Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 119

Introduction
In the last �� years, museums have opened satellite branches in international
locations—the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Las Vegas, and Berlin; the Hermitage
in Las Vegas and Amsterdam; and soon, possibly a Guggenheim in Helsinki
and a Guggenheim and Louvre on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi. For
decades or longer, museums have participated in international exchanges
or traveling exhibits of parts of their collections. In this respect, museums
have long been active across borders. But, establishing a satellite branch
is transnational activity of a different order. The branch strategy is driven
by different motivations than the traditional art exchange and involves
a different constellation of actors. Whereas art exchanges are typically
effectuated between museums, establishing a foreign branch usually (though
not always) implicates governments. Satellite branches can exercise distinct
forms of political, cultural, and commercial power, making the museum
relevant to scholars of global politics in a new way. �
In particular, satellite branches draw our attention to the museum as a
distinctive transnational actor. It resembles many other transnational actors
in some ways. Nonetheless, it fits uncomfortably into any standard category
that we use to understand transnational activity. Situating the museum as
a transnational actor is made more challenging by the fact that the drivers,
mode of execution, objectives, and consequences of existing satellites are
not identical to each other. Anecdotally, by way of example, one can point to
the fact that the Guggenheim is a private museum, while the Hermitage and
the Louvre are both quasi-public. What kind of transnational actor, then,
is the museum? This article offers an exploration of the museum based on
the typology of transnational actors that dominates debates in International
Relations.
The one entity that most closely resembles the museum as a transnational
actor is the university, which has also taken its transnational activity to a
new level, not just exchanging faculty and students as it has long done, but
also making its curriculum available digitally and opening branch campuses
in far-flung locations. I flag it here to underline that understanding the
transnational museum is intrinsically interesting in itself, but also indicative
of a larger set of activities by transnational actors with unique economic,
political, and ideational influence. Current transnational actor categories
accommodate these new actors poorly.
�.
Museums have been amply studied by cultural studies, cultural policy, and urban planning but less
so by IR scholars, with the exception of Christine Sylvester (����).
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