COMMERCIALIZING ART MUSEUMS.

COMMERCIALIZING ART MUSEUMS. When my brother Elmer was in law school, he met a girl at a party who was studying to be a museum curator. He wound up in an argument with her because it turned out that he favored bringing as many people to a museum as you could, while she believed that art should be reserved for people who cared about it and understood it. Elmer said that when he started to talk about how Bill Veeck got people to go to baseball games by having fireworks, he had given up on reaching any agreement with her. The controversy over the role of curators and the public is still alive. The article on the Detroit market researchers quotes an official with the Art Institute of Chicago on the subject of observing visitors: “Collections are hung at the discretion of the curators. They have a vision of how collections will be best presented to visitors.”