Volume 7, Number 7 · November 3, 1966
At the New Whitney
By John Richardson
American Art from 1676 to the Present Day
The Whitney Museum
Patronage of New York's foremost modern museums is vested in a few plutocratic families like the Whitneys, Guggenheims, Rockefellers, and Burdens. In addition, foundations great and small help with benefactions, while collectors, dealers, and art fanciers are under incessant pressure to help with donations, subscriptions, committee work, and alms. In the last resort, however, the costs of housing, stocking, and running these private museums are the responsibility of a small group of enormously rich patrons. That they have been generous and progressive no one would deny. They have seldom interfered more than they could help; they have deputed power to museum staffs; they have financed not only the wholesale acquisition of modern works of art but scholarly exhibitions, costly catalogues, and multi-services, as well as the lives of a great many artists. Lastly, for better or worse, they have encouraged their minions to impose a taste for modern art on Manhattan's formerly tasteless middle classes.
Review, 1632 words
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