When the Kunstkammer, the Collection of Sculpture and Decorative Arts, on the museum’s upper ground floor were closed to the public in 2002 for restoration, only the galleries’ windows were to be refurbished. The Burghauptmannschaft Österreich (the government authority that administers publicly owned properties), which is responsible for the museum’s exterior surfaces of the museum, had announced the project early on. The work was carried out, and it was decided to use the opportunity presented by the closure to undertake additional restoration measures and minor changes. In the meantime, more wide-ranging concerns arose: the historic display cases, indeed even those dating from the 1960s, no longer met modern climate-control and security standards. What had initially been envisaged as a short-term closing thus grew into a project for a "re-installation".

Planning, financing and execution of the project was to last 11 years.

Together with the introduction of a new corporate identity came the great moment, on 1 March 2013 the Kunstkammer was reopened.

"The Saliera is of course the most famous object in the collection. It is also emblematic, for the Viennese showcases are packed with numerous works of equal or similar rank. But to appreciate this one has to throw overboard most ideas about what passes as art today. When one speaks of art today, one often means paintings [...] The ancients of the Kunst- und Wunderkammer, both the princes and the artists, would turn in their graves.

Art then meant creating the greatest surprises out of the most valuable of materials, from gold, silver, gems, alabaster, marble, and ivory, out of rhinoceros horn, shark’s teeth, ostrich eggs, seashells, tortoise shell, and Seychelles nut. The great world over which kings and princes ruled was to be recreated by artists in miniature: the magnificence, variety, overabundance, and also the order and logic."

Julia Voss, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2 March 2013