Private Museums and the Cultural Legitimation of Wealth

Department seminar with Kristina Kolbe, Erasmus University Rotterdam. 

Over the past two decades, privately founded art museums have proliferated across the world, as wealthy collectors increasingly establish their own institutions for displaying and promoting art. Drawing on two papers developed within the wider *Return of the Medici?* research project, this presentation examines what this development reveals about the role of culture in contemporary processes of elite legitimation. I bring together two complementary studies of how private museums construct legitimacy for their founders.

The first draws on computational analysis of the mission statements and ‘about us’ sections of 399 private museums across 59 countries. It shows how these institutions mobilise a repertoire of legitimation narratives that present them not simply as expressions of private wealth or intra-elite distinction, but as professionalised actors within the art world and as socially valuable philanthropic institutions.

The second paper moves from these public-facing narratives to the situated production of legitimacy, drawing on interviews with founders, directors and curators of private museums in Germany. It demonstrates how legitimacy is constructed relationally through claims about private museums’ innovation and flexibility vis-à-vis public institutions and through moral distinctions between the supposedly autonomous, committed collector and more ostentatious or ethically questionable wealth elites. Bringing these findings together, I argue that private museums provide a particularly revealing site for understanding how extreme wealth is culturally and institutionally legitimated. Rather than simply converting economic capital into cultural prestige, they enable wealthy actors and their intermediaries to construct narratives of expertise, public value, authenticity and responsibility that position private wealth as a legitimate source of cultural authority.

Bio

Kristina is an Assistant Professor in Sociology of Arts and Culture at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication. She joined ESHCC after completing her PhD in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and working as a postdoctoral researcher in Sociology at the University of Amsterdam.