This chapter explores the role of art museums as institutions that helped create new dedicated citizens out of growing urban populations at the turn of the twentieth century. The chapter questions whether Tony Bennett’s celebrated concept of the ‘exhibitionary complex’ can be applied beyond the great metropolis such as Paris or London. For this reason Cracow is used as an example of smaller, but culturally important towns that were much more typical of the late Habsburg Empire and generally of the European fin de siècle. The chapter focuses on municipal involvement in the making of the National Museum, the Museum of Technology and Industry and the Czartoryski Museum, and the degree to which such involvement incorporated broader layers of the Cracovian population. Local agendas of the municipal government representatives and their associates in the urban circles emerge as far more decisive in the kind of negotiated governance on the local level that was typical of Austria-Hungary in the matters of taste and the musealisation of art at the time. Such agendas often overrode those of the imperial centre in Vienna and disregarded those of the broader public.