The rich body of literature on the history and theory of museums suggests that it might be helpful to rethink the analogy of museums, to consider them not a tomb (a la Theodore Adorno) or a laboratory (Alfred Barr) but instead as a supermarket (Andy Warhol) or, most recently, what Joanne Heyler (founding director of Los Angeles’s new contemporary art museum The Broad) called a “veiled vault.” This section looks at how these analogs impact understanding of the function of museums and the methodologies of museum practice.