ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the names of the four museums—Kiasma, Kumu, the Hamburger Bahnhof and Budapest’s Ludwig Museum—then it appears that none includes the notion of ‘national gallery’ in their publicly mediated names. It describes the political-economical spaces that the four national modern and contemporary art museums embody by focusing on agents involved in their development and the way their influence is enacted within the respective spaces. The chapter distinguishes four crucial agents that are actively involved in the production of national museum spaces: government, city, private collectors and corporations. Governments continue to hold a central position in the processes of setting up new large-scale spaces for artistic representation. Tony Bennett has traced the broader political aims of cultural representation used by governmental bodies of nation states. The growth of capitals forms an important temporal context for the musealisation of cities and regions in which art constitutes a resource.
