Art Museums in the Netherlands Creating Prophets

This thesis investigates the selection process of Dutch contemporary visual art museums. It dives into the decision-making process of museums staff, who are the gatekeepers of the acquired artists. Curators, heads of collections and directors are confronted with three main challenges: oversupply of new artists, uncertainty about the quality of new artists and competition for artworks of top artists. By observing the whole decision-making process, this thesis reveals how museum staff come to a decision. They confront the challenges in different ways. For instance, the museums cooperate in a network and sub-networks, which are partially the result of a governmental cultural policy called Collection Nederland. This structuring mechanism increases the diversity of the collections, which decreases the isomorphism among the museums. However, it also leads to a higher synchronisation of the decision-making processes and thus, increases isomorphism on the level of the processes. The cooperation between the museums fades into the background when it comes to the top artists. Competition becomes the driving force in the decisions on popular artists. This thesis draws on the theory of neo-institutionalism and Bourdieu’s field theory. The combination of the two theories proved to be a valuable aid to understand the decision-making processes in the field of cultural production.