Today's art museums are committed to completing major expansion and renovation projects, and vigorously carrying out their stated missions.1 These missions typically are concerned with processes of acquisition, preservation, exhibition, and education. The National Gallery of Art, for example, is dedicated to preserving, collecting, exhibiting, and fostering the understanding of works of art.2 Similarly, the Getty Museum the J. Paul Getty Center seeks to delight, inspire, and educate the public by acquiring, conserving, studying, exhibiting, and interpreting works of art.3 Such processes are strategic, of course, and give direction and purpose to the range of programs and services offered by these institutions. Ensuring that visitors are surrounded by works of art, at the highest quality, these processes also give rise to a particular view of the museum as an object of reflection, contemplation, and discussion.4 Although unstated, I shall argue that art museums typically have other missions that are actively, if insidiously implemented through processes of representation (re-presentation), socialization, institutionalization, and commodification. The museum functions as a socializing institution, that both represents and presents cultural assumptions, as well as social and aesthetic values to young and old alike.5 These processes succeed in establishing an ideology of aesthetic autonomy the compartmental conception of fine art that segregates to the separate realm of the museum.6 Simultaneously, they present ideology in material form.7 The museum itself is a representation that tends to take on an independent and ultimately self-reflecting existence. In a Debordian view, it is a spectacle, which, in its generality, is a concrete inversion of life, and as such, the autonomous movement of