“In the world of politics, power is pretty upfront: you argue; you face off; you declare war. In culture, the playing out is subtler, but can be, in its way, no less ruthless and devastating. By excluding certain kinds of objects, or by presenting them as relics of a dead past, a museum can degrade a culture just as surely as time and weather can. Fortunately, a museum can also reverse this process. And that has been happening, sometimes with vigor, sometimes with foot dragging, in America over the last 20 years. Whatever the motivating trend – call it postmodernism, pluralism, multiculturalism – the status of non-Western art is beginning to change in mainstream institutions, including sleeping giants in New York like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the recently repackaged Museum of Modern Art, from obscurity to varying degrees of prominence.”