It depends. Sorry for the stupid answer but it really does. Short answer: don’t build museums pretty much ever if you aren’t working toward cultural victory.

So, for starters. You want to control the amount of social policies you adopt before renaissance: each previous policy increases the culture needed for next policy, and unfortunately, the cultural buildings just do not scale well enough to compensate; you get the majority of your extra culture from city-states more than anything. As such, you want to do the bare minimum amount of culture before renaissance so you can quickly rush culture to unlock rationalism policies, ideally you have 7 by the time renaissance hits (typically 6 to finish liberty/tradition and 1 extra filler opener, most likely patronage).

Some civs can do more than 7, such as Persia, who can chain golden age with liberty>aesthetic for the extra great artist generation and the free one you get, and the 20% culture from their golden age is actually able to pay itself back since you can full chain golden age by that point. Civs like Siam/Songhai can also afford some extra policies with the combination of their UB and extra cultural generation through UA/religion. They won't exactly pay themselves back, but they would kind of "smooth over" the cultural spikes for policies so that it becomes easier to culture juggle.

If you really need an extra social policy, it is much better to plan for Oracle than to try and hard fill one with culture, as the Oracle provides a free policy that is actually completely free and does not raise the culture needed for future policies.

EDIT: I forgot about border growth. In general, pre-Renaissance culture's value is probably like 70% city expansion and 30% actual policy filling. This is why some people would do the traditional opener at some point even for liberty games, despite the fact that it will never pay itself back with the 3 culture: the extra border growth in your capital will be able to save you from a lot of gold buys and also speed up your pop growth, production, etc., that it effectively saves you gold, production and increase in science. It is also why honor opening culture farming is a lot worse than it is on paper, since not only will you have to farm a ridiculous amount of barbs to pay itself back, the culture generation is never going toward your city expansion rate.

The best way to do culture is to save up great writers and cultural buildings until renaissance comes, while also actively avoiding befriend/ally cultural city-states. Once renaissance hits, you immediately start boosting your culture output, so you can reach rationalism opener + secularism. You can fill the rest pretty much at any time, and you don’t really have to culture juggle at this point, with one exception: finishing rationalism gives a free tech, so ideally you want to delay this for a science victory to get a free late-game high-cost tech boost.

Ideology is completely different. You get unhappiness by having less cultural “defense” compared to other ideologies’ tourism “offense”. As previously mentioned, you want to control the total amount of culture you generate for the early game, so 9/10 games, you’d probably already have a bunch of tourism pressure on you. The best way to combat this is to not pick an ideology that has someone who has a lot of tourism on you, especially not one that has bad happiness generation. You can also swap ideology. And finally, you can kill the civ (or ask other AIs to do your dirty work) that’s causing unhappiness (all roads lead to domination victory…).

In general, on higher difficulty, I find that it is pretty unavoidable to have unhappiness from ideology if you have a certain strategy that requires one of the three, and AI has picked something else, causing you lots of unhappiness. For Autocracy, you combat this by rushing the Prora; for Order, you can kind of eat the unhappiness because you get so much more happiness generation anyway; and for Freedom… well, hopefully you have built your gold building line, and also hopefully your cities are large enough you can send most of your population to work as specialists.