ABSTRACT
Footsore tourists go to museums of contemporary art, if at all, to visit the gift shop or marvel at what appears to them the inanity of it all. Even museums of traditional art are attacked as themselves failing to mirror the sensibilities of late Modernism. However, those eager to get works by members of their preferred group into museums are chasing a phantom. In both the cases of the museum and the college, the object is defined by its place in institutions that matter a great deal to insiders and far less to outsiders. Public museums were founded in the early nineteenth century as tools of education and improvement, exposing the bourgeoisie of the Industrial Age to the Culture to which only princes and the aristocracy had hitherto had access. Museums and academia, the home grounds of Modernism and its descendants, have become largely irrelevant to the world outside them.
