Page 51 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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different kind of education. The modernist museum is highly educational. Like
the modernist department stores, it schools the visitor in taste and discretion, in
the values and the virtues of the ‘sophisticated’ consumer and the qualities
most associated with wealth. Minimal amounts of objects, individual lighting,
and large empty areas became more suggestive of wealth than accumulation
and clutter, now associated with Victorian poor taste and even with poverty.
The display of the permanent collection of a modern art museum connects
aesthetics with commerce, both by recalling expensive modern homes or classy
boutiques and by addressing visitors as discerning consumers. This effect is
doubled since the modern art museum has become associated with objects with
a high exchange value. By the 1950s, as New York replaced Paris as the centre of
the world art market, modern art attracted popular interest in the United States
partly because of the exorbitant amounts museums were paying for it. A num-
ber of highly publicized spectacular purchases created an interest in visiting the
museum purely to see if the new acquisitions were worth the incredible price
attached to them (Harris 1990: 91; Smith 2002). The American middle classes
had been schooled in a new kind of aesthetic appreciation, tightly wedded to
their skills as consumers, with discretion, good taste, and an eye for value.
This is not to say that the modern art museum simply addresses people as
consumers, but that the development of taste and aesthetic value in the museum
cannot be entirely separated from commodity aesthetics, which in turn cannot
simply be reduced to false or illusory pleasures. The education of taste is
clearly linked to the production of certain kinds of citizens and consumers and
to class aspiration, and this is discussed further in Chapter 4. However, this is
not the only way in which the modern art museum becomes entangled with the
market. Modern art museums and exhibitions have become a means by which
global economic status and political identities are established and maintained.
This was recognized in the social histories of art written by Serge Guilbaut, Eva
Cockcroft and David and Cecil Schapiro in the 1970s and early 80s. They
described the manoeuvres which enabled New York to ‘steal the idea of modern
art’ from Paris, and how in the 1950s the CIA with the Museum of Modern Art
(MOMA) funded exhibitions of American abstract expressionist art. These
exhibitions toured Latin America and constructed an identity for the United
States as a centre of liberty and free expression (Guilbaut 1983; Cockcroft 1985;
Schapiro and Schapiro 1985). More recently, critical attention has turned to the
relationship between the promotion of the YBAs (‘Young British Artists’) in the
1990s and London’s prominence in the financial services industry (Marshall
cited in Rectanus 2005). Major public museums, not just art museums, are now
characterized by increased corporate involvement. They use market indicators
as a means of measuring the success of exhibitions and depend on satellite
industries for the production of exhibitions (Rectanus 2002).