Paul Werner’s 2005 Prickly Paradigm pamphlet Museum, Inc: Inside the Global Art World was a provocation, like most of our pamphlets. Werner is an art critic and socialist activist; expelled from France in 1967 as a union organizer, he spent nine years lecturing at the Guggenheim while its “Senior Adviser” Tom Krens turned the museum into a global franchise with spectacular architecture (Bilbao by Gehry) and blockbuster shows (“The Art of the Motorcycle”)
Krens, according to Werner, was not just a (likable) “bad actor”: the Met and the MoMa were doing the same thing, hiking the symbolic value of their holdings, delivering audiences to donors, enforcing class distinctions through the language of aesthetic education. What Krens called “democratization” (motorcycles! Armani! Bilbao!) was an attempt to elevate commodities as culture, rather than simply to commodify culture.
Werner was blunt: the American art museum was a corporate tool and a money laundering operation, using the assets of its trustees and sponsors, encoded as “symbolic capital,” to sell an illusion: what is good for the wealthy collector is good for humanity. The museum, Werner argued, doesn’t seek to educate the public so much as display a knowledge of things it cannot know — creating the experience of “pure reverie.” The corporate museum, he suggested, was a racket: hiking prices, blocking supply, and manipulating the market through the pretense of “cultural stewardship.”
What gives the pamphlet its staying power is Werner’s sense of deep history. Today’s museums are cultural institutions rooted in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the colonial expansion of the liberal nation-state, and the rhetoric of democracy. The modern art museum was born in the French Revolution, when artworks stripped from palaces and monasteries were repackaged as universal patrimony — belonging to no one, therefore available to whoever controlled the institution housing them. The state became the arbiter of art’s contradictions precisely because it was the arbiter of all the other contradictions of modern society. The genius of the system was to claim that art’s “real” value transcended both its origins in power and its function as property. Werner, following Bourdieu, calls this “an interest in disinterestedness” — the foundational con on which two centuries of museum authority have rested.
In some ways, Werner’s pamphlet is dated: there have been lots of development in the museum world over the last twenty years that he didn’t anticipate. Repatriation debates, for example, weren’t even on the table in 2005. Today, the Smithsonian’s repatriation of the Benin bronzes to Nigeria, or the Manhattan DA’s seizure of looted antiquities from the Met, reveal how the museum was not just an institution of capitalism, but of colonialism as well. Nor did Werner anticipate tte political weaponization of public fundings, including the Trump administration’s elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services -- reversed two weeks ago in federal court – and the sole funding of projects that “reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage” as defined by Trump himself. In his pamphlet, Werner argued that the state was the final arbiter of the art museum’s contradictions – a claim realized today, although hardly in the way he imagined.
More telling is Werner’s critique of the museum’s failure to convert enthusiasts into repeat visitors. The Guggenheim gamble — spectacular architecture plus blockbuster shows equals permanent audiences — demonstrably failed, just as Werner predicted. The bikers who came for The Art of the Motorcycle (1998) never came back for Kandinsky. As soon as they reduce the number of extravaganzas, noted Kate Brown in a 2020 article in ArtNet, blockbuster-dependent museums lose attendance, often dropping to before the first such show, and each successive blockbuster requires more investment to produce the same spike. A “blockbuster addiction” has left many institutions too dependent on ticket sales from temporary shows — a vulnerability the pandemic exposed catastrophically.More than five years on, half of US museum have not returned to pre-pandemic attendance levels, according to the American Alliance of Museums.
Museum, Inc. remains essential reading for critics and consumers of the art museum. The blockbuster “arms race,” the attendance crisis, the defunding of cultural agencies — these aren’t simply policy failures, but the logical outcome of a system designed to enforce class distinctions while appearing to dissolve them. Whether or not you accept the class analysis, there’s no doubt that the corporatization of the museum is here to stay.
