The Cultural Meaning of Arts Patronage: Narrative and Hermeneutics As Theoretical Possibility

Drawing from interviews with private museum founders published in the media and in the context of the project “The Return of the Medici? The Global Rise of Private Museums for Contemporary Art”, this paper adopts a cultural sociology perspective to investigate the meanings attached to private patronage. Building on previous investigations about the self-legitimation of elites through private art museums (Andrade Silva, Velthuis, and Kolbe, forthcoming), we explore digital techniques such as text mining and topic modeling aiming to contribute to 1) theoretical approaches to changing meaning, narratives and social roles in contemporary society, 2) possible methodologies to understand cultural texts, focusing on the potential of digital models (Baranowski and Cichocki 2021; DiMaggio, Nag, and Blei 2013) and 3) the relationship between the actors meaning-making and material conditions, especially considering the increasing gap in economic inequality in the last decades.