The study is an historical investigation exploring the impact of the Carnegie Corporation's philanthropic cultural and educational activities in North America and Australia during the 1940s. The author examines the Carnegie's formation of public values and perceptions using cultural and aesthetic material in order to transmit American ideological ideals with the goal of influencing Australian, Canadian and USA cultural norms. The principal case examined in the paper is the "Art of Australia

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... -1941" exhibition, which toured the USA and Canada during 1941-42. Scrutiny of the exhibition uncovers the role it played in alliance building and the promotion of a range of cultural and political agendas. The investigation deploys a theoretical framework derived from the writings of Tony Bennett. The framework takes the form of a matrix that uses concepts of institutionalized agencies/power and individual agencies/knowledge detailed in a nine-cell matrix composed of propositional statements under the intersecting categories of culture, technologies, ethics, zones, objects, and visualization. The "Art of Australia" Exhibition is a paradigmatic case of the instrumental, cultural application of exhibitions in the interest of the state, using government and non-government, public and private organizations as intermediaries. The analysis reveals the existence of diverse agendas and power/knowledge relationships between governments, corporations and the exhibition. This account highlights the museum as a significant arena for establishing and legitimating social norms and practices whilst steering cultural values. Such actions sponsored by government and entrepreneurial philanthropy are analyzed and interpreted as an early instance of building civic values and promoting the public belief in shared national identity. In this sense the investigation explores the educational mission of the museum and it's supporting agencies in the broadest public context.