All Artists Are Equal, But Some Are More Visible Than Others: Institutional Logics and Artist Selection in Contemporary Art Museums

Sammanfattning

Museums increasingly articulate commitments to gender inclusion, yet significant inequalities in artistic representation persist. Existing research has documented these patterns extensively but offers limited insight into the organisational mechanisms through which they are reproduced. This study examines how professional logic maintains evaluative dominance within museum artist selection processes, and how this dominance shapes the conditions under which gender inclusion becomes institutionally possible. Drawing on the Institutional Logics Perspective, the study is designed as a qualitative single-case study of Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with a substantial proportion of the museum's curatorial team, supplemented by institutional documents and an empirical analysis of collection and exhibition representation across 88,860 digitised artworks and three current collection exhibitions. The findings demonstrate that professional logic does not operate as one institutional logic among others, but functions as a meta-logic structuring the evaluative terms under which market, state, and community demands become institutionally actionable. The study introduces two original concepts. Conditional inclusion describes the process through which diversity-related demands become institutionally actionable only when expressible within the legitimacy criteria of the dominant professional framework, producing forms of inclusion that are real but structurally bounded. Temporal layering describes how historically accumulated collections continue to structure present conditions of visibility and legitimacy independently of the evaluative intentions of current actors. Together, these findings suggest a reformulation of how institutional complexity operates within professional organisations: not as plural logics in tension, but as hierarchically ordered systems of legitimacy in which dominant professional frameworks define the terms of institutional possibility for all competing demands.