Museum, Inc.

• Example: Show "The Art of the Motorcycle"

Interaction was diagonal: cooperative, born of a mutual exchange, reaching the participants where they lived and thought.
Encouraged various narratives, they work best when they're at cross purposes, exposing the contradictions in the work and in our own interpretations of the work.

• Benjamin: the "the aura", the sense of authority attached to art objects, would survive even in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction but that it would require new strategies for its enforcement or transformation, not simply new labels.

• Special exhibitions don't build audiences. The only way to make permanent supporters is to include them in the museum's own approach to the topics that attracted them to begin with.

• No museum was interested in being "just" an elitist institution in the 90s, when the argument circulated that there were no classes anymore and we were all equal.

• Visitor attendance translated into cash or covered expenses? the needs of the visitors were in any ways commensurate with the services provided by the museum? (free-market model)

• If admissions actually covered expenses what would be the point of donors, trustees and sponsors?

• It's not the cutting-edge art but what the cutting-edge art does for you!

Anybody with money can buy old masters. but investing in cutting-edge is supposed to require some particular brilliance.

• Max Weber: the public presentation of art is about the manufacture of class distinctions.

• It's better to look free-marketous than to be free-marketous.

• Speculation in architecture keeps museums going: speculation "in" and "about" architecture.

• "Museums must re-assert their authority on what beauty really is, thereby reclaiming the idea of quality in art."

• Guggenheim leading people to freedom through beauty..by Frank Gehry.

• "The function of a museum is to create a situation in which viewers do not feel they are tyrannized."

• Gehry's construction_Cutting-edge architecture: architect is more interested in illustrating principles than providing for a practical function.

• "We have a Guggenheim brand that has certain equities and properties."

• Guggenheim was delivering an audience, but it was to their own sponsors and trustees, not to a 3rd party as yet undetermined. It's stated missions was no longer making art available to and audience, its was delivering "its" audience to a new sponsor.

• At the museum social groups and individuals come united by an interest in culture, but they're also involved in a silent struggle among groups and within each individual to define what culture is.

• People don't see the same artworks from the same social position.

• Audiences have been separated into subjects and objects, more and more the audience is dragged in to see the elite, not the art; often they're dragged in to see nothing at all.

• Museums are in crisis, and they won't face up the real reasons.

• Triumph of the belief that art makes money over the certainty that money makes art.