The Divided House of the American Art Museum

Author(s): Neil Harris

Source: Daedalus , Summer, 1999, Vol. 128, No. 3, America's Museums (Summer, 1999),
pp. 33-56
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences

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Neil Harris

The Divided House of the

American Art Museum

Measured by almost any quantitative criterion, the Ameri

can art museum stands at a historic peak of institu
tional power and prominence. Rising attendance fig
ures, growing collections, building expansions, renovations,
new foundations, busy home pages, interactive display systems,
enlarged memberships, enormous endowment campaigns, splendid
gifts, and continuous press coverage all testify to a handsomely
enhanced status within American cultural, social, and eco
nomic life. "Fueled by a powerful national economy and aided
by management policies put into effect over the past decade,
museum growth appears, by some indices, to be a verifiable
'boom,'" declares a recent article in Museum News. "There's
an explosion," agrees one Philadelphia museum director, who is
quoted in the same article.1 Business leaders, politicians, and
newspaper editorials alike honor the museum as a force in the
health of local economies and as a source for social integra
tion.2 Merchandisers acknowledge the energy of museum prod
uct management and promotion, particularly the tactics associ
ated with special exhibitions.3 Scholars have become frequent
and energetic contributors to an eruption of symposia, lecture
series, texts, and catalogs sponsored by museums and heavily
subsidized by them. Foundations and corporate sponsors sys
tematically underwrite ambitious exhibition programs. And
activists praise museums as exemplars of the special American
system of cultural philanthropy, blending tax-subsidized pri
vate giving with shifting levels of public support, which serve

Neil Harris is Preston and Sterling Morton Professor of History at the University
of Chicago.
33

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34 Neil Harris
variously to support existing needs or energize new departures.
Even current controversies, exciting so much media attention,
demonstrate the newsworthy status of American museums.
Such absorption and interest are, in their expanse and inten
sity, relatively new. While the self-conscious professionalism
and broad cultural ambitions of the American museum commu
nity may be more than a century old by now, and while critics
and commentators, here and abroad, have long acknowledged
the special user-friendly style of American museums, their rise
to distinction, if not celebrity, has been a product of the last
three or four decades.4
So late an ascent has not been for want of trying. For much
of this century museum staffs have tried to secure public atten
tion for their institutions; public-relations programs, some of
them scoring spectacular successes, go back many years. But
for a variety of reasons, the social functions museums perform,
their significance in the larger life of the community, and the
interest taken in their activities are perceived to have moved up
to another level.
With gains, of course, come costs. And critiques. Criticism of
museums, once more, is not new. The size, wealth, internal
arrangements, and architecture of museums, as well as the
inherent decontextualization of museum exhibits, had attracted
hostility in the nineteenth century and certainly in the early
twentieth century. The gargantuan temples of the early twen
tieth century were labeled by some critics "dignified disasters";
their organization of exhibits resembled nothing more than a
"Minotaur's labyrinth," ran one, not atypical, complaint; mu
seum policies were condemned as socially aloof and indiffer
ent.5 Some educators fumed about museum failures to acknowl
edge contemporary needs and interests, while others condemned
large-scale collecting as the poisoned fruit of capitalism.
But such charges, however numerous, were embedded within
a broadly positive set of endorsements. The museum, in theory
at least, seemed to epitomize the best of civilization. Reflecting
high standards of scholarship or connoisseurship, selfless giv
ing, and a democratic interest in self-improvement, it appar
ently transcended political and social divisiveness. The criti
cism of the last few decades has been far more fundamental.

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 The Divided House of the American Art Museum 35
Accompanying the dizzying rise of museums in public aware
ness have been a series of challenges, some mounted by schol
ars, some by museum administrators and curators, some by
members of the public, and some by competitors. Collecting
policies, exhibition planning, governance, financing, institu
tional arrangements, hours of opening, fee charging, commer
cial exploitation, interpretive stances, even cultural legitimacy
itself have stimulated assaults. They have not necessarily been
consistent. Museums have been labeled racist, revisionist, hege
monic, elitist, politically correct, mercenary, greedy, and self
serving. Responding to their growing sets of critics, many
American museums sound a defensive note rather than basking
in their growing influence. This apparent paradox?triumphant
public achievements coexisting with sternly issued warnings?
deserves explanation. When and how did American museums
come to change? How have they not changed? And why has so
much controversy erupted over their professional mission and
practices? Links between the two trends have grown closer in
the last thirty years, the period of this survey.
Revealed in a composite snapshot of the 1950s, American
museums, art museums particularly, my special focus here,
strongly resembled their ancestors of several generations ear
lier, if not in size, number, and wealth, then at least in manage
ment style, governance, financial support, philosophy, and gen
eral reputation. Self-perpetuating boards of trustees, represent
ing major business, professional, political, and collecting inter
ests, leavened often by social pedigree, supervised programs
that were financed largely through endowment, contributions,
and, in a few places, by massive memberships or local taxes. As
in most other areas of American institutional life, the influential
figures tended to be white males of Northern European descent,
and the same thing was true of institutional staff, with some
exceptions forced by a need for specialized skills. Active educa
tional activities with professionally trained staff linked to pub
lic school systems characterized most metropolitan areas.
Museum buildings tended to be traditional in appearance, a
number of them already, in the 1950s, receiving substantial
additions to house growing collections of objects. In keeping
with democratic ideology and most charters of incorporation,

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36 Neil Harris
museums tended to emphasize the value of large attendance,
clear and comprehensive labeling, docent and lecture programs,
and other devices meant to encourage broad public visitation.
Collection development rested largely, although not entirely,
on the opportunities presented by local connoisseurs and collec
tors, along with the criteria and desiderata established by pro
fessional staff and administrators. Few institutions possessed
funds sufficient for them to shape their holdings. In art, at least,
comprehensive anthological collections were deemed the most
appropriate way of establishing distinction. Promotion and
publicity were already part of larger operations but obeyed
generally agreed upon limits of propriety. Newspapers, radio,
and the new medium of television were exploited in moderation,
but there were brochures, catalogs, postcards, handouts, and
some souvenirs available, more frequently for visiting exhibi
tions and special occasions than for permanent collections.
Generally speaking, American museums, while understood to
be slower-paced, more formal, quieter, even deader sectors of
social action than most other areas of contemporary life, were
treated respectfully by the local press. Visitors from abroad
testified to the good reputation enjoyed by American museums
for their accessibility, coherence, aggressive educational pro
grams, labeling, and cultivation of private gifts. Museum his
tory and analysis were largely matters of professional interest;
the American Association of Museums had a tradition of com
missioning special surveys, while individual museums, as part
of larger programs of self-promotion, supported authorized and
largely uncritical histories of their operation. While not espe
cially smug or complacent, given the continuing need to raise
private funds for ordinary operations, and humbled to some
extent by the competition of mass entertainment, museum staffs
up through the 1950s might be said to have operated within an
atmosphere of self-satisfaction. To be sure, contemporaneous
observers defined certain problems, among them issues of bound
ary keeping, a certain passivity in stimulating new activities,
and a general air of fatigue, which apparently got in the way
of attracting broader audiences. As suggested earlier, such
critiques had been a part of museum discourse by then for more
than half a century, voiced by trustees, administrators, and

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 The Divided House of the American Art Museum 37
curators as well as by journalists and lay people. Such qualifi
cations not only obtained some attention, they occasionally
stimulated actual reforms. Repudiation of the immediate mu
seum past as dusty, remote, lifeless, and unimaginative became
an expressive ritual for each generation of museum profession
als since the late nineteenth century. One German art historian
described the art museum in 1890 as a place "where every
separate object kills every other and all of them together the
visitor."6 Twenty years later, Mary Hartt was telling readers
of Outlook magazine that docentry had recently "transformed
the museum from a grim fastness for the safeguarding of the
treasures of art into a people's palace of delights," converting
the staff from "a body of narrow-ranged specialists . . . into a
company of eager proslyters [sic]. . . ."7 The day is passing,
Benjamin Ives Gilman of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
wrote one year later, when "the accumulations of museums will
be accepted as a measure of their success. They will be asked
what they are doing to make their accumulations tell on the
community."8 Still before World War I, a Metropolitan Mu
seum of Art lecturer declared that while nineteenth-century
museums existed "simply to provide an esoteric and aesthetic
mausoleum of pictures, open on certain days of the week to a
few people," now "the museums desire to reach the largest
number of people and do the greatest amount of good."9 Twenty
years later, during the depression, museum specialists were still
announcing the birth of new, more socially conscious institu
tions. The Art Institute of Chicago, Elizabeth Luther Cary
reported to readers of the New York Times, was "deliberately
sacrificing opportunities of acquiring art for what it considers
the more important opportunity of inspiring art and the appre
ciation of art."10 In 1935 Grant Code of the Brooklyn Museum
pointed proudly to a recent shift of attention "from the museum
object to the museum visitor."11 Reform, then, is a long-stand
ing tradition within American museums. Experiments in media
programming, in branch museums, in longer and more conve
nient opening hours, in hosting of musical and social events,
and in sponsorship of cooperative community activities formed
a corps of active responses. The much maligned Metropolitan
Museum of Art was showing portions of its collections in neigh

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38 Neil Harris
borhood venues throughout the city?mainly high schools and
libraries?to some 474,000 visitors in 1937.12
But despite the rhetoric, the exceptions, and the promises,
despite the continuing sense of new beginnings, despite occa
sional lapses into populist activity at moments of crisis, this
sense of adventurous marketing was not sustained. On the
whole, American museums, and art museums especially, up
through the early 1960s might be said to have constituted a self
enclosed world, clearly defined by hierarchies of prestige and
privilege, visited by largely traditional audiences, and promul
gating an ideal of self-restraint in their display of art, history,
science, and culture.
Have they changed? From the standpoint of governance and
maybe even of staffing, perhaps not all that much, despite the
recent boom and growth in size. But in many other ways they
have changed quite a lot. American museums today, building on
the last several decades, claim new and unprecedented levels of
support as well as increased attendance and a great number of
user-friendly programs. They are active suitors of new audi
ences, they partner with a variety of civic and cultural organi
zations, they welcome gifts and exhibitions of classes of objects
they once dismissed as irrelevant or unimportant, they tackle
themes that are socially relevant and court controversy, and
they promote and merchandise themselves with impressive
aggressiveness. They seem unashamed of their mimicry of busi
ness corporations and willing to experiment with aggressive
systems of outreach. Who or what has been responsible for
these shifts? And what difference have they made to the mu
seum as a social institution?
It is difficult to know precisely when to date the reinvention
of the American museum or where to locate its shift toward
active audience development. But signs of awareness can be
found even in the 1950s and early 1960s that the stable serenity
of the museum world could not go on forever.
One source for all this was economic. Museum budgets,
especially those of nonprofit museums, have always been highly
vulnerable to inflationary pressures and to rises in energy and
labor costs. During the Eisenhower years, inflation remained
relatively low and stock-market yields high, enabling tradi

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 The Divided House of the American Art Museum 39
tional methods of financing museum operations to stay largely
intact. Only two of the years between 1949 and 1959 saw a
negative return from stocks, and in five of those years, the real
returns averaged more than 20 percent annually. Wealthy board
members and individual patrons could still make up the differ
ence between income and outgo on an annual basis, although
calls for help might become increasingly frantic. To take one
example, the operating costs of the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston, increased over the ten-year period from 1948 to 1958
by 56 percent, but the museum's operating income moved up 68
percent. There were deficits, to be sure, and they were worri
some, but they were beginning to decline and the problem did
not seem insurmountable. In New York, Philadelphia, Chicago,
and Cleveland, where, unlike Boston, there were significant
public subsidies to museum operation, the story was not funda
mentally different: controlled growth with heavy reliance upon
endowment income and annual contributions. The New-York
Historical Society, an institution that would experience severe
financial difficulties in the 1980s and 1990s, in 1956 obtained
94 percent of its total income from a return on investments,
and, like quite a few other museums and libraries, could confi
dently think about expansion of its mission.13
By the mid 1960s and early 1970s, signs of real trouble had
emerged. Fueled in part by the Vietnam War and in part by
national economic policies, inflation had begun to erode the
power of endowments. With returns on equities reflecting a
sluggish stock market, the term "stagflation" became popular
as a way of capturing the strange if depressing conjunction of
two unhappy economic trends.
Increasing costs, however, were caused only partially by a
general inflation. They reflected, as well, the pressures put on
building maintenance and energy costs by enlarged attendance,
the need to modernize obviously outdated facilities, and the
skyrocketing prices demanded for acquisitions. The inflation of
the 1970s led many individuals to invest in arts and antiques,
among other objects, as a form of hedging. While this eventu
ally would intensify the appeal of the art museum to the general
public as a repository for fabulously valuable objects, it also
produced unprecedented constraints on institutional purchas

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40 Neil Harris
ing. Museum officials lost no opportunity to point out the
discrepancies produced; drowning in popularity became a popular
refrain.
Financial pressures spawned a number of effects. One was a
turn to government, at every level?local, state, and federal?
for increased support. The establishment of the two National
Endowments in the mid 1960s and the activities of various state
arts and humanities councils constituted not only a source of
immediate revenue but a larger promissory note. These were
followed by the creation of the Institute of Museum and Library
Services a decade later. The expansion of governmental sup
port rested on many things, but the rhetoric of cultural compe
tition, inspired by Cold War rivalries, constituted one of the
more significant factors. Throughout the Eisenhower, Kennedy,
Johnson, and Nixon administrations there existed a willingness
to tolerate subsidy of the arts and humanities in order to counter
the charges of soulless materialism being advanced by America's
adversaries. State Department art and lecture tours, White
House conferences, international fellowship programs, student
loans, visiting professorships, and ultimately the two National
Endowments and the Institute of Museum and Library Services
formed part of the response. Although they were far behind
universities in obtaining rewards from these programs, muse
ums benefited directly and indirectly from these activities, as
they did from the federal indemnification program, a device
that made the federal government the principal insurer for
great (and expensive) international exhibitions. Public funding
thus permitted museums to host unprecedented blockbuster
exhibitions, to expand education programs, to invite scholars to
participate in publications and exhibition planning, to modern
ize management and facilities, and generally to expand pro
grams of many kinds.
But museum financial pressures were affected only margin
ally by public subsidies. More fundamental was the need to
create larger constituencies of supporters and to increase rev
enues through increased attendance and the sale of goods and
services. American museums had never been totally averse to
commercial opportunism; in early years institutions as distin
guished as the Art Institute of Chicago counted on renting out

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 The Divided House of the American Art Museum 41
part of their facilities to other organizations, and indeed the Art
Institute could not have constructed its monumental Michigan
Avenue building without the cooperative support of Columbian
Exposition authorities who used it for congresses, lectures, and
seminars before the museum's formal opening. Postcards, sou
venirs, and other promotional materials had been available in
gift shops before World War II. In the 1930s organizations like
Colonial Williamsburg had begun to license manufacturers to
produce reproductions of their holdings in return for royalty
fees. And, responding to financial challenges in the 1950s, some
museums, to step up their membership levels, developed cre
ative recruitment strategies. Some even began to redesign their
annual reports, peppering them with photographs and eye
catching graphics in imitation of the corporate model.
But these commercial activities were mere dalliances com
pared to what happened in the 1960s and 1970s. As museums
coped with larger crowds and as the consumer market grew in
scale and ambition, there came a realization that the shop could
become a major source of profit. Books, catalogs, articles of
clothing, reproduced antiques, sometimes actual antiques, craft
objects, greeting cards, jewelry, clothing accessories, and nov
elties of all kinds (many, but not all, based on museum collec
tions, but not necessarily on the host museum's collection) filled
the shelves of these stores and, in time, the pages of mail-order
catalogs.14 The museum visit became part of a larger buying
experience. In fact, many museum stores were strategically
located so that visitors could patronize them without actually
entering the museum. So active would museum stores become
over the next few decades that their tax-exempt status in sat
ellite sites became the subject of special inquiries.
That museums could become shopping destinations, depen
dent upon patronage, not only in stores but in restaurants and
cafeterias as well, meant they would need to develop exhibition
strategies to support the visitor numbers these services required
for effectiveness. The string of blockbusters in the 1970s and
1980s included shows featuring the art of ancient Egypt, Vatican
collections, gold from the Caucasus, and Impressionist masters.
These became news stories and media events because of the
unprecedented crowds they attracted. Blockbusters brought in

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42 Neil Harris
new members (at least for a time) and new visitors, and some
of them soon attracted corporate sponsorship as well. In their
quest for support, museums had begun to court large corpora
tions and their foundations, which found exhibition patronage
to be a powerful instrument of beneficent publicity. Some mu
seum officials worried that blockbusters eclipsed the museum's
more ordinary functions (and permanent collections), overem
phasized the value of large numbers, consumed far too much
revenue and staff time, degraded the viewing experience with
uncomfortable and inappropriate crowding, and set institutions
on boom-or-bust cycles. But the publicity, the income, and the
sense of serving a public far larger than the museum's custom
ary constituencies proved too enticing to be resisted most of the
time. Museum facades began to resemble movie theater mar
quees, more and more of them now sporting banners that
proclaimed current temporary exhibitions. Because of their
limited durations, such exhibitions ensured, as certainly as the
aters did with their changing programs, returning patrons ea
ger to see the next show.
Once more, the phenomenon of frequently changing exhibi
tions and spectacular blockbusters was not invented in this
period. American museums had cultivated the visiting show
earlier in the century when their own collections were not
always up to sustained scrutiny. And during the 1920s and
1930s specific shows?the Museum of Modern Art's traveling
Van Gogh show, the Guelph Treasures at the Cleveland Mu
seum, the Century of Progress exhibition at Chicago's Art
Institute?had attracted enormous crowds. But these events,
exceptional in the 1920s and 1930s, and a bit more common in
the 1950s and 1960s, became routinized in the 1970s, absorbed
into the ordinary calendar of events, and treated by urban
audiences as a normal part of the cultural agenda.
By the 1990s some museum shows had achieved the complex
planning levels of major trade fairs, with tie-ins to hotels,
restaurants, railroads, and airplane systems; they yielded im
pressive benefits to local businesses and municipal tax rev
enues. They were also graphic evidence of the museum's in
volvement with the larger life of the community. It was difficult
to charge museums with standoffishness and withdrawal when

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 The Divided House of the American Art Museum 43
hundreds of thousands of visitors would make their way, in just
a few weeks, to particular cities simply because of their interest
in a museum exhibition. In some cities, museums seemed more
significant than professional sports franchises, or at least more
lucrative. The income generated by very popular shows served
to subsidize, of course, more scholarly, specialized, or recondite
exhibitions that otherwise would have been difficult to support.
Curators and museum directors, responding to critiques of their
new consumer-friendly policies, pointed this fact out on many
occasions, without always convincing doubters that the larger
policy made sense.
What could not be denied, however, were the gains of en
ergy, drama, excitement, newsworthiness, prestige, and mem
bership (not always a permanent gain) that blockbuster shows
added to their host museums. And this, in turn, strengthened the
credentials of museums as they applied to governments for
further support. In a curious and even ironic way, consumerist
orientation seconded the public-service rhetoric that had so
long been part of the museum vocabulary. And many of these
developments were simply responses to the financial stringen
cies born out of the weakened power of endowments.
But simultaneous with financial motivations for program
matic expansion and public cultivation were ideological im
peratives born from a mood of public protest and carried
forward by a broader sense of social equity. Here emphasis
was placed not simply on numbers, as it had been decades
earlier, but on demographic representation. A pervasive sense
existed that museum governance, attendance, collecting, and
exhibition policies reflected racial, gender, religious, and class
dominance. Critics argued that traditional boundaries no longer
suited an increasingly self-conscious multicultural society. Swirl
ing around museum discussions was, of course, a much larger
movement that would, in time, be translated into debates about
affirmative action, equal opportunity, hiring practices,
ghettoization, and gender and racial stereotyping, among other
things. A compound of the struggle for racial justice, the pro
tests against the Vietnam War, a revolt by youth against the
authority of parents and teachers, the new era proclaimed itself
most dramatically in the museum universe in January of 1969,

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44 Neil Harris
just thirty years ago, with the intensely polarizing exhibition
hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,
Harlem on My Mind. Decades later, the echoes of the angry
words it provoked still resonate. Like the famous Armory show
half a century earlier, Harlem on My Mind was as important
for its revelation of existing assumptions and expectations as
for its actual exhibits. A multimedia documentary history of
African-American life in Harlem, studded with extraordinary
photographs, the show and its catalog raised many questions:
about appropriate exhibition subjects, about curatorial staffing
and editing, about audience makeup, about originality and
scholarly accuracy, and, above all, about the relationship be
tween the inside and outside of the museum. These questions
would ferment for decades to come.15
Again, it was not that such issues had never been raised
before the 1960s. But what Harlem on My Mind did was dra
matize a sense of injury and exclusion felt by whole groups of
people: exclusions of caste, class, viewpoint, status, value,
ethnicity, activity, or affiliation. The museum's historic claims
to transcendent representation, its sense of standing above the
fray of contending opinions, already called into question by
reformers, professionals, and practicing artists for several gen
erations, were now subjected to angry rebuke by other con
stituencies. The specifics of the New York show, the angry
debates about distortion, responsibility, demagoguery, plagia
rism, exploitation, and pandering, are, once more, less signifi
cant than the way the exhibition proclaimed itself to be an
obvious watershed, announcing the arrival of a new era and
claiming to challenge museum practices that it declared far too
comfortable and self-congratulatory. With its photographs of
Harlem, its deliberately provocative catalog, and its new groups
of museum-goers, the show posed three different challenges to
the museum: first, dramatically to redefine its urban audience;
second, to tackle controversial contemporary social issues; and
third, to incorporate formats, objects, and artists who, until
then at least, did not appear to belong in an art museum.
These issues were dramatized by a confluence of circum
stances, some of them contingent, that pinpointed the crisis in
the country's city of art and in its greatest museum. That this

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 The Divided House of the American Art Museum 45
museum was being directed by a young, newly appointed, self
celebrating, and rhetorically ambitious prophet, prepared to
cleanse the temple and restore it to the purposes he believed it
once was meant to serve, made the moment all the more pain
ful, problematic, or triumphant, depending on one's view. Just
months before the exhibition opened, Thomas Hoving, speak
ing at a meeting of the American Association of Museums,
reported that, in response to the set of crises the nation was
experiencing, the Metropolitan had awakened in itself "a keener
conscience and social responsibility," reexamining community
relations and public services, shaking up its organization, and
reaching out to new audiences. "Instead of sitting back and
accepting the arrows of their discontent, we're trying to bring
them into the shop. . . ."16 Hoving spoke respectfully of an
earlier point in the Met's history, when trustees had apparently
welcomed involvement with the social order. Museums had to
recover that heritage. The "crusading museum is a reflection of
the political ethos of today," he declared elsewhere. "It is part
of the same thing as the attack on poverty, the urban extension
of services for all sorts of people."17
The storm of controversy surrounding Harlem on My Mind
was even more significant because its host, the Metropolitan,
was just passing the century mark, planning a heady round of
exhibitions, publications, receptions, and fund-raising efforts
designed to celebrate its past and launch an extraordinary
expansion into the surrounding groves and meadows of Central
Park. Centennials are made for introspection and reassessment;
it was the Met's fate to hold its birthday party for guests who
were uncertain whether they were attending a celebratory
banquet or a ritual of atonement.
The Met, of course, was not alone. Urban museums across
the country encountered a whole series of protests. Like many
other professional meetings, the annual convention of the Ameri
can Association of Museums was disrupted by demonstrations
aimed at challenging policies declared repressive and inequi
table. Museum trustees faced embarrassments ranging from
picket lines to the release of cockroaches. Art magazines ran
symposia on the status of museums and hosted intense debates
about the harmful impact or irrelevance of museum-going. For

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46 Neil Harris
the "vast majority of people throughout the world," wrote
Linda Nochlin in 1971, concluding an essay on museums and
radicalism, "struggling against poverty, decimated by war and
hunger or crushed by demeaning life-styles, neither art nor
culture nor the museums themselves have ever really been
alive."18 The "Museum age," declared Brian O'Doherty in 1971,
"is over."19
Despite this tone of formality, proposals for redemption
emerged. They included the expansion of art categories to
include kitsch and graffiti rooms, the creation of vest-pocket
museums, the addition of community representatives to boards
of trustees, pageant productions to make the megamuseums
more inviting and less intimidating, drastic decentralization,
downsizing, and branch facilities.20 While traditional charges
of jumboism, clutter, and irrelevance were not entirely quieted,
as this list suggests, they were overshadowed by newer attacks
on museum power-politics, public-relations efforts, and cultural
colonialism.
During the thirty years that followed, despite a string of
great triumphs, American museums have put into effect few of
the fundamental reforms proposed. Museum governance has
not changed significantly, decentralization has not become char
acteristic, branches are few in number, and staffing criteria
have not been dramatically modified. But in planning exhibi
tions, developing collections, targeting new audiences, and,
finally, confronting significant contemporary issues, museums
did begin to change. Some of these responses, again, were
linked to financial stringencies. Courting popularity, after all,
made commercial sense. Others were functions of increased
public funding. Government grants often emphasized diversity.
But the aggressive pursuit of minority visitation reflected new
knowledge and a new will.
To speak about knowledge first, it is difficult to realize the
crudity of earlier conventional wisdom about museum atten
dance. Before the 1970s few museums possessed significant
information about just who their audiences were and why they
came to visit. Most were simply not interested, or assumed that
common-sense assumptions were a sufficient basis for policy
making. There were, to be sure, periodic surveys undertaken,

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 The Divided House of the American Art Museum 47
and in the 1920s several psychologists made some pioneering
efforts to investigate gaze time and gallery memory. But in
those years the primary thrust of research into consumer pref
erences was reserved for profit-making enterprises and fac
tored into the costs of marketing such goods and services.
Moreover, during these same years, probably right through the
1950s, there was a reluctance by museum professionals to link
their institutions to others concerned with market share. The
very basis of museum identity was shaped by a sense of
exceptionalism so far as the larger political economy was con
cerned, in indifference to or even in opposition to mere popular
ity. What the growth of public subsidies did was increase the
pressure on museums to demonstrate their relationship to broader
audiences and ultimately force a series of more sophisticated
audience surveys. Incomplete, spasmodic, and uneven as they
were in the 1970s and 1980s, the surveys began to break
visitation down by age, race, income level, residence, and other
indices. Although many museums were (and indeed some re
main) slow learners about their visitors, some progress devel
oped. Specialists in audience analysis appeared, sociologists
and statisticians among them, capable of analyzing the racial,
social, and economic makeup of museum constituencies (as well
as the patrons for other nonprofit cultural organizations).
Employed by government agencies as well, these experts pin
pointed underserved sectors, although they could not necessar
ily devise strategies that would change the mix or increase the
pool. But armed with the information, and aided by foundation
support and merchandising advisers, some American museums
began to do just this, attempting to shift the profile of their
visitor populations in the interests of making it more represen
tative of the general population. Self-evaluation was becoming
a standard part of ongoing institutional activities.
And the quest for more knowledge was driven by something
beyond mere technical needs. The growth of focus interview
ing, a series of supervised, sometimes lengthy, and often expen
sively monitored encounters with museum-goers, demonstrated
this during the 1980s and 1990s. These conversational efforts,
in several cases funded by the Getty Trust, attempted to dis
cover which museum features attracted or repelled visitors,

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 48 Neil Harris
what kinds of displays they found particularly appealing or
especially unappealing, what their assumptions, expectations,
and actual gallery experiences were like, and which kinds of
promotion and publicity seemed to work better than others.
Major museums undertaking such projects could repair policies
that were not always working, but these repairs were often
expensive when sustained, and grants to support inquiries did
not invariably subsidize improvements. But the turn to focus
interviews, among a series of other techniques, demonstrated a
hunger to learn more about the museum as visitors actually
experienced it. This went beyond mere responses to financial
need or governmental and foundation mandate. It reflected an
awareness that interactions between themselves and objects
remained complex, mysterious, and profoundly significant to
twentieth-century people, and that somehow, as instruments of
pleasure, sources of personal and collective validation, and
mediators with history and science, museums helped to define
these relationships.
The absorption with self-improvement that has characterized
American museums with such special intensity these last three
decades may also have owed something to the fact that the
international museum community was simultaneously being
energized by extraordinary new levels of support. Where once
the educational, architectural, and curatorial innovations of
American museums had created a clear standard of world
performance, now all over Europe, Canada, and in parts of
Asia, boldly assertive museums, often armed with generous
public support and significant private collections as well, opened
to the public with elaborate programs of education and public
ity. Montreal, Ottawa, Rotterdam, Stuttgart, London, Paris,
Barcelona, Madrid, Helsinki, Stockholm, Turin, Tokyo, and
Bilbao were among the many cities outside the United States to
sport cultural complexes that were sometimes astonishing in
their boldness. Older institutions such as the Louvre have not
hesitated to adapt to and then move well beyond the marriage
between commodity merchandising and art display that Ameri
can museums promoted. Indeed, most American museums may
seem somewhat dowdy and conservative by comparison, their
alliances with commercial and political interests who are will

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 The Divided House of the American Art Museum 49
ing to subsidize operations and exhibitions more tentative than
in Europe and Canada. A walk around the shopping center that
girdles the entrance to the Louvre is enough to establish this
point. American architects, museum professionals, and tourists
have contributed mightily to the vigor of this overseas museum
empire, but its somewhat competitive vitality may well have
stimulated some American museums to even greater activity.
If the growing social and economic significance of museums
was trans-Atlantic in character, so too was the expanding
critique of their practices and influence. In Europe the contribu
tions of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida,
quickly translated into English, helped transform contemporary
theories of subjectivity, representation, and otherness. Critiques
of post-Enlightenment history, supplemented by contemporary
investigations into audience composition, essentially eviscer
ated a whole range of reformist institutions that had long laid
claim to progressive admiration: hospitals, reformatories, pub
lic-school systems, universities, libraries, and museums. These
institutions, and others like them, turned out not to be trophies
of benevolence but disciplinary devices in an extended class
war, with spectacle and gaze as part of the new economy.
Explaining the growth of the hospital, Foucault said that it
"became viable for private initiative from the moment that
sickness, which had come to seek a cure, was turned into a
spectacle. Helping ended up by paying, thanks to the virtues of
the clinical gaze."21 With pain itself a spectacle, looking and
showing in order to know and to teach became violence upon
sick minds and bodies that more immediately demanded com
fort rather than display. If the language of spectacle, gazing,
and display could be applied to illness and incarceration, how
much more easily could it be applied to art? And how quickly
one could turn from Jeremy Bentham's panopticon to envelop
ing, sacralizing institutions like museums. Even when museums
were differentiated from these other sites, they nonetheless
enjoyed extraordinary powers. Tony Bennett, an Australian
student of museum history, posited an "exhibitionary complex"
that contrasted with the asylum, the clinic, and the prison?the
cluster Foucault had examined. This approach concerned itself
not merely with a governable, disciplined populace, but one

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50 Neil Harris
that assented to its status. Museums "sought rhetorically to
incorporate the people within the processes of the state. If the
museum and the penitentiary thus represented the Janus face of
power, there was none the less?at least symbolically?an
economy of effort between them. . . . Where instruction and
rhetoric failed, punishment began."22
Aside from specifically privileging certain classes of objects
and dignifying their owners?longtime criticisms?during the
late twentieth century museums have been fingered as signifi
cant social narrators, codifying modernity, organizing history,
subduing nature, and ultimately disciplining their visitors. The
great national and civic museums of art were organized, argues
Donald Preziosi in one representative analysis, "so as to stage
the dramaturgies of modern nation-states." The museum itself
had become an institution "of astonishingly potent and subtle
illusion . . . one of the most powerful factories for the produc
tion of modernity." While the late-twentieth-century museum
was bringing together many varied aspects of human creativ
ity, it "remains as the very emblem of desires set into motion by
the enterprise of the Enlightenment," one of the "premier theo
retical machineries for the production of the present."23 The
museum, condemned decades earlier for its irrelevance and
distance from contemporary life, was now discovered to be a
theater for the performance of hegemonic rites, a central instru
ment for promoters of modern values and systems of discipline.
Such appraisals have swelled in number. One recent reviewer
of texts on museums and collecting refers to a "museophobic
discourse."24 Two historians wrote in 1994 that over the past
twenty years, "a broad range of critical analyses have con
verged on the museum, unmasking the structures, rituals, and
procedures by which the relations between objects, bodies of
knowledge, and processes of ideological persuasion are en
acted."25 Nothing the museum did was unconnected to its in
strumental functions: its systems of classification and display,
its site and architectural plan, its choice of special exhibitions,
its permanent collections, its educational programs, its catalogs
and stores, its bestowal of honor and prestige. Drawing on and
occasionally merging Marxism, semiotics, structuralism, and
post-structuralism, a cluster of scholarly critics produced a

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 The Divided House of the American Art Museum 51
series of treatises offering prominence to earlier commentators
like Walter Benjamin, T. W. Adorno, Georg Lukacs, Georg
Simmel, and Antonio Gramsci, among others. It is difficult to
summarize the complexity and hard to overemphasize the intel
lectual influence of these analyses, which helped stimulate a
vigorous international literature on the history and sociology of
collecting, display, classification, and museums. Museums them
selves, exemplifying the levels of co-optation that were part of
the accusations, invited some of their critics to serve as exhibi
tion curators and began to incorporate, within exhibition labels
and catalogs, questions about their functions as bringers of
authority and codifiers of order. Being sensitive to the new
museum scholarship and incorporating representatives of the
new sensibility into their staffs, directors and curators occa
sionally agreed to deconstruct the sources of their expertise and
emphasize the fallible character of interpretation.
But the new museology, with its revisionary views of museum
history and function, probably affected museums less than did
a series of dilemmas, swelling in number and complexity as the
millennium approached. Each of them merits extended analysis,
but for present purposes a short list may suffice. Some, of
course, have already been addressed, and they did not always
possess the value of consistency. On the one hand, charges of
elitism, of catering to wealthy, well-educated audiences with
attractions subsidized by public money, continued to attract the
attention of critics and newspaper editorialists, determined to
put a halt to federal funding. On the other, often coming from
the same mouths, were complaints about crass commercialism,
philistine exploitation of artistic masterpieces, vulgarity, Disney
like imitations, technological hype, and concentration upon the
bottom line. Museum directors could legitimately claim bewil
derment at being told, simultaneously, to avoid the public trough
and stand on their own two feet, but not to resemble too closely
the commercial world that, after all, had to show a profit.
Although there were some limited victories in these skirmishes?
the two National Endowments and the Institute of Museum and
Library Services continue to exist?American museums, like
other cultural institutions, failed to make much of a dent in the
larger discussion of public subsidies.

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52 Neil Harris
But ballyhoo and elitism are far from exhausting the list of
current challenges. Controversial shows?on art, history, and
science alike?have, while testifying to museum willingness to
confront social relevance, also stimulated attacks and efforts to
distinguish the museum from the school or university, as a site
not for contesting and debating truth but one that more appro
priately celebrates consensual values. While not a universal
view by any means, the notion that exhibitions are more diffi
cult to argue with than lectures or written texts is a popular
one. If museum displays are by nature more authoritarian than
the printed page, and if their visitation is more heterogeneous
and more vulnerable than the classroom, some critics see all the
more reason for them to rise above the vortex of scholarly
interpretation and stick to clearly established facts, whatever
their limitation.26
Still others challenge museums on issues of ownership and
possession. Newspaper expos?s paint respected institutions as
complicit abettors of a series of crimes: theft, smuggling, and
expropriation of property among them. Whether accused of the
purchase or acceptance of classical antiquities with dubious
provenance, the display of treasures smuggled out of Latin
America or Southeast Asia, or the presentation of art expropri
ated from its rightful owners by Nazi officials, museums are
forced to defend both their policies and their integrity and to
investigate more effectively the provenance of everything they
own or exhibit.
There are some who take a different line, attacking museums
for taking the path of least resistance in their quest for atten
tion, abjectly obeying the elaborate surveys and planning strat
egies that are designed to increase attendance, funding, and
popularity. Instead of setting standards, they assert, museums
are responding to them, dumbing down exhibits and labels,
relying upon elaborate (and expensive) orientation films, audio
tours, and interactive terminals?anything to avoid concentrat
ing upon the fundamental if difficult experience of confronting
objects on their own. The expanded educational staffs, the
elaborate school and family programs, the broad range of
social activities intended to market the museum to new audi
ences, all have aroused the scorn of purists who accuse muse

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 The Divided House of the American Art Museum 53
urns of becoming therapy centers or adopting the techniques of
Disney, Nike, and Universal Studios.27
Actually, of course, these are among the museum's competi
tors for patronage and attention, particularly among the young.
Even while museums have gained so impressively in size, num
bers, and influence during the past three decades, their growth
has been dwarfed by the explosive advance of entertainment,
destination marketing, theme parks, professional sports, and
other recreational outlets. The fact that the boundaries separat
ing museums from commerce, hospitality, and entertainment
institutions are more porous today merely reflects the pervasive
presence of these powerful forces that do indeed shape expec
tations for exhibitry.
There are grounds for wondering, then, just how significant
a cultural and social force museums have become. The rhetoric
of both their promoters and their critics suggests levels of
influence and power that they may not possess. The exagger
ated tirades of an earlier day, created by those who persistently
labeled museums morgues, mausoleums, charnel houses, and
institutions dead to the world around them, are complemented
by contemporary assignments of responsibility for sustaining
the class structure, spreading racism, and protecting the canon
ized narratives of Western civilization. Only the university
rivals the museum among contemporary institutions in its si
multaneous position of prestige and vulnerability to criticism.
But the university, unlike the museum, gives credentials to its
consumers and shapes their careers as well as their values.
What are we to make, then, of the position of museums in
modern American life? Do they shape anyone's values, validate
anyone's identity, impose any lasting sort of order? Their sig
nificance is clear for scholars, students, connoisseurs, and en
thusiasts. But for most ordinary visitors, has the American
museum shed its traditional functions of yielding pleasure, di
version, and status? Does it continue to store and highlight
broadly valued objects? How are we to measure the impact of
the museum experience, or even to talk about so diverse a
universe of institutions in any categorical way? Something has
happened, these last thirty years particularly, but just what that

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54 Neil Harris
is remains unclear. Finding that out will continue to defy our
patience, our energy, and, above all, our ingenuity.

ENDNOTES

*As quoted in Jane Lusaka and John Strand, "The Boom?And What To Do
About It," Museum News 77 (November/December 1998): 57. The article
brings together some of the statistical support for the notion of a "Golden
Age" of museums.
2See, for example, the series of articles published in a special section of the New
York Times ("Museums," New York Times, 21 April 1999) for evidence of
the art museum's transforming urban influence.
3Among a raft of recent analyses see Julie Connelly, "The Impressionists Sure
Move the Merchandise," New York Times, 21 April 1999, D2.
4This is not to argue, of course, that serious intellectual ambitions and activities
are new to the American museum. For one recent study arguing the case for
the centrality of museums in the epistemology of nineteenth- and twentieth
century America, see Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life,
1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). For admiring Eu
ropean comments on American museums see, for example, the observations
of Sir Henry Miers quoted in the New York Times, 27 May 1928, 6.
5For such critiques, some from inside the art-museum community, see Henry W.
Kent, "Museums of Art," Architectural Forum 47 (December 1927): 584;
Fiske Kimball, "Museum Values," American Magazine of Art 19 (September
1928): 480; and Forest H. Cooke, "Culture and Fatigue: Some Reflections on
Museums," Century 111 (January 1926): 291-296.
6This wras Julius Langbehm in Rembrandt als Erzieher, as quoted in Benjamin
Ives Gilman, Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method (Cambridge: Riverside
Press and Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1918).
7Mary Bronson Hartt, "Docentry: A New Profession," Outlook 94 (January
April 1910): 708.
8Benjamin Ives Gilman, "Docent Service at the Boston Art Museum," Nation 91
(1 September 1910): 197.
9These were the comments of Kenyon Cox in Stockton Axson, Kenyon Cox, G.
Stanley Hall, and Oliver S. Tonks, eds., Art Museums and Schools: Four Lec
tures Delivered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Scribner's,
1913), 70.
10Elizabeth Luther Cary, "Modern Attitudes of Our Museums," New York
Times, 17 December 1933, ix, 12.
nGrant Code, Brooklyn Museum Quarterly 22 (April 1935): 65.
12See Richard F. Bach, "Neighborhood Exhibitions of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art," Museum News 16 (1 September 1938): 7.

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 The Divided House of the American Art Museum 55
13For more on the financial history of the New-York Historical Society see Kevin
M. Guthrie, The New-York Historical Society: Lessons From One
Nonprofit's Long Struggle for Survival (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996),
particularly chap. 4.
14For an amusing and often ironic examination of the museum store and its au
thority see the essays, illustrations, and glossary in Gottfried Fliedl, Ulrich
Giersch, Martin Sturm, and Rainer Zendron, eds., Wa(h)re Kunst: Der
Museumshop als Wunderkammer. Theoretische Objete, Fakes und Souve
nirs, Werkbund-Archiv, Bd. 26 (1997).
15For retrospective observations by the curator, see Allon Schoener, ed., Harlem
On My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968 (New York:
New Press, 1995), introduction to new ed. This is a reprinting of the original
catalog published in 1968 by Random House.
16Thomas P. F. Hoving, "Branch Out!" Museum News 47 (September 1968): 19.
17Russell Lynes, "The Pilot of the Treasure House?Mr. Hoving at the Met," Art
in America 55 (July-August 1967): 24.
18Linda Nochlin, "Museums and Radicals: A History of Emergencies," Art in
America 59 (July-August 1971): 38. This issue of Art in America was a special
museum issue, bringing together critiques and jeremiads reflecting the mood
of the day.
19Brian O'Doherty, "Introduction," Art in America 59 (July-August 1971): 75.
20For some of these suggestions, and for evidence, by scholars and critics, of con
siderable indignation at what were perceived to be self-aggrandizing public
relations steps undertaken by the ambitious Metropolitan Museum of Art,
see "The Metropolitan Museum, 1870-1970-2000," Artnews 68 (January
1970): 27-45, 58-60b. The fourteen contributors included Barnett Newman,
Linda Nochlin, Harold Rosenberg, Meyer Schapiro, and Rudolf Wittkower.
21Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Percep
tion (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 85. This book was originally pub
lished in France in 1963, and in English translation in 1973.
22Tony Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex," Thinking about Exhibitions, ed.
Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (London and New
York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1996), 109.
23Donald Preziosi, "Art History, Museology, and the Staging of Modernity," in
Maurice Tuchman, Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 299-300.
24Ivan Gaskell, Art Bulletin 77 (December 1995): 675.
25Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds., Museum Culture: Histories, Dis
courses, Spectacles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 199A), ix-x.
26For an extended critique of one contemporary museum's effort to deliver and
package the facts, see Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an
Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham and Lon
don: Duke University Press, 1997).

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56 Neil Harris
2 The "biggest problem facing art museums today" is the "emerging 'consensus'
among politicians, community activities, funding sources, and engaged aca
demics that the art museum is first and foremost a social institution, an active
educational center with a mandate to encourage therapeutic social perspec
tives for learning about and appreciating the visual arts." James Cuno,
"Money, Power and the History of Art," Art Bulletin 79 (March 1997): 7.

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