Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1989
Abstract
The museum boom in this country since World War II has been easy to observe and document. Almost as many museums were constructed in the 1960s as in the previous two decades, and the erection or expansion of cultural palaces has continued into the 1980s. The rising importance of museums has been signaled not only by new buildings and massive additions but also by attendance figures. The leading public attraction in the United States is neither professional football nor baseball; it is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. This overwhelming public response is not limited to the "Big Apple," for museum attendance has soared across the nation, particularly in the Southwest. The art museum has long since dropped its patrician stuffiness and become a place where the masses enjoy the beautiful and the historical. 1 Indeed, the art museum rivals the shopping mall as a site for family excursions. The residents of the Southwest have participated in the museum boom, generating new institutions and new buildings along with national media attention, in a proclamation of the region's cultural maturation. It has not always been so, however.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly (GPQ 9 (Spring 1989): 100--117).Copyright 1989 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska—Lincoln.