SIC 8412 Museums and Art Galleries

Encyclopedia of American Industries | 2005 | Copyright

SIC 8412
MUSEUMS AND ART GALLERIES

This industry classification includes establishments primarily engaged in the operation of museums and art galleries. Art galleries and dealers primarily engaged in selling to the general public are classified in SIC 5932: Used Merchandise Stores and SIC 5999: Miscellaneous Retail Stores, Not Elsewhere Classified.

NAICS Code(s)

712110 (Museums)

712120 (Historical Sites)

Industry Snapshot

The numerous U.S. museums seem as permanent and stable a part of the cultural landscape as schools and libraries, but it was not until the late nineteenth century that they attained social respectability and civic solidity. Museums had existed since the founding of the country, but they were often small collections of odd paraphernalia, housed in someone's home or carted around by circus masters such as P.T. Barnum. But American museums grew as the country grew, and, according to Public Interest contributor Michael Lind, "The acquisition of an art museum by a city…has traditionally been a source of civic pride in communities across the country."

Supported by government funding and private donations, twentieth-century museums became elaborate storehouses of America's and the world's artistic, scientific, historical, and technological past. In the process they became very big business, attracting more than 865 million visitors a year, or 2.3 million per day, in the early 2000s. According to Richard K. Miller & Associates, nearly 50 museums and cultural attractions in the United States had more than 1 million visitors apiece in 2000. Contemporary museums are supported by billions of dollars of annual support from government sponsorship, corporate donations, and public membership, and they employ and educate a wide range of professionals.

In the early 2000s, there were more than 11,000 museums in the United States. Nine of out 10 counties in the United States have at least one museum. Slightly more than half of museums are free to the public.

Organization and Structure

The museum world is fragmented and hard to summarize. The most recent comprehensive study is the 1989 National Museum Survey conducted by the American Association of Museums (AAM), the findings of which were presented in the 1994 report Museums Count. This survey, using information from fiscal 1988, counted 8,179 museums in the United States. About three-quarters of them were founded after 1950, and less than 5 percent have origins in the nineteenth century. The AAM survey categorized American museums as follows: history museums (2,401); historic sites (2,083); art museums (1,214); general museums, or those in which two or more disciplines are equally represented (704); specialized museums, or those with a single distinct subject or for which no other category is appropriate (470); arboretum/botanical gardens (318); nature centers (297); natural history/anthropology museums (252); science museums (184); zoos (133); children's museums (64); planetariums (39); and aquariums (20). These institutions are distributed throughout the United States in roughly the same proportion as the population.

Fifty-nine percent of museums are privately run and 41 percent...

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