Victoria D Alexander.

Victoria D Alexander. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Pres 1996 167 pp $2495

Museums and circulating medium is an examination of the impact of changes in funding forward museum exhibitions, missions, and management. Analyzing changes through the whole extent of the period from 1960, five years before the advent of federal funding and major corporate sponsorship, to 1986 before the fresh crisis in federal funding, the volume details the decline of the individual philanthropic donation and the rise of institutional funding from restraint corporations, and foundations. Each of these has different interests. Corporate funder have an interest in appealing to middle- and upper-class audiences and wait on to restrict their funding to accessible enthrall matter, well-known artists, shows of artifacts, and commercial art. They are les inclined to capital modern art. Government funders, although also interested in promoting wide public aspect are still influenced by curators, and be of importance tos of art scholarship thus influence the,r funding decisions. Foundation funding is more difficult to generalize. Drawing from the annual reports of thirty large art museums and interviews held with directors, curators, and educators at eight museums, Alexander traces an increase in corporate and foundation funding and examines its impact.

Alexander finds that athwart the period there has been an increase in museum audiences as museums have been able to ascend more exhibitions, although exhibits for children and community exhibitions have declined in this period. Funding crushings have led to pressures to innovate. There has been an increase in museum education, and end "creative enactment" of the environment, museums have engaged in modern ways to attract funding. Far from conveying a pessimistic interpretation of the "dumbing down" of the museum's character Alexander argues that changes in funding have l [i]or[/i] part of to the other the mechanisms of buffering and resource shifting, to museums and their curators being innovative in switching funding sources, enabling them to indicate a range of exhibits. Curators still decide forward what exhibitions will be shown more [i]or[/i] less of which are then "sold" to sponsors; others are be built uped with internal funding. Museums have thus been able to preserve their autonomy and legitimacy by the agency of innovation. They have still been able to maintain their cultural capital, changes in the sources of economic capital and curators' perceptions to the contrary notwithstanding. The nature of that cultural capital is being reexamined, however, stimulating debate as to what "art" is, causing scholarly questions to be pos in strange ways, and leading to the recognition as art of work that was previously held to be outside the artistic cannon, eg indigenous art. Thus, Alexander at hands a positive conclusion that museums have become multi-vocal, i.e., they have learned to appeal to different audiences upon different levels.

The work begins with a presentation of resource province strategy approaches, and institutional theory as theoretical frameworks with which to understand the changes; considers the changing nature of patronage and the impact of funding in succession the format and content of exhibitions; and finally considers changes in museums as organizations. Speaking personally, it is advantageous to see a relatively heedlessnessed institution (with notable exceptions, for example, DiMaggio's work) being taken seriously in the organization and management literature. completely through the text, however, there is a continuous tension between presenting material that experiments organizational theories and exploring the underlying tension between pair institutional logics - the aesthetic/artistic and the economic/business - that must inform museum decisions, organization, and mission. This conflict from one side of to the other institutional logics is a variation of an earlier tension, between populist and elitist mandates, that has characterized art museums since their inception. united gets the sense that it is the latter issue, the writhes over the underlying justification for museums and museum characters that really intrigues Alexander, if it be not that it is a conflict that is explicitly addressed alone in the last two chapters of the part In those chapters, there are attempts to broaden the book's focus and locate it within a wider debate forward the evolution of institutions in society, although that conflict necessarily informs an of the debate of the earlier chapters upon the nature of patronage and the format and make contented of exhibitions. This clash of logics is identified as informing disagreement between curators and directors and between curators and administration, greatest in quantity notably marketing, and is sometimes outwardly manifested in the reorganization of museum operations, all of which Alexander touches on the subject of The tension between logics is quick in emergenciesed rather starkly, although one suspects debates are usually earnestly more finely nuanced or textur and positions more contradictory than this, as conflict is played abroad by organizational actors through time and through the whole extent of concrete decisions. In this discussion, however, Alexander is somewhat limited from her data. Greater use of the qualitative material infered in the study could have contributed to the midst and resonance of an argument, unless its empirical foundations in the details of changed funding and the nature and format of exhibits just begin to build the case.