Success Quote by Norton Simon

There is a withering elegance in comparing a cultural function to a supermarket opening: the line doesn’t just dismiss the event, it reclassifies it. Norton Simon, a businessman-collector who moved easily through museum boards and donor circuits, is stripping the glamour off the “function” and revealing the machinery underneath. A supermarket opening is engineered foot traffic: balloons, speeches, cameras, the promise of abundance. Everyone shows up to be seen consuming, not necessarily to care about what’s on the shelves. By yoking elite social rituals to retail theater, Simon punctures the pretense that these gatherings are primarily about art, ideas, or civic virtue.

The intent reads as a blunt refusal to romanticize philanthropy’s social layer. Simon isn’t condemning commerce; he’s accusing the function of being commerce in costume. The subtext is that prestige operates like a product launch: institutions “market” culture to patrons, patrons “buy” belonging, and the evening’s real inventory is access. It’s also a quiet flex. Only someone securely inside the system can afford to call it cheap.

Context matters: mid-century American culture saw museums professionalize and expand alongside corporate wealth. Openings, galas, and benefit dinners became a parallel economy of status. Simon’s comparison suggests he understood those events as logistical, transactional, and interchangeable - less sacred rite than promotional rollout. The sting is in the ordinariness: if the function feels like a supermarket opening, then the supposed grandeur of high culture is just better lighting over the same old sales floor.