The Museum of Modern Art of Stockholm, Moderna Museet, is a state museum with free admission.

The very idea of a state museum with free admission, as well as the degree to which the curators and directors of Moderna Museet engage with the philosophy of art, may seem absolutely un-UnitedStatesian, but it is possible to establish a large number of institutions of this kind in the United States. (Instead of "Americans," Spanish speakers use the term Estadounidenses, "UnitedStatesians," to distinguish the people of the United States from other Americans, like Guatemalans and Canadians, for example). It requires a deeper appreciation of the state funding of the arts, a recognition that such sponsorship benefits the consciousness and quality of life of many generations to come, and an acknowledgment that if a relatively small nation like Sweden can display the works of Atsuko Tanaka, Rene Magritte, Louise Bourgeois, and many other masters for free in its Moderna Museet, the U.S. can, too, on a larger scale.

The Smithsonian is the exceptional case, and for a state with such a greater geographic size and GDP, the U.S. could use more than one art museum open to all. Incentive-driven economists argue that the privatization of the U.S. museum economy, in which most museumgoers have to pay for tickets, actually increases the value of the art itself, just as a bottle of wine tastes better if it's expensive, and this may be true. But the financial value of art is probably less important than the overall wellbeing of people, in which art, music, and cultural expression play a clear role. This does not necessarily, however, suggest that outside of art policy, the U.S. should follow Sweden in general.

The Moderna Museet Projekt, curated by the Museum outside of its walls, including installations in its famous sculpture garden, emerged from a conversation about how the art institution might accommodate young people by finding a more relevant approach to its program.

During the late 1980s and 1990s, a younger generation of artists, disillusioned by the museum's rooms that seemed so simple but at the same time weighed down by historical, administrative, ideological and commercial baggage, created artwork that interacted with other, more social or anti-social places, and which intervened more directly than the museum has ever been able to do with direct, living, present experiences. The Moderna Museet Projekt is a response to these artistic initiatives.

In particular, the Projekt emerged from Claire Bishop's response to Nicolas Bourriaud's suggestion that the museum should shed its technocratic sensibility and embrace a politics of egalitarianism. Bishop's critique of Bourriaud, illustrated by the work of "Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn, highlights a type of art that not only invites social equality but also produces potentially antagonistic relationships." Antagonism, in other words, is not just an externality that intellectuals and administrators ought to "manage away" or suppress, but a potentially fecund site of engagement and experimentation. With its recent history of social conflict, it is difficult for U.S. institutions to follow such a thought, but by allowing a space for conflict or dissonance, as a psychotherapist does within the transference of counseling, an institution could potentially sublimate destructive energy and turn it into something more convivial.