TABLE 2-1Projected Orientation ofStakeholders in Museum Exhibitions(According to Interviews and Academic Literature)
What does each stakeholder want museum exhibitions to achieve? (table) Why might government agencies place greater emphasis on public access?
Average Number of Exhibitions per Museum, Sponsored by EachType of Funder, by Year.
How many exhibitions each type of funder sponsored per year? (graph)
Individual sponsors dropped just as government sponsors skyrocketed. How does the graph demonstrate the shift from individual patronage to institutional funding?
Which type of funder became more influential over time?
Why is the data presented as an average per museum rather than as a total?
Figure 2-1. Sum of Exhibition Types over Sample Museums: All Exhibitions,Funded Exhibitions, and Unfunded Exhibitions.Source: Annual Reports, exhibition data set
How many exhibitions were held and how many received funding? (graph)
What does the number of funded exhibitions suggest about museums’ dependence on outside sponsors?
What does the graph reveal about the proportion of funded and unfunded exhibitions?
The goals of the government agencies pull in two directions, then. Theyhave public outreach goals, to bring art into the public sphere, and whatmay be termed “professional outreach” goals, to fund the scholarly andchallenging exhibitions that particularly excite the individuals who dis-tribute funds (panelists) or who make up a lobbying constituency (mu-seum personnel, art critics, artists, and the cultural elite).
What tension exists within government arts funding?
Traditional patrons are uninterested in attracting broad audiences tomuseums.
How do wealthy individual patrons differ from institutional funders?
thegoalsof the institutionalfundersarenotthesameasthoseoftraditionalmuseumsponsors.
What is the central problem created by new funding sources?
Corporations want to sponsor art thathas a wide public appeal,
What kinds of exhibitions do corporations tend to support?
Corporations favor representational art.
What kinds of exhibitions do corporations tend to support?
corporations generally fund art as apublic relations gambit.
What is the main motivation behind corporate arts funding?
the mid-60s were a time of tremendous growth of corporate artssponsorship.
What major change occurred in corporate arts sponsorship?
Themissionof theNEAistomakeartavailabletomorepeople,andtohelpculturalorganizationsbetter servethecitizens oftheUnitedStates.TheNEH’sprimary purposeistoincreasehumanisticunderstandinginAmericabysupportingeducation, publicprograms,andscholarly researchinthehumanities.
What were the main purposes of the NEA and NEH?
Individual philanthropists were the primary supporters of museumsearly in this century.
What was the main role of wealthy individual philanthropists in early museums?
widely available artenriches the nation
Why did federal arts funding become important?
American museums, instead, were founded on theideals of civic boosterism and cultural enlightenment.
How did early American museums differ from European museums?
But starting in the mid-sixties,museums became reliant on a mix of institutional funders.
What historical shift changed museum patronage in the United States?
As with all of the arts, literature was once upon a time entirely made possible through patrons. This goes at least as far back as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. They were able to write because their patrons provided them financial support. And this was of course true of all of the other arts. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, however, literature and commerce got mixed.
In some sense, there is a link between these areas of art/writing and funding and what we see in social media influencers who in some sense are trying to create an "art" for which they get paid. Sadly, most are not making art and worse, most of them are being paid even worse.