Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 133

playbook and noticing this is important. However, simply equating globally
minded museums with MNCs forecloses an inquiry into many other aspects
of the transnational museum’s activity. Let us turn to the other familiar
category, the NGO.
Non-Profit Transnational Actors
“If firms are private actors pursuing private profits, NGOs are private actors
pursuing public purposes” (Jönsson ����:��). Museums share some attributes
of the NGO, but not others. The International Council of Museums (ICOM)
defines a museum as “a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of
society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves,
researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage
of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study, and
enjoyment” (ICOM ����). While NGOs are often associated with a principled
cause, museums are not typically involved in advocacy and they do not typically
seek to influence policy processes. One could argue that museum’s raison
d’être is itself a principled cause of sorts—arts preservation and education,
as well as cross-cultural understanding. Indeed, the commercialization of the
museum and its appropriation of MNC practices arguably diminishes this
more principled mandate. In the absence of the satellite strategy, museums
might more comfortably fit in the NGO transnational actor category.
Depending on the country, museums are non-governmental actors to varying
degrees. The Guggenheim Foundation, for example is a private entity.
The Louvre and the Hermitage, on the other hand, receive funding from
their respective governments. It is worth noting that NGOs generally are
not completely autonomous from the state (Higgott, Underhill and Bieler
����:�). At a minimum, they exist along a spectrum (Josselin and Wallace
����:�). Some are creations of the state; some are enlisted by states to do
work on their behalf, which is also true of the museum.
A museum is like a foundation in some ways. However, foundations are
more typically granting organizations that fund research, often relating
to policy issues (Stone and Garnett ����:�). A museum evokes some of
the characteristics of an epistemic community in that it is a repository of
expertise and can offer advice. Both the Guggenheim and the Louvre have
been operating in this capacity with some controversy, offering advice to
government partners, especially in Abu Dhabi, on art purchases. Nonetheless,
it is actually an empirical question the degree to which there is a museum
community characterized by “principled beliefs, …shared causal beliefs, …
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