Museum Marketization

This cogent collection of chapters is an important critique of the creeping commodification and privatization of public life and the erosion of the commons. The wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary essays present fascinating case studies that converge on common issues. Together they show how public engagement and the educational mission can morph into a search for popularity in a competitive entertainment industry. Richard Wilk, Distinguished Professor and Provost's Professor Emeritus, Indiana University and Director of the Open Anthropology Institute We have all watched in horror when New Public Management marketized our public sectors. Art and culture seemed to be protected from this invasion - but not anymore! The contributors to Museum Marketization mercilessly expose the ongoing intrusion, still making room for some hopes about the future. Barbara Czarniawska, Professor of Management and Organization Studies, University of Gothenburg This collected volume of research illuminates a radical transformation in the relationship between marketing and public institutions. Whereas marketing had once been a tool that public institutions used to better promote their services and to better serve their clientele, in the age of neoliberal reforms, the logic of market competition increasingly defines whether or not public institutions actually offer value to customers. Nowhere has the marketization of public institutions been more disruptive to long standing cultural values and ideals than in the museum sector, where artistic expression has been reconstituted as a marketized, entrepreneurial endeavor. The chapters in this volume systematically analyze specific ways in which marketization has altered cultural understandings of art, the practices of museum curation, and, last but not, least amplified the importance of branding and sponsorship in the institutional practices of museums. This volume is a must read for anyone interested in the interrelationships of art and commerce and the ways in which neoliberal policies have transformed society's important cultural pillars. Craig J. Thompson, Churchill Professor of Marketing, University of Wisconsin-Madison This timely edited collection charts the effects of extending a neo-liberal market ideology into the cultural sphere and in so doing explores the inevitable tension between the traditional principles underlying the presentation of the arts and the demands of a market economy, with its emphasis on efficiency and accountability. It is a volume that will be of interest to academics and students in a variety of disciplines, as well as all those tasked with running today's increasingly marketized art galleries and museums. Colin Campbell, Professor Emeritus in Sociology, University of York, UK