ABSTRACT
While the country houses offer dreams of Elysium, museums are smoothing away the nightmares of yesterday. The opening of the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall has broken almost the last psychological barrier between yesterday and today. The chequered history of the Beatles Museum in Liverpool shows it is only just ahead of its time. The arrangement of museums and galleries, their selection and presentation, give the objects they contain a special significance. Museums have become the new patrons of art. Museums sanction the creation of commodities that have immaterial, rather than material values. The cultural role that museums have inherited from the earlier institutions of crown and church explain the signficant difference between the state’s attitude to funding museums and galleries, and to subsidy for the performing arts.
