, nicknamed Lascaux IV, was inaugurated in 2016, offering facsimiles of all the cave paintings, covering an area of more than 900 square meters (Passebois‐Ducros, 2019). Lascaux Cave 1/1 is the virtual twin of the Sistine Chapel of prehistory. Various digitization campaigns led to the creation of this larger-than-life replica, which makes this unique place accessible in complete safety and comfort. Since July 8, 2021, Lascaux Cave 1/1 can be visited at the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine (City of Architecture and Heritage) in Paris. For 45 minutes, groups of 6 people accompanied by a tour guide and equipped with backpacks and virtual reality headsets explore the entire 235 meters of the cave. The technologies developed by Dassault Systems research laboratory make it possible to go on an expedition into this life-size virtual cave in which visitors quickly kneel, or crawl around, even if it is not necessary, to observe the simulations of cave paintings dating back 17,000 years.
Virtual reality also allows to travel in time and see a heritage site evolve over the centuries, with construction, extensions, destruction, transformations, and renovations (Bruno et al., 2021). This allows visitors to have a dynamic and historical approach to a monument and therefore to know the initial intentions, to better understand certain choices, to explain the motivations for changes, and to immerse themselves in a specific context. This is particularly interesting for cathedrals which are buildings that are sometimes thousands of years old, having gone through wars, cultural changes, natural disasters, accidents, and the damage of time (Taçon & Baker, 2019). Thanks to virtual reality headsets, it is possible to visit the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the See of Seville (Catedral de Santa María de la Sede) in different eras: Roman, Almohad, Golden Age, and present times. This allows virtual visitors to observe not only the largest Gothic cathedral and its numerous artifacts in the smallest details, but also all its successive evolutions (Allal-Chérif, 2022).
Artificial intelligence is also widely used by heritage organizations to manage visitor flows, to reconstruct damaged works, to combat the trafficking of cultural artifacts, or to design the route of an exhibition (Griffin et al., 2023). Thanks to AI, it is possible to anticipate behaviors, analyze preferences, and adapt cultural offers according to tastes, needs, context, and specific conditions. AI allows visitors to interact with deceased artists, such as with Dali at the Salvador Dali Museum in Florida, or even with the artworks themselves, such as at the Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo using Watson technology from IBM (Kwok & Koh, 2021). A new relationship with art is created because it is possible to enter it, animate it, decompose it, deconstruct it, and have fun with it. Artificial intelligence therefore brings new scientific, educational, and recreational potential.
Our exploratory qualitative methodology is based on a multiple case study of metamuseum projects, that is to say museums in the metaverse. The four cases analyzed are: Virtual Meta Museum; the Metaseum; the Meta Museum; and the Digital Giza. We discuss the devices, missions, functionalities, visitor experiences, limits, and potential developments.
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We exploit a rich dataset on Italian museums (ISTAT, 2018: more than 4000 observations) to investigate whether corporate museums’ performance in the dimensions of a) core museum functions (research, collection management, dissemination); b) visitor-friendliness; c) adoption of digital and IT technologies is different from the performance of the rest of the museum population, and also from the performance of all other types of privately-owned museums. We take account of possible confounding effects by applying the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition approach, which identifies the share of the performance gap due to differences in observable attributes (such as size) in the two samples and the share due to different returns to otherwise equal attributes. Our analysis reveals that corporate museums are not dissimilar to other museums as to core functions and visitor-friendliness. However, they do perform better as far as digital services are concerned. This does not come from differences in observable attributes in the two samples, so we argue that corporate museums are intrinsically more innovation-prone. This probably comes from their interaction with the parent firm. Corporate museums’ higher levels of digitalisation may be seen as the effect of a knowledge spillover. To our knowledge, this is the first quantitative analysis of corporate museums.