revisiting the politics of art museums

Culture and Society

Revisiting the Politics of Art Museums

Daniel M. Fox

A lthough social scientists have studied art museums for a generation, most have ignored the poli-

tics of these institutions. Many academics reject politics as a tedious, routine activity in the subjects they study and the organizations that employ them. In health affairs, the arena I know best, academic intellectuals often disparage politics as impeding what they con- sider to be rational policies to make Americans healthier at less cost. Their colleagues who study museums usually deplore the politics of public subsidy.

Most intellectuals insist that problems like choos- ing which health care or arts institutions to subsidize have technical solutions, even if they are the result of conflicts about ideas and interests. Most of these so- lutionists insist that people who run for office or meet public payrolls need their help to decide what to tax and subsidize or how to regulate. They should not be disappointed when their offers of help go unappreci- ated by people who earn their living in politics.

Most scholars have strong opinions about what museums ought to do for whom and at whose expense. But most of the scholars who worry about the sociology or the political economy of museums ignore the art they display. Moreover, most scholars who care about art objects distrust museums as institutions. Social scientists, in general, remain aloof from the practical political questions of what a museum ought to collect and display for which audi- ences at whose expense, and who cares about what they do.

In the 1950s, both social scientists and foundations had political motives for studying philanthropies. In a recent essay, Peter Hall, a Yale scholar of the nonprofit sector, said that until the advent of the Cold War, philanthropy, and especially foundations, had been im- mune from congressional inquiry and thus comfortably exempt from taxation. The investigation of Alger Hiss in 1948, after he had left the State Department to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for Inter- national Peace, was, Hall says, the "beginning of a steadily broadening political and regulatory challenge to the autonomy of grant-making foundations."

Foundations, he continues, took the "initiative for creating a public record" of their activities. In 1955 the Ford Foundation awarded Merle Curti of the Uni- versity of Wisconsin the "first grants to encourage the scholarly investigation of the role of philanthropy in American life."

Curti was an extraordinarily influential historian in the 1950s. His many books include The Growth of American Thought, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He was also a successful professional politician, esteemed by peers and students. Curti was one of the youngest presidents of the American Historical Association. His reputation as a caring teacher featured the legend that he displayed a map of the United States on which pins designated the location of scholars whose dissertations he had supervised. The legend had some basis. The first time I met Merle Curti, in 1962, he volunteered that he had directed 110 doctoral dissertations. Curti

REVISITING THE POLITICS OF ART MUSEUMS I 43

also described himself to me as a democratic socialist with pacifist inclinations. He said that he was appalled by the callousness of contemporary social policy and political behavior. The history of philanthropy, in contrast, offered evidence of the most generous impulses in American life. Voluntary action could help resolve the antagonism caused by the Cold War at home and abroad. Moreover, voluntary action to assist the poor or those who lacked access to culture and education was an alternative to the limited compassion of both modern Republicanism and a Democratic Party that was dominated by conservative members of Congress from the South.

The Ford Foundation had chosen its grantee well. They had Curti precisely where he wanted to be. Curti invited me to write a monograph on philanthropy for art museums in order to emphasize the great signifi- cance of voluntary action in the shaping of American character and institutions. The existence of a unique American character was self-evident to many historians, sociologists, and political scientists in the 1950s. An allegedly unique American national character was formed by the shared immigrant experience, by the abundant natural resources, and by the political, economic, and educational institutions that encouraged opportunity. America transformed its immigrants, whatever their country of origin. As part of this transformation, the new Americans became notorious join- ers of voluntary associa t ions--churches , ethnic organizations, lodges, and social clubs flourished here as nowhere else.

Americans were also benevolent in their voluntary action. As a result of local philanthropy, schools, colleges, hospitals, museums, and artists" and scientists' organizations flourished in the United States. Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting from France in the Jacksonian Era in the 1830s, famously called attention to Ameri- cans' unique commitment to voluntary associations.

National character and voluntarism were important subjects in the works of historians who taught me- - Fred Merk, Wilbur K. Jordan, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Frank Freidel, Donald Fleming, and, especially, Os- car Handlin. In his books and lectures, Handlin ro- manticized the American experience. Men and women, he insisted, remade themselves and created new institutions to assist their efforts. Americans used their new political and economic institutions first as instruments and then as emblems of their personal transformation. For Handlin liberty provided the context in which Americans achieved their aspirations. Liberty had been more important to American history than the institutions of capitalism or even those of republican democ-

racy. Although Handlin's interpretation of American history was inspiring, he rarely mentioned or analyzed the practical details of politics.

In the late 1950s arts policy had become a special case of public social policy, in which the United States allegedly lagged behind other countries. Although foundations spent more for the visual and performing arts than the federal government did in the 1950s and early 1960s, most advocates of arts policy regarded philanthropy as an inadequate substitute for public policy. In the arts as in health care, education, and pen- sions, most intellectuals assumed that there was a well- established general pattern of policy development. New social policies began with actions by individual donors and advocacy groups. Several donors united within communities to create philanthropic organizations, and municipalities and states shared some of the financial burden with philanthropists and their organizations. The federal government made national policy.

Many years later I realized that most Americans, maybe even most academics outside the elite univer- sities, did not want an expanding welfare state in the 1950s and early 1960s. Like many other intellectuals, however, I regarded Roosevelt 's New Deal as desirable but incomplete. Sometime soon Americans would enact proper subsidies for the arts and education, national health insurance, and an expanded social security system to replace means-tested public welfare. We complained that the United States did not have these attributes of a modern state because of the selfishness of business and professional interest groups and because many people in the middle and upper classes lacked sufficiently generous regard for the less fortunate. These views set my interest in arts policy in a broad political framework. My interest and convictions were reinforced in the course of a year of research on arts policy in Europe. The titles of my earliest articles in scholarly journals made my polemical point, though at the time I was persuaded that they were objective: "Federal Writers and the National Portrait," "The New Arts Patronage in Eu- rope and the United States," "Artists in the Modern State: The 19th Century Background."

The bias that guided my scholarship on arts policy reinforced my adherence to the assumption that philanthropy preceded the welfare state, in present politics as in history. Philanthropic institutions aided people in need of money or housing or education because they were unemployed or sick or members of a stigmatized religious or racial group. But philanthropists were eventually overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the problems of modern society.

44 / SOCIETY �9 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1995

The inevitable failure of philanthropy to meet esca- lating need created constituencies and hence mandates for public policy. This had happened in Great Britain, beginning in the early nineteenth century. It occurred notoriously in the United States in the early 1930s, when philanthropy could not cope with the misery caused by the Great Depression.

The Politics of Museums The arts had a claim on philanthropy and public

policy. Artists who could not prosper in a market economy deserved to be subsidized because their work had aesthetic and educational value. Philanthropy had improved the incomes of artists and given the general public access to their work. But state subsidies were now required to ensure that artists had proper incomes and to make their work widely available.

The claims to public subsidies by advocates of the arts were, however, less convincing than those of advocates for welfare-state expansion in health care or income security or housing. Proponents of arts subsidies had difficulty justifying the use of public funds for cultural activities when many people were ill fed, ill housed, or just ill. Moreover, the marketplace hand- somely supported those artistic expressions the general public enjoyed most, popular music and the movies. Public subsidies for the arts, by contrast, pro- moted activities that were patronized and enjoyed mainly by the wealthiest and best educated. As a result, government funding to democratize the audi- ences for painting, sculpture, ballet, and classical music, even during a period of national prosperity like the 1960s, lacked the compelling moral logic of subsidies for hospitals, colleges of engineering, or the interest on mortgages.

These doubts about the purposes of arts policy in- formed my research. On the one hand, I believed that arts policy was essential in an inevitable welfare state. Culture was good for everyone. On the other hand, I suspected that advocates of arts policy often used the rhetoric of general welfare to mask special pleas on behalf of collectors, entrepreneurs, and artists. I was not sure whether my research would lead to practical conclusions about how to achieve the American vari- ant of the welfare state or how interest groups behave in a pluralist society.

Thirty years later, having repeatedly expressed my skepticism about both the welfare state and interest- group pluralism as a public official and an author, I am embarrassed by my innocence. But I am impressed by the extent to which the work ethic of scholarship made my normative conflict irrelevant. Objectivity is

a notoriously slippery issue. Among social scientists, however, there is a loose community standard of objectivity that, when it operates effectively, usually sub- ordinates ideology to information.

My study of philanthropy for art museums met that community standard. Despite polemical inclinations, I carefully documented some of the politics by which patrons and politicians accommodated each other in American cities from the 1870s to the 1950s. The state and elite interest groups made deals for which philanthropy provided money and ideological sanc- tion. This accommodation was so successful in satis- fying interests that were potentially in conflict that few contemporaries accused the deal makers of vio- lating the public interest.

There were, however, very few people in 1963 who cared very much about an argument by a graduate stu- dent that art museums were an instructive case of the accommodation of public and private interests. Over- whelmed by ambivalence about subsidy for the arts as social policy but increasingly fascinated by the relationship between ideas and politics, I transferred my attention to other issues.

Like other contributions to Curti's History of Ameri- can Philanthropy Project, mine was incorporated ret- rospectively into the field of what is now called nonprofit or voluntary action or independent sector studies. Peter Hall, Stanley Katz, and a few other scholars have written the requisite history of the study of nonprofit organizations and included me as a minor participant in it.

Because I am an ancestor in nonprofit studies and a contemporary in the study of health policy, John Simon and his colleagues at the Yale Program on Nonprofit Organizations have invited me to talk about my cur- rent work and, on these occasions, have told me about the present politics of their newly created field. From these colleagues, I learned that Lester Salomon, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, had inde- pendently arrived at the thesis of my 1963 monograph. According to Peter Hall's account of a 1986 paper by Salomon, the "failure of scholars and policy makers to acknowledge the interpenetration of government and the private non-profit sector" is a result of both the failure of research and the limitations of theory. Salomon criticizes voluntary sector theory "because of its tendency to justify the voluntary sector in terms of failures of government and the market."

I was surprised by Salomon's sense of discovery. Why was the interpenetration of government and nonprofit organizations news to anyone in the 1980s? As a participant in the health care industry, I lived with the facts

REVISITING THE POLITICS OF ART MUSEUMS / 45

of interpenetration. My news about art museums in 1962 and 1963, generalized, is a fact of life for the more then 10 percent of American workers who are employed in the health and human services industries.

I am less interested, however, in knowing why scholars who study the nonprofit sector have reached their conclusions than in how people who lead public, nonprofit, and investor-owned organizations have con- ducted politics in particular cases.

What Social Science Tells Us Turning from theory to empirical research, consid-

erable work has been done on art museums by historians, sociologists, political scientists, and economists. Historians have studied museums as institutions through which wealthy Americans communicated their tastes and values, mainly to members of the middle classes. Neff Harris of the University of Chicago did a useful comparative study between museums and other institutions. In a collection of his articles published in 1990, Harris combines enthusiasm for museums with vast knowledge of the interconnection of ideas and institutions in American culture. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's book about cultural philanthropy in Chi- cago from the 1880s to 1917 was the first examination of a major museum in its full socioeconomic context. Kathleen McCarthy's recent book Women's Culture: American Philanthropy and Art 1830-1930 expands the history of museums to include institutions founded and governed by women to promote crafts, folk art, and the work of avant-garde artists. Joel Orosz, in a book about museums before 1870, describes an "in- formal museum movement . . . gu ided . . .by the im- peratives of American culture." Daniel Sherman's study of art museums in nineteenth-century France contributes to the general museum historiography a distinction among anecdotal, schematic, and contex- tual studies.

Sociologists, especially Paul J. DiMaggio, h a v e made the history and present condition of museums an important subject for research. DiMaggio has em- phasized two themes in many publications since the late 1970s: the unique role of nonprofit organizations in mediating between culture and the marketplace, and the interplay of local and national issues in the behavior of both social elites and museum professionals. He combines research in primary data, including historical sources, with facility in organizational theory. Moving carefully from scholarship to prescription, DiMaggio has recently warned that "art museums can no longer count on steadily increasing demand for their services." His pessimism derives from data about

demography, the general economy, the state of the art market, and changes in upper-class behavior.

In a study of the New York art world between 1940 and 1985, sociologist Diana Crane argues that control over museums has shifted from social elites to government and corporations. Over four decades, she argues, New York museums sought broader constituencies and simultaneously became "less responsive to emerging art styles."

Several political scientists have assessed recent arts policy, of which museums have been leading benefi- ciaries. In 1982 and 1991 Milton C. Cummings published richly documented studies of government and the arts in the past generation. Kevin Mulcahy, expanding the thesis of a polemical 1984 book by Edward Ban field, concluded that American arts policy has been characterized by "an inability to detrme a public cultural interest." Even for these scholars politics was an impediment to the making of good policy.

Economists who study museums have a choice of two theoretical stances, both of which separate policy from politics. Those who assess museums in terms of the theory of the firm criticize the alleged misuse of public funds for the benefit of a small segment of the population. The museum-as-firm engages in self-serv- ing accounting practices that ignore the value of its capital in land and buildings (which are usually provided by government) and in art objects (which are donated by philanthropists). Most economists, however, justify public and philanthropic subsidies because they explain museums through theories of public utili- ties (natural monopolies) or merit goods (goods that people should have more of than they will purchase in the market).

Economists who decide that museums operate outside the market describe how they could reduce the losses that result from their public mission. These losses are caused by what they call market failure, that is, public policy and consumer opinion that limit the freedom of museum directors to buy and sell art objects under the most favorable conditions. Notable contributors to the economic literature on museums have included Tibor Scitovsky, Dick Netzer, Bruno S. Frey, and Werner W. Pommerehne, as well as, recently, a group of prominent economists assembled by Mar- tin Feldstein on behalf of the National Bureau of Eco- nomic Research.

Most scholarship on museums has separated the institutions and their collections. Art was one subject; how museums operated and what they aspired to, an- other. This assumption persisted even in studies that, like mine, described the benefits that museum leaders

46 / SOCIETY �9 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1995

wanted members of the public to obtain from viewing particular kinds of objects. Until recently, art historians have been comfortable with this separation. A vast literature in that discipline analyzes particular art objects without much information about where and how they were displayed or stored and with scant attention to the intended audience. Social scientists have been deferential to artists and art historians, just as most of their colleagues who studied science once assumed that their proper subject was its social setting rather than how knowledge is produced.

Museum Professionals Museum professionals have usually reinforced the

separation of art and the politics of institutions. They have found it useful to define themselves as coordina- tors of the interconnected worlds of artists, dealers, collectors, government and foundation officials, and visitors. The official definition of museums describes this separation as self-evident. According to a handbook published by the Association of Art Museum Directors, a museum is a "permanent nonprofit institution, essentially educational or aesthetic in purpose, with professional staff." This definition dichotomizes education, the search for attention from the public, and aesthetics, how people react to an object. Professional staff manage this dichotomy. The directors' handbook then lists the activities of this nonprofit institution, which "acquires objects, cares for them, interprets them and exhibits them to the public on some regular sched- ule." Each activity requires special expertise and co- ordination. The museum trade press and the writings of leading directors reinforce the assumption that art and politics are and ought to be separable. A notable example is a 1989 monograph by John Coolidge, former director of Harvard's Fogg Museum, on the relationship between patrons and architects in design- ing art museums. Coolidge begins by celebrating elites but concludes by recommending that public libraries should serve as models for art museums. Like most good professionals, Coolidge adroitly comes down on most sides of every controversial issue.

Thomas Hoving, by contrast, rejected the dichotomy between art and the institutional museum in his 1993 account of his service as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hoving disdained what had long been orthodox distinctions between art and its purchase, sale, and display, and political events within and outside museums. As many of his critics insisted, Hoving did not invent the blockbuster exhibition, dramatic bid- ding by museums at public auctions, or de-accessioning works of art. But he violated professional norms by

explicitly claiming every aspect of museum activity as a proper subject for his expertise.

Like museum directors, hospital executives insisted for decades that medical staff, trustees, and adminis- tration had separate functions. According to orthodoxy, the job of the director, in a hospital as in a museum, was to mediate among these constituencies. I know from personal experience as well as from social science that every day in every hospital people violate the norms of the tripartite separation of responsibility. These norms once helped to prevent conflict. But their usefulness has declined as changes in the way hospitals are financed rearrange the stakes and the account- ability of physicians, managers, and board members.

Similar changes seem to be occurring in museums. Hoving's mistake may have been premature professional innovation. During the 1970s and early 1980s, for example, hospital directors could lose their jobs if they tried to make physicians more sensitive to costs and trustees more interested in market share. Such behavior is now rewarded.

In health affairs, social scientists wrote about the linkage of money, politics, science, and technology before medical and hospital professionals were comfortable discussing it in public. A similar state of academics' freedom from the constraints of industry seems to exist in the study of museums. DiMaggio, Harris, and Crane, for example, have been more ex- plicit than most museum professionals in describing the effect on museums of changes in their external environment.

A few scholars insist that the study of museums be entirely reconceived. They describe museums as sources of data to study more important issues. In the metaphor of statistics, museums are not dependent variables. Scholars should not ask, for example, how museums are influenced by ideas about the arts or education or gender, the interests of social elites, or changes in demography. Like the social scientists who have insisted that illness and responses to it are so- cially constructed, these revisionist scholars criticize their predecessors for assuming what has to be proved.

Two recent books make these points. In his Intro- duction to the collection of essays The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Ivan Karp claims that social constructionism explains every subject bear- ing on art and its display. Svetlana Alpers then describes how museums themselves create objects of art. Carol Duncan makes museums political institutions: "To control a museum means precisely to control the representation of a community." Before the emergence of "cultural studies," Duncan had equated

control over a museum with ownership of the means of production. Philip Fisher, in his book Making and Effacing Art, treats museums as "technology," part of the process--but not the polit ics--by which art is made. Museums, Fisher writes, became "storage ar- eas for authenticity." As a result, artists now create so that their "work will f'md itself eventually within a museum as part of what the future will . . . take to be the past."

This recent scholarship on museums considers ob- solete most of the work that I have described. These revisionists accuse social scientists who have analyzed museums as educational, business, or scholarly institutions of taking art objects for granted, much as most social scientists who studied medical science once wrongly assumed that there is a universally applicable patho-physiological classification of diseases.

Scholars of art museums as institutions in Ameri- can society should ponder this attack. In health affairs, the insights of people who are influenced by cultural studies (or its principal method, social construction) have potential practical importance as well as enor- mous intellectual interest. These insights are, for ex-

REVISITING THE POLITICS OF ART MUSEUMS / 47

ample, influencing the management of chronic dis- abling illness. Adherents of cultural studies may discover that research on museums by social scientists in the past is more pertinent to their work than they be- lieve. In the study of the arts as in health affairs, the only available primary data about what people saw and thought are often what they said about matters of politics and money.

My second tour of scholarship about art museums, then, revealed that, like the institutions themselves, it had grown more than it had changed. Policy and politics remained almost as separate in the minds of scholars in 1995 as they had been thirty years earlier. Perhaps I had merely become more familiar with the mix of ideology and interests, enthusiasm and cynicism, ear- nestness and earthiness that characterizes every sector of our political life.

Daniel M. Fox is president of the Milbank Memorial Fund in New York City. He is author of Power and Illness: The Failure and Future of American Health Policy and Engines of Culture: Philanthropy and Art Museums (from which this article is adapted), published by Transaction.

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revisiting the politics of art museums

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