Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

PORK AND PORCELAIN
support of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 3 It is important not to exaggerate to
the point of inaccuracy: the creation and maintenance of art institutions did not
proceed without the aid of public authorities. Writing about the case of museums
in particular, Daniel Fox has stressed “the direct and subtle influence of
the need for approval, concessions, funds, and services from municipal and state
governments” on the goals and activities of private philanthropists: “Private collectors
and self-appointed guardians of culture were transformed into public
benefactors by the interaction of their own concern for public welfare with the
need to co-operate with the elected and appointed representatives of the
people.” 4 Nevertheless, private philanthropy has played an undeniably crucial
role in the creation of artistic institutions in the United States.
The mobilization of taste for the legitimation of social distinction had a special
force for American art-lovers, who did not even have much of a native
aristocracy to marry into. In Fox’s words,
Many men and women derived considerable pleasure from collecting
in one lifetime what European aristocrats had acquired over many generations.
Possession of great works of art, especially when the collector
did not have lifelong familiarity with the fine arts, seemed to represent
a “natural instinct” for the best. 5
The gift of such a collection to the public both immortalized the collector and
established his (or, less frequently, her) place as a benefactor and so as superior
to his fellows. In the museum field the desire for social recognition can be seen
in such phenomena as donors’ strong preference for giving objects, material
testaments to the collector’s eye, rather than cash, more abstract and anonymous,
and the many attempts made to give collections as wholes rather than
allow them to be dispersed throughout an institution.
On the other hand, despite the wish to demonstrate equality with those in
England and elsewhere in Europe whose ancestral portraits flowed to the New
World, American philanthropy differed essentially from the patronage system
after which it liked to style itself. Classical patronage emphasized the distinction
of the patron, in the framework of an ideology celebrating status differentiation
as the foundation of social order. Under the conditions of bourgeois democracy,
cultural philanthropy had to embody in institutions the membership of outstanding
individuals in a social elite and to suggest the notion of the potential openness
of social advancement to all. Only by being offered to the public could culture—
3 See Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural entrepreneurship in nineteenth-century Boston, part II: the classification
and framing of American Art,” Media, Culture and Society 4:4 (1982), pp. 301–22.
4 D. M. Fox, Engines of Culture: Philanthropy and Art Museums (Madison: The State Historical Society
of Wisconsin, 1963), pp. 1–4, see pp. 40 ff.
5 Ibid., p. 20.
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