Museums and merchandising

Museums were among the prime beneficiaries of the cultural policy boom in the post-World War II period that led to significant increases in public support and a substantial expansion of the cultural infrastructure in much of the Western world. This boom was driven both by the realization that market failure in the arts required increased public intervention and by the then-prevailing socialdemocratic zeitgeist that stressed notions of cultural equity and democratization (Toepler and Zimmer, 2002). By the 1980s, fiscal retrenchment, however, led to a reappraisal of the welfare state in the 1980s and also halted the expansion of cultural policy. In the USA, federal arts support began to stagnate in this period, before dropping off in the 1990s; and in Western Europe, many governments initiated the search for ways to reduce public funding by improving legal and fiscal incentives for private giving and the establishment of philanthropic foundations, such as the French 1987 Law on the Promotion of Maecenatism and the German 1990 Law on the Promotion of Culture and Foundations. Fiscal measures to increase private arts support are also evident in other parts of the world (Schuster, 1999).