At the top of Jacobs' list of 15 moral rules for the guardian system is the simple admonition, shun trading. This is hardly radical. National parks, schools and art museums need money, but society has always set limits on how they can get it.
The commercial boundary is shattered by making a public park into a corporate advertising spectacle, dismantling a historic school to create a bonanza tourist destination or renting out the art museum's collection to a private company. To apply the for-profit rules of commerce to the nonprofit cultural sphere unavoidably degrades it.
The magnitude of these recent monstrous hybrids makes them hard to ignore. More people are starting to catch on that the corruption of politics by corporate money isn't the only gruesome facet of the privatization of public life. In the wake of the NFL kickoff debacle, federal legislation was introduced to protect the National Mall from the corporate hawkers. In Pennsylvania, the judge told the Barnes petitioners to go back to square one. The final outcomes of both remain to be seen.
No word on what, if anything, the Assn. of Art Museum Directors might do. But they'd better do something. Each recent example shows the failure of the guardians -- among them the National Park Service, Pennsylvania's state attorney general and the trustees of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts -- to resist the powerful commercial ethos. At this rate, a monstrous hybrid might soon be devouring a museum near you.
Christopher Knight can be contacted at Christopher.knight@latimes.com.
