It is notable that very large collections of art, and all the world’s major museums, are the work of the very rich or of societies during strongly nationalistic periods. All the principal museums in New York, for example, are associated with the names of the famously rich: Carnegie, Frick, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Whitney, Morgan, Lehman. Such muse

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In the West, modern museums evolved from so-called Cabinets of Curiosities, which typically displayed wondrous artifacts of the natural world—shells, fossils, plants and organisms—taken from their context and mounted inside. The natural world is sampled and split apart, studied and displayed.