Paper presented at the conference Art Museums and the Price of Success; an International Comparison, held at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on December 10 and 11, 1992, and organized by the Boekman Foundation, Amsterdam.

... [the author] defines the art museum as an educational and academic institution, rather than a place for recreation and entertainment. He thinks that the primary mission of an art museum is to collect and preserve works of high quality and to present them to an interested and sufficiently educated public. [He] sees art, and especially 20th-century art, as something separated from the world of profit and loss. Sponsoring, as a kind of support for this art, contains a dangerous paradox. If a government feels responsible for culture, it must accept the consequences. (General Introduction, p. 15)

CONTENTS
Introduction.
The art museum as a laboratory for the arts.
Fundraising and sponsoring.
Governmental responsibility.
Notes [bibliography].

[The author] defines the art museum as an educational and academic institution, rather than a place for recreation and entertainment. He thinks that the primary mission of an art museum is to collect and preserve works of high quality and to present them to an interested and sufficiently educated public. [He] sees art, and especially 20th-century art, as something separated from the world of profit and loss. Sponsoring, as a kind of support for this art, contains a dangerous paradox. If a government feels responsible for culture, it must accept the consequences.