Art & Creativity Quote by John Cotton Dana

A department store as the real American museum: John Cotton Dana is needling the cultural gatekeepers by pointing out where modern life actually goes to look, learn, and desire. Written in the age of urbanization and mass production, the line treats the grand store not as a vulgar marketplace but as a curatorial machine: arranged objects, themed rooms, lighting, placards, seasonal rotations. The retail floor becomes an education in taste, materials, and design, updated weekly rather than embalmed for posterity.

Dana’s intent is less to flatter commerce than to embarrass museums. His comparison lands because it targets the museum’s weak points: limited hours, intimidating rituals, remote locations, and an unspoken code about who belongs. A “great department store” is “easily reached” and “open at all hours” not just as a convenience but as a democratic ethic. Accessibility is the argument. If art is supposed to enlarge the public, why is the public treated like a special guest with visiting hours?

The subtext is sharper: museums have confused preservation with relevance. Department stores, driven by profit, are forced to study their audiences, to choreograph attention, to make beauty legible to people who didn’t major in it. Dana, a major museum reformer, is effectively saying the museum can’t keep blaming the public for not showing up; it has to earn the crowd the way retail does.

It’s also a warning. When shopping becomes the most vivid encounter with objects and aesthetics, cultural authority tilts toward consumption. Dana admires the store’s immediacy, but he’s also daring museums to compete on experience, not sanctimony.