Framing Diversity: Policy Rhetoric and the Cultural Supply of Modern Art Museums

This research explores how modern art museums conceptualize and operationalize diversity within their policy documents and strategic plans. Although museums are facing increasing pressure from political and social justice movements to change their collections and curatorial practices, their approaches to diversity are often inconsistent and largely symbolic. To examine this discrepancy, the study draws on cultural economics, decolonial scholarship, and Andrew Stirling's (1999) multidimensional diversity framework, which encompasses variety, balance, and disparity, to evaluate how museums frame diversity within their cultural supply (i.e., collections, exhibitions, and other cultural offerings). A qualitative comparative content analysis was conducted on institutional documents from ten modern museums across the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, and France. The findings show that museums primarily identify diversity through the presence of variety, as shown by the wide but uneven use of diversity descriptors (e.g., BIPOC, queer). Stirling's second dimension, balance, appears in limited forms and is often focused on correcting underrepresentation in siloed and temporary initiatives rather than as structural integration throughout the collection. Finally, the degree of difference between diversity descriptors (i.e., disparity) is absent; instead, most museums frame diversity using broad umbrella terms such as "non-Western" that flatten meaningful differences and risk reproducing Eurocentric logics. This study is the first to use Stirling's model within the museum (and thereby fine art) industry, and ultimately reveals that diversity is often reduced to symbolic or siloed initiatives to correct absence rather than achieve systemic transformation. It also underscores the need for clearer definitions of diversity and the establishment of measurable goals that use concrete data and move beyond tokenistic inclusion. While the research sample is limited to Western institutions and based solely on public-facing documents, the research provides a framework for evaluating diversity that could be further developed in future studies to assess and operationalize diversity directly within art collections.