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For What It's Worth

Michael Rushton on pricing the arts

Selfies in the museum, Victorian edition

March 9, 2016 by Michael Rushton Leave a Comment

the end is nearPacific Standard reports that “Surprised museum researchers find many visitors snap photographs of themselves with the masterpieces.”

I’m not sure which researchers are actually surprised by this. But by coincidence I am now reading John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939. He cites Thomas Hardy’s notebooks from the 1880s, and the author’s visit to the British Museum, where he saw (p. 24):

… crowds parading and gaily traipsing round the mummies, thinking today is for ever, and the girls casting sly glances at young men across the swathed dust of Mycerinus. They pass with flippant comments the illuminated manuscripts – the labour of years – and stand under Ramases the Great, joking. Democratic government may be justice to man, but it will probably merge into proletarian, and when these people are our masters, it will lead to more of this contempt, and possibly be the utter ruin of art and literature.

Those millennials, eh?

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Michael Rushton

Michael Rushton taught in the Arts Administration programs at Indiana University, and lives in Bloomington. An economist by training, he has published widely on such topics as public funding of the … MORE

About For What It’s Worth

What’s the price? Everything has one; admission, subscriptions, memberships, special exhibitions, box seats, refreshments, souvenirs, and on and on – a full menu. What the price is matters. Generally, nonprofit arts organizations in the US receive about half of their revenue as “earned income,” and … [Read More...]

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