ABSTRACT
Turkey offers new insights into political change and the instrumentalization of the national art museum. The museum's primary function was to offer the spectacle of a civic state for the purpose of promoting its modern image in the West; it was less interested in addressing its own public. The purpose of the chapter has been to contribute to discussions concerning the national museum as an ongoing process of negotiation involving knowledge, ideology and power. Istanbul Modern, like its predecessors, reflects the contemporary ideology and the controlling interests of elites, but now this city senses that it is no longer on the periphery. The Imperial Museum was long ago broken up as a symbol of the old order, and while the Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture survives it does so as a relic of earlier values and a regime that has also been surpassed by state progress.
