建筑学外文翻译博物馆新镀金时代收集器展览在纽约艺术博物馆.docx

1、建筑学外文翻译博物馆新镀金时代收集器展览在纽约艺术博物馆Museums in the New Gilded Age: Collector exhibits in New York art museums, 19452010 Department of Sociology, University at Albany, State University of New York, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12222, USAAvailable online 2 March 2014Choose an option to locate/access thi

2、s article: Show more Show less http:/dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2014.01.004Get rights and contentHighlightsWe traced special museum exhibits from 1945 to 2010.The fraction of exhibits devoted to patron collections declined in the 19601970s.Despite cuts in government funding, collector exhibits did

3、not increase after 1980.Professionalized museum curators retained their autonomy.AbstractHow have museums in the United States been affected by the concentration of wealth and the decline in Federal support for the arts in recent decades? We address that question by tracking special exhibits at the

4、Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim and Whitney Museums in New York from 1945 to 2010. We find that the fraction of special exhibits devoted to and organized around patron collections declined in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the subsequent decline in government f

5、unding and growing concentration of wealth, patron exhibits did not increase in recent decades. The autonomy that professionalized museum curators achieved in the 1960s and 1970s to determine the themes and content of exhibitions has been sustained, even as organizational norms were transformed in m

6、ost other realms.Keywords Museums; Wealth; Exhibitions; Professionalization; Government1. IntroductionHow have museums in the United States been affected by the concentration of wealth and the decline in Federal support for the arts in recent decades? American art museums were founded in the Gilded

7、Age, a period from the 1870s to the end of the nineteenth century, which was marked by high levels of wealth concentration and during which wealthy benefactors and collectors exerted a high degree of control over museums. That era was followed by a long mid-twentieth century interlude of greater equ

8、ality and a growing role by government in financing and influencing museums (see Section 2). We ask if the beneficiaries of the recent growth of inequality are reasserting control over what museums exhibit in the current era of great wealth, which has been dubbed the “New Gilded Age.”We begin by rev

9、iewing the literature on the initial organization of U.S. art museums in the nineteenth century and then trace the effects of twentieth century governmental funding on the organization and curatorial decisions of those museums. We next identify the bases of curatorial professionalism and autonomy. W

10、e then present a dataset on special exhibits at the four most prominent New York City art museums and use it to test hypotheses on the changing influence of rich collectors from the end of World War II to the present. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for U.S. museums as a w

11、hole and suggest avenues for future research.2. U.S. art museums: from elite control to professional autonomyThe influence of wealthy benefactors and collectors in the original Gilded Age has been documented by DiMaggio, 1982a and DiMaggio, 1982b; see also Temin, 1991), who shows that those initial

12、generations of donors were not hesitant to make clear to museum administrators their preferences for the styles of art they wanted in museum collections and exhibitsincluding their expectations that museums show works owned or donated by benefactors and that museums should take measures to limit the

13、ir visitors to an educated, middle-class, Protestant audience. These elites sought to exclude “new waves of Irish and German immigrantsby replacing the relatively undemanding leisure activities of the first part of the nineteenth centurywith a more demanding, austere, and uplifting kind of art. They

14、founded or transformed existing museums and orchestras by excluding crowd pleasing music and visual art” (Zolberg, 1990, p. 140). Thus, reproductions of famous paintings and sculptures were banished from U.S. art museums as benefactors and museum curators devoted their energies to procuring, through

15、 donations and purchases, original works of art (Levine, 1988). Museums measured themselves largely by the quality of the art in their collections rather than by the number of visitors (Zolberg, 1981).Rich benefactors control over art museums began to be undermined in the 1920s, as some municipal go

16、vernments (most notably New York City and Detroit) began to provide funding to museums for “building, maintenance, and educational budgets, while trustees financed the collections, salaries, and scholarship” (DiMaggio, 1991a, p. 273). The Great Depression, by cutting into the fortunes of many wealthy Americans, reduced their ability to fund the museums they or their ancestors had founded, forcing them to sh