Museums in the New Gilded Age: Collector exhibits in New York art museums, 1945-2010

How have museums in the United States been affected by the concentration of wealth and the decline in Federal support for the arts in recent decades? We address that question by tracking special exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim and Whitney Museums in New York from 1945 to 2010. We find that the fraction of special exhibits devoted to and organized around patron collections declined in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the subsequent decline in government funding and growing concentration of wealth, patron exhibits did not increase in recent decades. The autonomy that professionalized museum curators achieved in the 1960s and 1970s to determine the themes and content of exhibitions has been sustained, even as organizational norms were transformed in most other realms.