ABSTRACT
Finally, we have reached the period of the ‘Museum Boom’ throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In these three decades, most prefectural art museums were established (see Table 6.1). I have already discussed two distinct types of empty museum – the one represented by the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (1926) that had no collection, no curator, and no permanent display, and the other by the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art (1951), which had museum-based curators, but neither collection nor permanent display. Those two types of empty museum were developed respectively by the art group and the curator. At the end of the last chapter, I also indicated that these museums would hybridize and diversify during the latter half of the twentieth century. Both the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum and the Kanagawa Museum undoubtedly remained important models for new institutions throughout the period, but the local artist and the curator could not maintain their own sanctuaries. In other words, these two agents co-existed in the local artistic field; therefore it was not by the culture associated with one or the other agent but through struggles between them that a regional art museum was characterized.
