Last year almost half of the world held up a finger in the breeze, hoped for the best and voted in elections to decide its future. Over the next 12 months a dizzying array of new museums will open with an eye on the very nature of truth, viewed through the prisms of immigration, repatriation, artificial intelligence and more – topics not unrelated to the choices made in 2024. Perhaps you’re thinking, “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we had been given a little more time to learn about these things before choosing our fate?”

Museums have been enjoying a golden age in building, refurbishment and attendance since the turn of the millennium and the transformation of knowledge from something that’s largely stored in books and artefacts into information that’s principally stored digitally and available everywhere, all at once. While convenient, however, screen learning and screen knowledge are also incomplete and two-dimensional. The growing power of bricks-and-mortar, glass-and-steel museums – and an increasing desire to convene with the physical – has accompanied the rise of the virtual and is its temporary rejection. When you visit an exhibition, your phone stays in your back pocket unless you want to snap some shots of the works on display. You might have heard about a show online but you queued to see it in person. The point is that you had to see it in the flesh. You encountered the real thing. Doesn’t that feel good?

I sensed this victory of the physical over the virtual during the Christmas holidays while visiting Antwerp for some misty meandering over the medieval cobbles of the Old Town and out to Zurenborg’s art nouveau marvels. I found two museums with very different offerings open during this period of seasonal closures: the MoMu fashion museum was showing Masquerade, Make-Up & Ensor alongside a fascinating slice of its princely permanent collection, while the Museum Mayer van den Bergh did its stolid thing with artefacts and masterpieces from the collection of 19th-century art historian Fritz Mayer van den Bergh.

At the latter museum, the great collector’s treasures of gothic and northern Renaissance art, as well as a haul of altarpieces and Christian statuary, artefacts and sundry odds and ends, are displayed “salon-style” – in other words, all over the place. It’s a charming cacophony of winsome annunciations, sorrowful crucifixions, very non-Lutheran ecclesiastical glitz, greengrocer-fresh still-lifes, stern and playful portraits, and both the impish and utterly unhinged sides of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Bruegel’s “Twelve Proverbs on Wooden Plates” is a wry, annotated take on peasant logic. It features gems such as, “I am rebellious and sullen so I run with my head against the wall,” accompanied by a picture of said rebellious character crunching his noggin into a solid-looking edifice, and, “No matter what I attempt, I never succeed; I always piss against the moon” (image: crestfallen bloke indeed urinating towards an unattainable lunar body). The artist’s infamous “Mad Meg” gets a room to itself and, if it were in a lesser institution, would probably come with a trigger warning: “Contains images of a disturbing nature, including bowler-hatted spider people, the horrors of war and men with spoons up their bums.” But this isn’t a lesser institution and so the museum’s homepage features instead a photo of two wholesome Belgian mothers pointing out scenes of carnage to their little ones.

Joking aside, the whole place is a mad joy and home to small wonders, such as the clerk who takes your €10 while softly swearing at his computer (“Told you this was better than the internet,” he might be saying) or the little “Highlights” book that you get to keep as a souvenir. From the art to the rooms heavy with old brown wood and the dust on the chandeliers, it’s the real deal and gloriously subjective. It’s one collector’s love of art and artefacts laid out for your viewing pleasure. If you like it, great; if you don’t, there’s a Zara Home an eight-minute walk away.

The joy of being there was also in evidence around the corner at the MoMu. Dark wood, light walls, a playful way with lines of sight and a great wash of natural light from a partially glass roof make the museum a beguiling place to pass through, and its stylishly appointed café is a wonderful lunch spot. But there’s a whiff of municipal neutrality to the permanent, public parts of this institution that you hope will be alleviated by the temporary shows and their designers, who are so fond of making whole new worlds in which to fit their exhibitions’ ideas.

So it was with Masquerade, Make-Up & Ensor, a stunner of a thing that was full of ideas, excellent materials, clever staging and subtle lighting. Its supremely confident curation successfully combined its potentially awkward ingredients – explorations of the look and meaning of theatrical masks, interrogations of beauty in art and the desire to change our faces with make-up, a glance at the beauty industry in marketing and the media. All while putting these on the aesthetic and psychological terrain of the funny, sad, grotesque and beautiful paintings of Belgian surrealist, expressionist and not-quite exhibitionist James Ensor.

I’m mindful that that’s a mouthful but there was a lot going on. In certain respects, it was a very adult show that was also studded with runway and fashion footage, photography, make-up and lookbook captures from the 1980s and 1990s. Most of the other visitors on the day that I attended were teenage girls accompanied by women who I presumed were their grandmothers. I was interested by just how few smartphone photos I saw being taken of the exhibits or the wall texts but there was a lot of excited and whispered Flemish chatter on which my English ears could not successfully eavesdrop.

The show was fascinating but so too was witnessing other people’s fascination up close and in person. I sensed that the ideas around female beauty that it probed would soon profoundly affect many of my fellow visitors. I can’t imagine how anything of the sort could be staged except in the bewitchingly physical style with which this show was executed. So, yes, you had to be there.

Last autumn I was fortunate enough to receive a preview of two new museums in nearby Rotterdam. The Nederlands Fotomuseum is moving to a new site in what was once the gargantuan Santos coffee warehouse in the unlovely but up-and-coming dockside Katendrecht district. Its archive is one of the world’s largest repositories of photography, with more than six million items. The museum will show many of these and have a restoration department as part of its permanent collection, as it were – an observable, perhaps even visitable part of the building. In an era when image manipulation can be highly political and is obviously dangerous, a museum department dedicated to sprucing up photographs for the better, performing its task transparently, is a clever and somehow very Dutch idea. Despite these iconoclastic leanings, the museum is highly likely to become an icon in its own right.

A stroll down the old dockside took me to what will be Fenix when it opens this May – a museum about migration that is being built in what was once the world’s largest warehouse and up to its Iain Sinclairs in psycho­geographic relevance. It sits next to one of Europe’s first Chinatowns, now a highly multiracial neighbourhood, and is over the harbour from the former headquarters of the Holland America Line, on which so many Dutch emigrants steamed westward to secure succour. It’s a proper in-and-out club.

Immigration is something that appears to be changing Western European politics decisively and so this museum, led by its thoughtful and probably necessarily forthright director, Anne Kremers, will be a topic of much debate. It’s an essential visit for anyone with even a passing interest in the stories behind the myths and the headlines, then and now. Immigration is a topic whose relevance is burning enough to fill this museum’s cavernous spaces and the works announced so far seem as witty, smart and suggestive as the realities of some of the stories that will doubtless be housed in this great hangar of compassion are harsh.

I would argue again that this sort of thing can only be done in a physical place. As with photographic manipulation or telling subtle stories about the nature of beauty, or “simply” showing off a collector’s passions, the viewer’s proximity to the stuff is vital. The online world is full of fevered fictions that are never less than certain on either side of an argument. Subtlety, depth, discussion? You’ll get them here, in a place, not there in the virtual realm.

Of course, you’ll also sometimes get utterly stupid wall texts, wrong-headed curatorial notes and obfuscatory art speak in museums but you can see the painting that they’re discussing in its big, gold frame and decide for yourself whether, for example, it’s about rich people liking horses in 18th-century England or it’s secretly about how awful it is that some people had horses and other people only had donkeys, if they possessed a beast with a leg in each corner at all. Because though you might not be an expert and may be persuaded by a crazy claim, you can see the painting in its three dimensions. And you might also go home and read more about it in a book and come to something adjacent to the truth.

Museums are transformative. From children making learning a lifetime habit after quaking in awe at the cathedral-long blue whale in London’s soon-to-be-revamped Natural History Museum to the many canny culture and tourism boards reviving their regions with the addition of a bright, new cultural centre, museums can change both people and places. When the Guggenheim Foundation unveiled its Bilbao institution in 1997, millions of visitors and millions of euros were drawn to a tired and unloved city in Spain by a building considered excitingly avant garde. This set in motion the museum mania that is perhaps only now beginning to reach the end of its super-cycle. You had to see Frank Gehry’s curved, crinkled titanium-and-steel masterpiece to believe it – and so people did, in droves.

In the grand projet that is Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Cultural District, the Guggenheim is preparing to open a new museum of a similar design by the same architect. The Emirate is right to expect lightning to strike twice and the project’s ambition is big, bold and brave. It sits on an island nestled close to other cultural hot spots, including a Louvre designed by Jean Nouvel and the soon-to-open Zayed National Museum, named after the nation’s founder, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, and designed by Norman Foster.

On another island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, the Naoshima New Museum of Art will open this spring, showcasing the work of contemporary Asian artists in a building designed by the chalk to Gehry’s cheese, Tadao Ando. These institutions and a long list of others, whether ancient or modern, are all about place, experience and context. You will be in the realm of the senses, reaching out and touching the world – the real one.

There’s a lovely museum and concert hall on the Sussex coast called the De La Warr Pavilion. It’s a well-kept 1930s modernist building, which is rare in England. I once went to an exhibition there and met the curator, who was perhaps near the beginning of her career. She skipped down the beautiful staircase and told me why she had wanted to work there. It’s a good place, of course, but really, she said, it was because of the staircase, designed some 85 years previously – its precise incline and flow, the quality of pleasure afforded by the gap between riser and tread. The joy that it gave her made her certain that this was the right place to be. It was the absolute satisfaction of the building’s physicality. Of course!

So, the right place to be is in front of just one work, looking and seeing; seeing how others look; wondering how you might seem. There are other worlds in museums and you might just find yourself in them too. Museums are community, communication, communion. And, yes, they might help us to make better decisions and know more – and lift us out of ignorance. You won’t find that somewhere that’s nowhere, will you? — L