Self-Legitimization of Economic Elites through Private Art Museums

This paper focuses on private contemporary art museums and their role for elite (self)legitimation strategies. In light of escalating wealth concentration and growing economic disparities around the globe, there is a critical imperative for sociologists to scrutinize the formation and reproduction of contemporary elites, including the social mechanisms and narratives that enable elite groups to signal legitimacy for their resources, status, and power. In this context, private museums have long been seen as a particularly pertinent vehicle for elite status and legitimation. Our paper shows how private art museums serve their founders as platforms for elite (self)legitimation claims and strategies. To that end, we leverage a global database of private contemporary art museums which we established in 2023. This database contains, inter alia, “mission statements” and “about the founder” information of 408 private art museums in 60 countries which are published via their official websites. By examining these discursive (online) representations through topic modeling, we aim to draw out the diverse (self)legitimizing tactics employed by museum founders across different cultural and national contexts. We argue that private art museums offer fertile grounds for elites to construct narratives of legitimacy. Their founders channel various legitimation strategies through their engagement with the arts. These legitimation repertoires can range from presenting founders as engaged creative actors who invigorate the field of contemporary art, as social patrons who invest in local heritage and community education, or simply as particularly refined, cultured elites with both ‘good taste’ and extensive economic resources. By discussing these different and partly overlapping repertoires, the paper not only advances debates of how the rise of private art museums might contribute to wider elite-making processes today, but in so doing also deepens our understanding of the breadth and scope of contemporary elite’s legitimation strategies as such.