Creating Cultural Heritage Three Vignettes on Carl Jacobsen, His Museum and Foundation Lunde Jørgensen, Ida
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Creating Cultural Heritage Three Vignettes on Carl Jacobsen, His Museum and Foundation Lunde Jørgensen, Ida Document Version Accepted author manuscript Published in: Management & Organizational History DOI: 10.1080/17449359.2018.1547645 Publication date: 2018 License Unspecified Citation for published version (APA): Lunde Jørgensen, I. (2018). Creating Cultural Heritage: Three Vignettes on Carl Jacobsen, His Museum and Foundation. Management & Organizational History, 13(3), 283-301. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449359.2018.1547645 Link to publication in CBS Research Portal General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us ([email protected]) providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 25. Sep. 2021 Creating Cultural Heritage: Three Vignettes on Carl Jacobsen, His Museum and Foundation Ida Lunde Jørgensen Journal article (Accepted manuscript*) Please cite this article as: Lunde Jørgensen, I. (2018). Creating Cultural Heritage: Three Vignettes on Carl Jacobsen, His Museum and Foundation. Management & Organizational History, 13(3), 283-301. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449359.2018.1547645 This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Management & Organizational History on 21 Nov 2018, available online: DOI: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17449359.2018.1547645 * This version of the article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the publisher’s final version AKA Version of Record. Uploaded to CBS Research Portal: July 2019 Creating Cultural Heritage: Three vignettes on Carl Jacobsen, his museum and foundation The paper addresses the larger question of how cultural heritage becomes taken for granted focusing on how cultural value becomes assigned. This is illustrated by taking departure in the case of Carl Jacobsen, an élite philanthropist, owner and founder of the New Carlsberg brewery, who came to have a profound effect on Danish cultural heritage through the establishment of the museum The New Carlsberg Glyptotek and the New Carlsberg Foundation in Copenhagen. Using archival sources, the paper investigates the mechanisms by which cultural value is assigned, conceptualizing these through framing, canonization and consecration. The paper shows the prominence of each mechanism with vignettes from the early work of Carl Jacobsen, to the contemporary work of the New Carlsberg Glyptotek and the New Carlsberg Foundation. In doing so, the paper sheds light on the managerial and organizational processes of cultural meaning-making as well as the way in which élite philanthropy may directly and indirectly influence the cultural heritage of a nation. Key words: cultural history, cultural heritage, élite philanthropy, Carlsberg, museums, art foundations Introduction A central divide in the analysis of culture involves a distinction between culture as art (music, painting, sculpture, literature, drama etc.) versus an anthropological understanding of culture as shared values, rituals, language and ways of life. Yet categories of art rely heavily on the 1 production of shared values and understandings. In this paper, the larger question of how cultural heritage becomes taken for granted is addressed by honing in on the purposeful assignment of cultural value by élite actors and organizations. Specifically, the paper takes departure in the case of Carl Jacobsen (1842-1914), a central art philanthropist in Denmark, who directly and indirectly influenced Danish cultural heritage through the establishment of an alternative national museum (The New Carlsberg Glyptotek, est. 1897) and a prominent art foundation (The New Carlsberg Foundation, est. 1902) as well as examples from the conscious work of these organizations. While in no way negating the role of other actors and organizations involved in the ‘creation’ of cultural heritage, this paper draws attention to a number of conceptual mechanisms – framing, canonization and consecration – apt to understanding successful élite philanthropy and the relationship between élite philanthropy, the arts and the assignment of cultural heritage. The paper is structured as follows. First, the theoretical perspective is presented, outlining the central argument, which draws on institutional theories of art and organizations. After a brief methods section, discussing the research approach and sources, the paper introduces Carl Jacobsen and goes on to illustrate three particular processes of cultural heritage assignment: First ‘framing’ with the case of Carl Jacobsen, followed by ‘canonization’ with the work of the New Carlsberg Glyptotek and finally ‘consecration’ with the work of the New Carlsberg Foundation, the most significant private Danish foundation for visual arts. The paper suggests that prominent philanthropists and their organizations are able to exert significant cultural influence through these processes that each assign cultural value at different stages. Finally, the author concludes and argues for further engagement with the mechanisms by which 2 cultural heritage becomes taken for granted and the ways in which different actors and organizations work to shape what is understood as cultural heritage. This paper takes an institutional approach to understand how actors and organizations seek to influence institutions, and its underlying premise is that ‘art “reflects” the socio-economic structure of the society within which it is produced’ (Williams 1981, 34) and strives to engage with the nature of this reflection – by honing in on the mechanisms by which élite actors and organizations purposefully assign cultural value. Previous scholarship on culture and art, exemplified well by the work of Raymond Williams, has emphasized the importance of four particular entities and their relationships; the ‘market’, the ‘patron’, the ‘professional artist’ and the ‘state producer’ (Williams 1981, 33). This paper places particular focus on the influence of private patronage on the art available to a people – and how it is understood. Williams studied the historical development of patronage in the British context, distinguishing several pivotal relationships between artists and patrons following the fully integrated or ‘institutionalized artist’: (1) The ‘occasionally dependent’ artist associated with a patronizing household (for some artists, several), (2) the employment of artists through ‘retainer and commission’, which Williams notes often represents the true cases of ‘official recognition’, (3) ‘protection and support’, which represent a milder form of social support, moving towards mere recommendation’, (4) ‘sponsorship’, which is a more independent form of monetary support often directed at the earliest stages of production that ‘survived into conditions in which commodity and market relations [became] dominant’, and finally (5) public patronage (‘from revenues through taxation’) (Williams 1981, 39-43). Through the following vignettes about Carl Jacobsen, The New Carlsberg Foundation and the New 3 Carlsberg Glyptotek, the paper sheds light on particular ways in which a significant patron – and patronizing organizations – have come to influence the conception of Danish cultural heritage within the visual arts. This is a question of how élite actors and organizations seek to shape cultural institutions, and the paper pays particular attention to different strategies that assign value. Theoretical perspective The central argument of this paper is that the very definition of cultural heritage is not a happenstance result, eternally fixed or objective quality that can be inferred purely by reference to the nature of the artworks themselves. Rather, cultural heritage, is the product of an ongoing process, where actors and organizations purposefully seek to create shared meanings and definitional boundaries about what constitutes cultural heritage. This approach encourages us to view cultural heritage production as a process, which on one hand involves various types of assignment, contestation and – if successful – different degrees of institutionalization or ‘taken for grantedness’ by actors and organizations in the public sphere. Where the following paper, pays particular attention to different kinds of assignment. By applying a historical and institutional approach we can attend to the processes but also evaluate the relative successes of such prescriptive efforts. In doing so, the paper elucidates the strong and purposeful efforts behind the ‘taken for granted’ art and culture of a nation. Institutional approach The question of how cultural heritage becomes taken for granted fundamentally addresses the production of institutions as implicit cognitive structures that shape and enable our 4 understanding of the world (Aldrich and Fiol 1994; Suchman 1995; Rao 1994). This resonates with the institutional view of the ‘art world’ (Danto 1983; Dickie 1974), which sees art as the production by various actors, not just artists, but also art organizations, most prominently through museums and museum professionals such