Superstar Museums: An Economic Analysis

Bruno Frey

Journal of Cultural Economics, 1998, vol. 22, issue 2, 113-125

Abstract: Superstar museums are characterized by (1) great prominence among tourists and world fame among the general population; (2) a large number of visitors; (3) a collection of generally known painters and individual paintings; (4) an exceptional architecture; and (5) a large role of commercialization, including a substantial impact on the local economy. The superstar phenomenon is caused by factors both on the demand and the supply side of the market. Superstar museums are forced to offer “total experience” to the visitors; they have to relate to events in history, technology, politics, films and TV, and they have to provide for everything from education, food, gifts, shopping to entertainment. The development of superstar status strongly affects museum policy. The strategic orientation emphasizes visitors' demands; the organization has to be decentralized into processes each devoted to particular segments of visitors, to special exhibitions or support activities. There are also major consequences for human resource management, in particular, relating to flexibility and staff composition of paid employees and volunteers. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1998

Keywords: economics of art; museums; superstars; commercialization; art policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (42)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1007501918099 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jculte:v:22:y:1998:i:2:p:113-125

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10824/PS2

DOI: 10.1023/A:1007501918099

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Cultural Economics is currently edited by Federico Etro and Douglas Noonan

More articles in Journal of Cultural Economics from Springer, The Association for Cultural Economics International Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().