High Culture.

During the 1870s art became enshrined in the United States. Over the course of the decade grand art museums—hitherto a rarity in America —opened their doors. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston opened in 1870. Philadelphia built its Museum of Art in 1876, the same year that it hosted the national Centennial Exposition. Chicago, bounding back from the Great Fire of 1871, established its Art Institute in 1879. And in 1880 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, founded in 1870, moved into new, palatial headquarters. At long last major American cities boasted adequate facilities for the display of fine art. By any measure, however, these new museums reinforced the division between high and low culture—and high and low society. The museums owed their existence to the patronage of society's upper crust. Inside they were crammed with European masterworks; outside they resembled...