ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the place of large cultural institutions within international and national elites and how they draw on minimal, cheap sponsorship to gloss their image and win goodwill from the public while maintaining oligarchical ties. Prior to the Enlightenment, royal collections in Europe were designed to express monarchical grandeur and induce insignificance in viewers. The nineteenth century saw public art museums proliferate as agents of civilizing discipline, embodying a shift away from the intramural world of the princely museum. Many museums that focus on nature are encased within imperial domination and industrialization as much as scientific knowledge, and just as tightly linked to the Global North's tendency to colonize and classify peoples and places. Museums encapsulate a cosmic ambivalence as they veer between coin-operated searches for publicity, eager-beaver approbation from oligarchies, and careful conservation of everyday nature, life, art, and memory.
