ABSTRACT
This introduction chapter gives an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The American Alliance of Museums (AAM) reports that approximately 850 million visits occur each year to all museums in the United States, more than the attendance for all major league sporting events and theme parks combined. Museums have become increasingly popular and diverse institutions ever since the last quarter of the twentieth century, assuming a number of different roles. The new era of the capitalist museum is perhaps best embodied by Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City who became known for his policy of aggressive museum expansion in the 1990s. The shock of modernization and the horrors of two world wars in the twentieth century were followed by a retreat into the values of the past. Art museums came to symbolize this withdrawal.
