If art institutions are sites of control for the powerful and sites of struggle for the powerless, then we should understand how different modes of art funding transform these spaces into ideological state apparatuses and the type of platform it offers (or does not offer). By analyzing two commercial art galleries and four museums, we argue that public versus private funding affects art spaces across four-axes: technologies of display, technologies of interpretation, technologies of audience engagement, and technologies of architecture. The combination of these technologies is that public funding presumes an impoverished, naive viewing mass in need of aesthetic education, while private funding presumes an affluent, sophisticated viewing mass looking to consume art as a commodity. The consequence is that although important distinctions exist, art institutions—whether public or private—remain haunted by Matthew Arnold’s (1869) conservative conception of culture as “the best which has been thought and said.”