Wealth & Money Quote by Lewis H. Lapham

Lapham turns a cultural temple into a mausoleum with one surgical substitution: portraits become graves, and the dead aren’t people but money. The line works because it refuses the museum’s preferred self-mythology - that art is an uplifting public good - and drags the institution back into its enabling transaction. “Living portraits” implies presence, intimacy, a conversation across time. “Cemetery” cancels that romance: what’s on display is not vitality but embalming, preservation, permanence purchased.

The kicker is “tax-deductible wealth,” a phrase that makes philanthropy sound less like generosity than tax strategy with better lighting. Lapham isn’t simply accusing rich donors of vanity; he’s suggesting the museum is where capital goes to launder its origins and secure a legacy that feels nobler than a balance sheet. The subtext is class power dressed as civic virtue: the public gets access, yes, but the benefactors get naming rights, moral cover, and a subsidized monument.

As an editor steeped in American political theater, Lapham is allergic to the consensus language of “patronage” and “culture.” His skepticism lands in a specific late-20th-century context: expanding inequality, the rise of brand philanthropy, and institutions increasingly dependent on trustees whose fortunes shape what gets collected, exhibited, and celebrated. The museum, in his rendering, becomes a quiet annex of the tax code - a place where wealth stops being merely rich and starts becoming righteous.