James Burnham’s famous Managerial Revolution (1941), by detailing the transfer of power over society from capitalists to managers, ought to have prepared even the art public for the inevitable. What makes the arts go today isn’t art and it isn’t artists; it isn’t (socialists and other all-knowing types to the contrary) the financial power of patrons or even the pressures of a boorish mass audience. It is rather a thriving, confident, well-paid—and well-expense-accounted—class of administrators.

Whether these administrators work in opera companies, symphony orchestras, museums, foundations, government agencies, or the numerous powerful advocacy groups funded by all these institutions, it is they who bring us the art we see and hear, and they who mediate the encounter between artists and patrons, artists and audience, and audience and patrons. In music, these administrators choose composers, conductors, and soloists. In the visual arts, they choose the exhibitions that make small reputations big and great reputations greater. In foundations and government, administrators establish which programs are to be supported, and then select the experts who bear the putative responsibility for what is to be done.

In the visual arts, they choose the exhibitions that make small reputations big and great reputations greater.

Given the very real shift in power toward administrators so apparent today, art lovers are quite justified in wondering about the aesthetic basis on which decisions about our cultural agenda are being made. Fortunately, an article in the August 1983 issue of the Research & Information Bulletin