The museum as fun house.

fun house, n. A building or an attraction in an amusement park that features various devices intended to surprise, frighten, or amuse.

--The American Heritage Dictionary

I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.

--Marcel Duchamp, 1946

Everyone knows that American culture has undergone drastic changes over the last several decades. Perhaps no cultural institution has changed more drastically in that time than the art museum. Forty years ago, the typical art museum was a staid and stately place. Its architecture, often neo-classical, tended to suggest grandeur and to elicit contemplation. Soaring columns and marble halls bespoke an opulence of purpose as well as material wealth. Even museums that departed from the neo-classical model, such as New York's Museum of Modern Art, strove to embody a dignified seriousness about the vocation of art.

At that time, the museum was widely regarded as a "temple of art" a special place set apart from the vicissitudes of the quotidian. The decibel level was low, decorum high, and crowds, generally, were sparse. In the culture at large, there was broad agreement that the art museum had a twofold curatorial purpose: to preserve and exhibit objects of historical interest and commanding aesthetic achievement, and to nurture the public's direct experience of those objects. "Art," not "amenity" came first on the museum's menu.

The seriousness of the art museum was a reflection of the seriousness of the art world. If some works of art were deliberately playful or even frivolous, art itself was entrusted with the important task of educating the imagination and helping to humanize and refine the emotions. Accordingly, art museums were democratic but not demotic institutions. They were open, but not necessarily accessible, to all. The bounty they offered exacted the homage of informed interest as the price of participation. Accessibility was a privilege anyone could earn, not a right that everyone enjoyed.