When I was little, I had no interest in museums. At the time, museums in Istanbul tended to look like cheerless government offices designed to exhibit and preserve archaeological artifacts, and the leftover splendors of the Ottoman era. These were boring places, little more than storerooms. During the 1990s, around the time when my books began to get published in the West, the first places I went to on my travels outside Istanbul were major museums like the Louvre, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the State Hermitage. These massive and highly symbolic institutions did, of course, convey a sense of the creative energy and the wealth of history behind them. But it was only in the smaller museums that I was able to find the fragile histories of individual human beings, to experience the pleasures of that depth of meaning that results from the connection between objects and personal dramas and to feel that metaphysical sense of time that museums must be able to convey.

There is also a political side to the matter. Turning the Louvre from a private residence of the Bourbon royalty to a national museum for the people of France was a liberating transformation, both from a cultural and from a political point of view. This transformation had a democratic aspect, not unlike the move from epic histories describing the feats of kings to novels focusing on the lives of ordinary people. But in the more than 200 years that have passed since the Louvre’s conversion into a museum, these large state museums have turned from catalysts for greater freedom and democratization to tourist destinations acting as symbols of state and national power. The massive, Louvre-like state museums that are being set up, at great expense, in non-Western cities like Beijing and Abu Dhabi, where individual rights and freedom of thought are often suppressed, do nothing to nurture the efforts of local artists and individuals. Instead, these monumental new structures seem to crush the area around them, overwhelming the nearby neighborhoods and the city itself, and acting as smokescreens for the crimes of authoritarian regimes.

The economic growth that we have witnessed in non-Western countries over the past 20 years has brought with it the formation of a middle class. In order to experience the personal stories that come from within these emerging, modern middle classes, what we need are not huge state museums, but small and innovative museums focusing on individuals. The ingenious developments we’ve seen in museums, in regard to curating and architecture over the past 20 years, can turn small museums into wonderful tools through which to investigate and express our shared humanity.