“In the US, historically, institutions often received substantial amounts of public funding. Starting in the late 19th century, many US museums were built on public land in cities contractually obligated to support them with public funds. Nevertheless, in most cases they were governed by wealthy individuals sitting on self-perpetuating boards in a structure that was modelled on private, for-profit corporations. That represented what the historian Peter Dobkin Hall called ‘civil privatism’ in his book Inventing the Nonprofit Sector (1992). It resulted in urban public spheres in which the most prominent ‘public’ institutions were fundamentally private and plutocratic in their governance structures.”