By 2045, mosaic is understood as what it has always been: one of the longest-lived, most geographically distributed, and most culturally central art forms in human history. Museums across Europe, the Americas, and Asia collect, exhibit, and teach mosaic at the scale and seriousness its history requires. Mosaic operates on functional infrastructure: public transaction histories, commission rates set against published data, and abundant scholarship. Artists, gallerists, and collectors work with confidence in primary and secondary markets established on transparent data. Five thousand years of mosaic history has been researched, argued, and made available. The art/craft hierarchy that classified mosaic as decorative for two centuries is understood now as the political construction it always was. Other institutions have used MME’s methodology to build their own markets, their own scholarly apparatus, their own infrastructure — in mediums and traditions the canon had similarly overlooked.
The museum’s success is measured by a changed field. That is the only measure that matters.
