Ivory Tower or Discotheque? The Commercialization of Superstar Museums

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In reality art equates art event. Or to be more precise, if the artwork is to be 
effectively presented, it needs to be part of an art event. We are now living in 
the society of communication. Spectacle is the form. The spectacle, or the 
event is the very horizon and the bottom line of “reality”. To hold an event, the 
institution is an indispensable physical condition. It is also more importantly, 
the ideological foundation. What kind of institution should be created is now 
the crucial question. This is because the institution is the central element in the 
power system or mechanism that defines the notion and boundary of art itself 
(Hanru 2003). 
This dissertation centers on the idea that the expansion of new media, the explosion of 
interest in the cultural sector, the globalization and McDonaldization (Ritzer, 1996) that 
society is experiencing in recent decades, together with the reduction of funds for 
supporting the arts that the United States federal government introduced, have created a 
distinctive environment for strategic transformation in art museums, making them more and 
more reliant on the market to sustain themselves. 
The first chapter offers an overview of the focus of the analysis, art museums in the United 
States, providing a synopsis of the history of museums and in particular art museums in 
America to set the scene for subsequent chapters. It looks at the governance structure of the 
sector and at the objectives of museums and their core business and analyzes the 
attendance and visitor composition of art museums.  
With the second chapter there is a shift towards the more business related issues concerning 
revenue generation for art museums. The propositions and assumptions made lead to the 
next chapter, which is completely centered on the debates about commercialization of 
culture. 
Globalization and the creation of a global brand, together with the reduction of public funds 
for the support of the arts, are the direct forces that lead museums towards 
  
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commercialization. Within the art field, art museums in particular constitute an ideal 
example of the tensions inherent in the commercialization issue. Perceived as secluded 
temples of culture in the past, museums have long resisted mixing commerce and the muse. 
Criticism of commercialization started to enter the debate in the 1970s, once corporations 
began to show greater interest in sponsoring art exhibitions and flared up when art 
museums started changing their strategies in order to face up to a more and more 
competitive global market (Toepler, 2006).  
Traditionally museums were concerned with engaging visitors and demanding that they 
make an effort in understanding the exhibited art, but postmodern theories of leisure 
“suggest that contemporary leisure activities are increasingly fragmented and superficial and 
demand little commitment from the participant” (Burton & Scott, 2003). The role of 
museums in the era of the experience economy  (Pine & Gilmore, 1999) and the society of 
the spectacle (Debord, 1992) changes; people have different sources of entertainment, 
which are becoming more and more widespread and appealing, while the spare time that 
can be dedicated to them is still a scarce resource. Museums have to compete with movie 
theaters, videogames, theaters, entertainment and sports events in the hunt for a larger 
number of visitors. Having a strong and well defined global brand can attract tourists and 
increment revenues. 
The compelling experience that customers cannot get elsewhere and that they expect to find 
in a specific museum, although a relatively new development in marketing, becomes the 
new mission for museums in order to make the “brand” itself central, ensuring that visitors’ 
involvement is not diluted by the other communication tools they are exposed to  
(Masterman & Wood, 2006). 
Big superstar museums are those that have succeeded in creating a global brand and 
leveraging on it in order to compete in the market. Chapter 4 is entirely focused on superstar 
museums, their management and their characteristics. A more economic based analysis was 
therefore conducted in order to underline the differences, strengths and weaknesses of 
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superstars compared to smaller art museums. There are two separate but related forces at 
work in the redefinition of museums as global institutions and global brands. Firstly, 
museums have incorporated many of the functions of other cultural institutions, including 
being used as sites for events, education, shopping, and visual consumption. Secondly, they 
are at the same time attempting to differentiate themselves from these and other cultural 
entities, especially other museums and cultural centers, through thematic specialization. 
Both of these processes – i.e. functional de-differentiation and thematic specialization – 
represent forms of institutional hybridization (Lash 1991; Rectanus 2002). 
Chapter 5 is basically organized around examples of strategies for the commercialization of 
superstar museums: bookshops and off-site bookshop expansion, global franchises, 
blockbuster exhibitions and various strategies related to admission fees and corporate 
sponsorship. 
Thomas Krens, the former director of the Guggenheim Museum, has codified the successful 
twenty-first century museum experience as “great collections, great architecture, a great 
special exhibition, a great second exhibition, two shopping opportunities, two eating 
opportunities, a high-tech interface via the Internet, and economies of scale via a global 
network” (Dobrzynski, 2000).  
“If you start to think – and I think about the language I use to sell my institution all the time 
– it’s very easy to accept the corporate model as the appropriate model for cultural 
institution. We should be well run, but I don’t think we’re corporations” (Marincola 2001). 
Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, London, remarked that reduced public funding for 
museums created more pressure to shift exhibition programming to blockbuster shows, 
which attract larger audiences and corporate donors. Serota chose to balance such needs 
with a policy that limited the museum to one blockbuster each year at the Tate (Marincola, 
2001). At the same time, however, the Tate, like many other museums during the 1980s and 
1990s, became more proactive in generating corporate support (Wu, 2002) and expanding 
  
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the museum franchise regionally (not unlike the Guggenheim) as an instrument of regional 
economic development (Barker 1999). 
Indeed, superstar museum administrators above all have gradually accepted, as this 
dissertation shows, the market rationale as a primary indicator of success, replacing 
predominantly normative-based objectives, for example artistic, national or aesthetic, which 
were problematic in their own right (Schulze, 1992). Although rationales of administrative 
efficiency are mandated as part of institutional accountability for state-funded institutions, 
there are also larger forces at work which involve the corporatization of private and publicly 
funded cultural institutions on a global basis. 
  
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METODOLOGY 
A review of current literature and museum materials, on which the first two chapters and 
the last one are based, indicates that museums are evolving from temples of culture towards 
a more hybrid mix of commerce and the muse, seeking a number of alternative revenue 
generation methods. These range from variations on more traditional fundraising methods 
to entirely new strategies based on the creation of satellite museums, off-site bookshops 
and blockbusters able to attract crowds of visitors. 
In the absence of useful historical data, the extent of museum commercialization in the past 
is definitely hard to trace, therefore in the theoretical part I had to rely on highly aggregated 
data, reprocessed by analysts, such as Salamon (1993) – Census data – Weisbrod (1998) – 
IRS form 990 and survey data – or single case analysis of the Annual Reports of the 
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for approximately a 40-year period, conducted by 
Toepler (2006) 
However, this data necessarily presents some limitations, if we want to consider the 
strategic viewpoint and the organizational and managerial behavior of superstar museums, 
in order to highlight their difference in relation to smaller art museums in the United States. 
In order to gauge this particular aspect, after a review of the literature that shaped the 
background of the analysis, in that it provided a snapshot of the phenomenon of 
commercialization embedded in the broader context of art museum management and 
governance, data was collected from the Association of Art Museum Directors Statistical 
Survey published in 2008 and reporting data for the 2006-2007 fiscal year. The analysis is 
intended to provide a more precise picture of the status of alternative revenue generating 
strategies and museums characteristics and management strategies employed by superstar 
museums for a particular period – the fiscal year 2006-2007 
  
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The sample provided by the AAMD statistical survey – which ranges from approximately 100 
to 135 museums, depending on the specific data provided in subgroups of the survey - was 
restricted to 101 museums with the same pool of data, in order to be able to make 
comparisons between museums on the same statistical basis. It is very important to note 
that the AAMD statistical survey is not a bias free sample, in fact the error due to the non-
random selection of the museum sample in this particular case caused some members to be 
less likely to be included than others. To be more specific, the Association of Art Museum 
Directors is a membership organization representing 175 directors of major art museums in 
the United States, Canada, and Mexico; therefore the sample is not randomly taken from the 
entire 3.500 art museums across the United States, but it is representative of just a part of 
them. This extreme form of biased sampling, means that certain members of the group – 
those that do not belong to the Association of Art Museum Directors – are totally excluded 
from the sample (that is, they have zero probability of being selected). As a result, smaller 
museums are not represented at all in the sample, while superstar museums are 
overrepresented. Moreover, this is a particular case of self-selection bias, which is possible 
whenever the group of people being studied has any form of control over whether to 
participate or not. The decision to participate in part of the survey, in fact, may be correlated 
with other features that affect the study, making the participants a non-representative 
sample. Since the survey can be filled also in part, those individuals who are highly 
motivated to respond, typically in this specific case individuals who have a strong interest in 
showing their success, are overrepresented, while other sections of the survey can be more 
poorly represented because of the lack of respondents.  
This often leads to a polarization of responses, with extreme perspectives being given a 
disproportionate weight in the summary. As a result, these types of polls are regarded as 
unscientific. To avoid this problem, those museums that did not complete the survey in all its 
parts have been excluded, in order to obtain a homogeneous museum sample.  
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Of the 101 museums, eight were given the label of “superstar museums”, following in part 
the criteria highlighted by Frey (1998): admission revenues, presence of blockbuster works 
of art and exhibitions, as well as substantial market revenues; the rest of the sample were 
labeled “smaller art museums”. 
Comparison analysis and ratio calculations were conducted on strategic subgroups of data: 
admissions, strategic management, cost per visitor, museum space distribution, importance 
of temporary exhibitions vis à vis permanent collections, and revenue composition. This 
shows that superstar museums are more commercialized than smaller art museums and 
pursue a different strategy. 
The last part of the dissertation is based on a theoretical analysis of superstar museum 
strategies obtained through reviews of the literature and direct phone and e-mail interviews 
with museum managers 
 
 
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1. AN OVERVIEW OF THE MUSEUM 
SECTOR IN THE UNITED STATES 
1.1 A GOVERNANCE OVERVIEW 
 A museum is a public structure where relational and social competencies become central to 
satisfy in the best way those intrinsic and hardly definable needs of consumers (Di Betta, 
2005). 
Embracing the ICOM1 definition “a museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the 
service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, 
researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and 
its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.”  (ICOM, 2007). The 
unique contribution to the public (AAM, 2000) is the most important characteristic and 
forms a common denominator even across the most diverse museums by collecting, 
                                                      
1
 The International Council of Museums (ICOM) is an international organization of museums and museum 
professionals which is committed to the conservation, continuation and communication to society of the 
world's natural and cultural heritage, present and future, tangible and intangible. Created in 1946, ICOM is a 
non-governmental organization maintaining formal relations with and having a consultative status with 
UNESCO. As a non-profit organization, ICOM is financed primarily by membership fees and supported by 
various governmental and other bodies. Based in Paris, the ICOM Headquarters houses both the ICOM 
Secretariat and the UNESCO-ICOM Museum Information Centre. ICOM provides the policy basis for the 
operation of the .museum ("dot-museum") top-level domain. ICOM comprises international committees that 
focus on certain types of museums (e.g. art museums, military museums, transport museums, ethnographic 
museums) and national committees that represent all the member nations. The international committees meet 
annually, as does the executive committee, while there is a full general conference of ICOM every three years. 
The first meeting was held in Paris in 1948. In recent years, General Conferences have been held in Seoul in 
2004, the first meeting in Asia, and in Vienna in 2007. The next ICOM General Conference will be in Shanghai in 
2010  (ICOM, 2009). 
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preserving, and interpreting the things of this world  (AAM, 2000) with a basic attempt at 
educating and implementing cultural diffusion between different social classes2. 
Museums provide the public with opportunities for lifelong learning and are vital stewards of 
cultural heritage; consequently, as stated by the American Association  of Museums3, they 
provide value to the American population, being widely acknowledged as educational 
institutions that engage with schools, families, and communities; they connect the whole of 
society to the cultural, artistic, historical, natural, and scientific understandings that 
constitute our heritage; and they collect and conserve tangible objects—animate and 
inanimate—for the benefit of future generations  (Institute of Museum and Library Service, 
2008).  
Figure 1 offers an overview of the distribution of museums in the United States4. On the 
basis of the data collected by the Institute of Museums and Library Services in 2002 there 
are 17,774 museums across the country . 
The range in the number of institutions across each region is quite large. More than 1,700 
institutions were identified in the New England Museum Association region; the Association 
of Midwest Museums has just over 3,800 institutions. The counts for all other regions fall 
                                                      
2
 “The educational role of museums is at the core of their service to the public. Their special role in public 
education is centered on the capacity of museums to provide the public with an interactive, object-based place 
to better understand its community, our nation, our world”.  (AAM, 2000) 
3
 AAM’s mission is to enhance the value of museums to their communities through leadership, advocacy, and 
service. They are dedicated to ensuring that museums remain a vital part of the American landscape, 
connecting people with the greatest achievements of the human experience, past, present and future. AAM is 
the only organization representing the entire scope of museums and professionals and unpaid staff who work 
for and with museums, currently representing more than 15,000 individual museum professionals and 
volunteers, 3,000 institutions, and 300 corporate members  (AAM, 2009). 
4
 Because many of the museum address fields were post office boxes rather than a physical street address, the 
Urban Institute team geo-coded institutions at the ZIP code level. As a result, each point on the map identifies a 
coordinate within a ZIP code boundary, not the specific longitude and latitude coordinate of an actual street 
address. Note that 12% of the institutions could not be geocoded at the ZIP code level and are not represented 
in the national or regional maps below. 
 within this range. The range in the number of institutions at the state level is also quite large, 
with some states having close to 10 times the number of institutions found in others. For 
example, five states in regions
institutions each. Those states are California, Illinois, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. At 
the other end of the distribution, eight states and the District of Columbia have fewer than 
150 identified institutions each. 
Figure 1: U.S. Map of Museums - source: combined museum listings from IMLS, AAM and National Center for 
Charitable Statistics 
Though population centers are not directly identified on the map, it is clear from the 
clustering of institutions in the eastern 
and the West that the spatial distribution of museums is highly correlated with population 
 of two museum associations have more than 900 iden
 
part of the United States and in areas of the Midwest 
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tified 
 
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density and with certain features of the physical landscape. In the Southeast, museums 
cluster along the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. Florida displays this pattern quite 
clearly, as museums cluster around the perimeter of the entire peninsula. The Mississippi 
River provides another example, as museums cluster on both sides of the river in Arkansas, 
Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. 
There are many different types of museums in the world and art museums in America 
represent a particular subgroup, which includes approximately 3,500 museums spread 
around the country (Institute of Museum and Library Service, 2008) visited by over 68 
million adults per year. They are drastically different from all the other museum subgroups, 
first of all because the vast majority of them are privately founded, as non-profit 
corporations set up by individuals acting in small associations on a voluntary basis, often 
without having great and important collections through which to create word-of-mouth and 
strong promotional and marketing campaigns. Secondly they are dependent for their 
existence at least in part on a combination of federal, state and regional funds. These 
features strongly characterize American museums as different from the majority of art 
museums in Europe, many of which were created using strong royal or private collections 
that nowadays are fully supported and owned by the national governments. 
Moreover, unlike the majority of European countries, the US museum system, even if 
dependent, as mentioned before, at least in part on governmental funds for its existence, is 
not basically regulated by the federal government. Looking more closely at the variety of 
revenue streams that U.S. museums report in the Museum Public Finance Survey (MPFS) 
made by the Institute of Museum and Library Service in 2008, there is no consistent pattern 
of public support across the museum sector and generally as a proportion of total revenue, 
government support for U.S. museums ranged between 7% and 33% according to museum 
type. However, when government administered museums, like the museums part of the 
Smithsonian Institution, are removed from the analysis, the highest proportion of public 
support drops to 24%  (Institute of Museum and Library Service, 2008).