Entitled

Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts

Jennifer C. Lena

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780691204796, 9780691158914
• eBook ISBN: 9780691189840
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

An in-depth look at how democratic values have widened the American arts scene, even as it remains elite and cosmopolitan

Two centuries ago, wealthy entrepreneurs founded the American cathedrals of culture—museums, theater companies, and symphony orchestras—to mirror European art. But today's American arts scene has widened to embrace multitudes: photography, design, comics, graffiti, jazz, and many other forms of folk, vernacular, and popular culture. What led to this dramatic expansion? In Entitled, Jennifer Lena shows how organizational transformations in the American art world—amid a shifting political, economic, technological, and social landscape—made such change possible.

By chronicling the development of American art from its earliest days to the present, Lena demonstrates that while the American arts may be more open, they are still unequal. She examines key historical moments, such as the creation of the Museum of Primitive Art and the funneling of federal and state subsidies during the New Deal to support the production and display of culture. Charting the efforts to define American genres, styles, creators, and audiences, Lena looks at the ways democratic values helped legitimate folk, vernacular, and commercial art, which was viewed as nonelite. Yet, even as art lovers have acquired an appreciation for more diverse culture, they carefully select and curate works that reflect their cosmopolitan, elite, and moral tastes.

1

The Invention of American Art, 1825–1945

The arts in America are, in many ways, the invention of a group of influential, rich Bostonians called the “Brahmins.”¹ Before 1850, there were few distinctions between American forms of entertainment. Operettas, symphonic pieces, and comedic songs would be featured on the same concert bill; portraits and landscape paintings hung next to stuffed animals; and Shakespearean plays were followed by performances of contortionists.² Most culture organizations were commercial enterprises, owned by entrepreneurs like P. T. Barnum, who had a for-profit museum, and Theodore Thomas, the most renowned figure in orchestral music at the time.³

Between 1850 and 1900, bourgeois urban elites built organizations that could define, isolate, and “sacralize” some of this culture.⁴ To view these fields as art, people needed to have “a vocabulary of concepts and adjectives, reasoning logics, and justifications to explain . . . aesthetic qualities.”⁵ “High” art was “grand,” “good,” and “best,” like what could be found “in all the large European cities”—“true” and not “vulgar.”⁶ This “sacralization” of high art, with a “strong and clearly defined” boundary between it and entertainment, established the outlines of a legitimate, elite culture.⁷

Museums and Symphony Orchestras

The decisions made within the Boston Museum of Art and the Boston Symphony Orchestra would have a sizeable influence over what cultural objects and performances other organizations would select to display, and, therefore, what Americans would define as “art.” They would also influence the kinds of people who would have the authority to make these decisions. The Boston Brahmins were those kinds of people: a highly connected, self-conscious social group tied together by kinship, philanthropic endeavors, commerce, and club life. Threatened by waves of immigration and an emerging middle class, they were driven to create a boundary around refined tastes to symbolically mark their cultural and social superiority.⁸

As argued by sociologist Paul DiMaggio, Brahmins engaged in three key activities while inventing art in America. First, they adapted the existing organizational form of the nonprofit corporation—familiar to them from their educational and philanthropic experience—to a new purpose. Second, they engaged in the classification of works as art or entertainment. In making decisions about what works to exhibit or to present in performance, these elites introduced distinctions between what was museum-worthy and what was not, between what was symphony-worthy and what was merely entertaining. Finally, they taught audiences how to relate to art—how to behave in its presence, how to make meaning from viewing it. Their challenge was estimable:

Boston’s cultural capitalists would have to find a form able to achieve all these aims: a single organizational base for each art form; institutions that could claim to serve the community, even as they defined the community to include only the elite and upper-middle classes; and enough social distance between art and audience, between performer and public, to permit the mystification necessary to define a body of artistic work as sacred.⁹

In orchestral music, for instance, the sacralization process involved a shift from playing work by contemporary authors to playing compositions authored by a small number of “great” dead composers.¹⁰ (Sacralization, in this sense, refers to the process by which people begin to talk about some works as if they were separate from everyday life—“sacred.” It does not refer to the content of the works themselves, nor is it meant to indicate any “religious” content, although that may be present in some work.) Through the efforts of the Brahmins, “high culture” became a strongly classified, consensually defined body of art distinct from “popular” fare.¹¹

It is important to note that the establishment of an artistic canon in Boston influenced, but did not determine, the activities of arts organizations elsewhere. For example, three decades after the Boston Museum of Art was founded, the Art Institute of Chicago still included a curatorial department called the “Antiquarian Society,” staffed by women who collected “lace, fans, textiles, antiques, and occasional sculpture.” The acquisition of “nonartistic” objects and works by amateurs indicates the gradual and uneven application of artistic legitimation processes.¹² In New York, the existence of a relatively large and powerful middle class meant that elites were never able to exert exclusive control over arts organizations, and commercial orchestras survived their invention.¹³ The New York elite was large and fractured, so contending nonprofits emerged, competing for audience members and donor dollars by developing particularized programming long after the Boston Symphony’s repertoire had become limited and repetitive.¹⁴ Despite dissimilar starting conditions in the two cities, according to DiMaggio, “the increasingly national institutional basis of high and popular cultures . . . eroded regional differences.”¹⁵

Rationalizing Governance

While elites like the Brahmins formed and governed these organizations, the organizations received public charters and municipal aid and were institutionally committed to provide service to the “masses.”¹⁶ The evidence suggests that most founder-trustees were proud to be engaged in service work on behalf of their communities. They built cultural centers similar to those in Europe but founded them on American, democratic principles. Orchestras and museums were designed to educate, promote moral uplift and enlightenment, and produce and reinforce a shared public culture—something we might view as critical to a modern, heterogeneous republic.¹⁷

Arts organizations were chartered as public institutions and eventually granted nonprofit status as educational organizations. Wall labels, tours, program books, lectures, classes for amateurs, and other programming were designed for the purpose of training the public to understand great works of art. Free or subsidized admissions programs and school tours targeted young, poor, and new audiences. Institutionally, nonprofit organizations were bound to principles of service, even while their governors defined and required respect for highbrow culture, without input or appeal.¹⁸ While the invention of “high art” in America depended on the work and tastes of elites, the story of the arts in America is incomplete if it is a tale of the noblesse oblige of the wealthy; rather, it is better characterized by the tension between elitism and populism.

This tension is nowhere clearer than in the strain over the increasingly rationalized governance structures of art museums. From 1870 to 1900, fewer than five museums per year were founded in the United States. Born into wealthy families, their directors were “art men” with connections to artists and collectors who bought or donated works, helped administer finances, and even engaged in artistic direction. In recruiting these art men, the criteria included a “pleasant demeanor,” familial social ties to powerful people, and good taste.¹⁹ In 1910, the president of the American Association of Museums asserted that “a curator is born and not made. I do not believe you can train a man to be a curator. He is the result of natural ability and circumstances. He must be a man . . . who must know something of everything and everything of something. Such a man is difficult to find.”²⁰ There was little training available to educate curators, preservationists, or museum administrators in the task of managing these organizations. The abjuring of formal job criteria, and reliance on charismatic authority, affirms an institutional reliance on patrimonial staff arrangements and helps to explain why administrators in this era were praised by trustees but failed to engage the public. While they were legally serving the educational needs of the public, these administrators were organizationally subject only to the approval of the board members. This also helps us to understand why criteria governing standards of “artistic excellence” were not immediately and universally adopted.

Wealthy founder-trustees unquestionably felt a sense of ownership over these organizations, even while paid staff did much of the work. Reviewing this moment in American history, one commenter noted that board members could have viewed a museum as

an extension of their livingroom, where they could enjoy parties and theatricals; an educational institution of a quasi-tutorial or finishing-school type; a gallery to professional artists; an ‘attic’ to store personal collections in security while vacationing; or memorials for the dead and, importantly, a locus for cementing contacts with similarly situated individuals.²¹

Wealthy founder-trustees benefited from their control over these organizations, enjoying them both as entertainment and as mechanisms to advance their social, economic, and political capital.

The first full-time director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and perhaps also its most colorful, was General Luigi Palma di Cesnola, an Italian military veteran who built powerful links to New York elites as a language tutor. After surviving capture by the Confederate army and then a court-martial for misappropriating funds during the Civil War, Cesnola married a New York City debutante. He then took a series of positions in the consular services, and, while posted in Cyprus, he trained himself as an amateur archeologist. Cesnola came to the attention of the museum board when he began selling his archaeological finds (some of which proved to be fabricated from fragments of broken statues) upon his return to New York.²² Once he was installed as the director of the Met, Cesnola had his glass-faced office built on the balcony of the museum building and surveilled his employees at his leisure, wearing metal-studded shoes so they would snap to attention when they heard him approach.²³ His autocratic governance, impresarial management style, and unethical management of the museum’s finances were typical of directors from this era.

As arts organizations grew in number, size, and complexity, they could no longer be run by administrators whose qualifications rested primarily on their networks and taste. Curatorial or programming decisions were increasingly made with an eye toward encyclopedic, canonical, and democratic concerns, although trustee preferences could still govern individual decisions. A shift in the kinds of people who were allowed to make decisions about what counted as art was taking place. At this moment in American history, nonprofit trustees were joined by an emerging class of professional administrators.

Colleges and universities provided critical support to the professionalization of arts administration and curatorial work. While in 1876 just seven universities offered courses in art history or appreciation (a qualifying course of study for the curatorial arts), by 1930 almost every college and university offered them. These courses were consolidated into art history departments, and graduates of these programs eroded the dominance of “art men.” Academic art historians who worked as consultants to museums or art dealers exerted additional influence on the institutionalization of administrative practices.²⁴

The creation of trade organizations like the Association of American Museums marked another key moment in the artistic legitimation process. Along with the College Art Association and the American Federation of the Arts, the Association of American Museums worked to establish not just professional ethics, but also standards for the care and preservation of objects, the design of exhibitions, codes of conduct for employees and board members, and even guidelines for the teaching of art in universities.²⁵ National philanthropic foundations like the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller philanthropies lent economic and human resources to support the professionalization of the arts field.²⁶ Once European refugees fleeing fascism arrived in the US in great numbers, the market for curators exploded so quickly that professional associations stepped in to regulate hiring through employment services.²⁷ A similar process was playing out in music, including, importantly, a shift from instruction in music performance to instruction in music appreciation and theory (in addition to the other steps noted above).²⁸

The rationalization of administration and the creation of arts administration as a profession is a critical step in the artistic legitimation process. After all, legitimacy is evaluated as a function of both “the right to make claims, and the bases on which those claims are made.”²⁹ Academic training and credentials, and affiliation with a professional association, are commonly accepted bases for the right to make claims of legitimacy. As arts administrators acquired these credentials and affiliations, they acquired the right to make claims and influence what forms of culture were presented as art.

The creation of the nonprofit arts organization was of extraordinary importance to t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Invention of American Art, 1825–1945
• 2. The WPA and the Opening of the American Arts
• 3. The Museum of Primitive Art, 1940–1982
• 4. Opportunity Structures
• 5. Expansion: 1900–2000
• 6. Cultural Appropriation
• 7. Conclusion
• Appendix: Methodological Appendix
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index