«… there has also been a crucial shift in the way American art museums display and interpret designed objects. Back in 1983, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened a major exhibition on ‘Design Since 1945′, curators of the decorative arts concentrated on defining styles, canonizing works by ‘great’ designers, and highlighting the aesthetic quality of elite artefacts chosen for display. Three years later, in 1986, the Brooklyn Museum abandoned such traditional concerns and instead embraced historical contextualizing with ‘The Machine Age in America’, an exhibition that garnered rave reviews and influenced the definition of subsequent design shows at museums as varied as the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design in New York and the Wolfsonian in Miami Beach. The extent of this shift from the aesthetic to the historical was suggested in a recent conversation with the curator of modern decorative arts at a major art museum. At first she described their acquisitions policy as driven more by an object’s artistic merit than by its historical significance. But then she boasted about an Electrolux vacuum cleaner as her department’s latest acquisition and lamented that one of the board members simply could not understand how an ordinary appliance—something she might once have used in her own home—could be exhibited in an art museum.»
Jeffrey L. Meikle, Material Virtues: on the Ideal and the Real in Design History, in “Journal of Design History”, vol. 11, 1998, 3, pp. 191-199: 192.

photo: The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1986