Cultural Policy Effects on the Marketing Orientation in London Art Museums

This chapter examines marketization in museums, focusing on four major London art museums, the British Museum, the National Gallery, Tate, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The paper considers two ways to understand marketization: first, marketization as the increased exposure of museums to the marketplace, a consequence of changes in cultural policy, and second, marketization as the increased adoption by museums of marketing tools from business, which is a logical consequence of the first sense of marketization, exposure to the marketplace. British cultural policy has profoundly affected the market-orientation of state-supported museums in the United Kingdom, especially National Museums which receive funding from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Thus in many ways marketization in the supported arts sector can be seen as a public policy effect.