Self-legitimization of Economic Elites through Private Art Museums

• In Event: 20420 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 6: Status, Legitimacy, & Legitimation

Abstract

This paper focuses on privately owned contemporary art museums and their role for elite (self)legitimation strategies. In view of escalating wealth concentration and growing economic disparities around the globe, there is a critical imperative for sociologists to scrutinize the formation and reproduction of contemporary elites, including the cultural mechanisms and narratives that enable elite groups to justify and legitimize their resources, status, and power. While the arts have long been seen as a particularly pertinent field of elite legitimation, private museums themselves have actually been the topic of much controversy and their founders may well need to justify this specific form of cultural philanthropy. In this context, our paper proffers how private art museums may yet serve their founders as platforms where both justification strategies and elite (self)legitimation claims can converge. To that end, we established a global database of private contemporary art museums which contains, inter alia, online “mission statements” and “about the founder” information of 408 private art museums in 60 countries. By examining these discursive representations through topic modeling followed up by a more in-depth text analysis, we draw out different narratives of justification that aim to legitimize a) the existence of private museums as valuable players in the art field, b) their founders as societally relevant elite actors, and c) art philanthropy as a worthwhile elite spending. We argue that these diverse justification tactics employed by museum founders across different cultural and national contexts indeed show how private art museums, in turn, offer fertile grounds for economic elites to seek (self)legitimation in different social arenas. Indeed, in thinking through our data through a Boltanski and Thévenot framework, our paper points beyond established theoretical approaches in the study of arts, philanthropy and elite reproduction, and shows how social disputes that pressure elites to justify themselves can effectively be turned into valuable sites for elite (self)legitimation during an era of sharpening economic inequality.

Authors

• Sara Raquel de Andrade Silva, Universiteit van Amsterdam

• Kristina Kolbe, Erasmus University Rotterdam

• Olav Velthuis, University of Amsterdam