Art dealer Sonia Dutton was at her gallery on the Lower East Side last fall, where “Night Drawing,” Boston artist Rose deSmith Greenman’s debut New York exhibition, was on view. The untrained artist began drawing only in her seventies, but her still lifes, often made after dark with humble materials like everyday markers and ballpoint pen, bristle with energy.
In came a museum curator who expressed enthusiasm about the show, and even interest in acquiring a piece. But that news came with a pitch many dealers have come to expect, and not necessarily relish. It goes a little something like this, Dutton said: “We love the show. We love the work. We’d love to have something for the museum’s collection. But I’m not sure we have the funds for it.” In practice, that can translate to, “Who can you find to buy it for us?”
This presents a mixed prospect for the dealer: the chance to have an artwork enter a museum collection is a coup, but it is tempered by the fact that the dealer is, to some degree, pressed into service raising funds for the museum, which one might expect to be the job of the institution’s board or development department.
“The heartache of museum curators that stop short after a very long, engaged conversation about the work to ask whether a collector can be found to bankroll the acquisition is jarring,” Dutton told ARTnews. “While museum curators understand the importance of the work being in their collections and may understand the value for dealers, artists, and estates, their enjoyment of a discovery, and an intellectual revelatory look at the artwork with them, is uprooted by this overlay. This has really affected the collecting habits, palpable aesthetic, and quality of works present in many museums across the board.”
A New York dealer with nearly four decades’ experience, speaking anonymously to frankly discuss delicate arrangements, told me she has had the same experience. “I have heard those words. It’s not uncommon,” she said, adding, “They’re not my favorite words.”
This kind of arrangement isn’t new—when ARTnews broached the subject with New York’s Michael Hort, who collects with his wife Susan, he was puzzled as to why there should even be a story about it. But Hort thinks it may be happening more often, for a simple reason. “There are a lot more museums now,” he said. “There’s a lot more artists and a lot more dealers, ten times [more than] when we first started.”
Hort said he fields calls from dealers proposing that he support museum acquisitions as often as once a month.
There’s another obvious reason, too. “Museums just don’t have any money,” said one former New York gallery director, speaking anonymously. (In fact, those Greenman drawings at Dutton were priced at a maximum of just $17,000 and averaged about $4,000, which one might hope would not be a stretch for an institution.)
The benefits of such deals are obvious: the donor gets a tax break; the artist can add another important line in their CV, and their work will presumably be well cared for; the gallery makes a sale; and the museum enriches its holdings.
“This arrangement helps dealers on every level: we profit when we sell the work, plus the institution will be a good steward for the work and promote the artist’s legacy,” said the gallery director. “There’s a reason the best work in a gallery show will be on reserve for a museum, maybe for as long as eight months: it’s worth it, even if you give a 20 percent discount. You could sell it off the bat at full cost, but that’s not as appealing for many reasons.”
Installation view, “Rose deSmith Greenman: Night Drawings,” at Dutton, New York, 2025.
Then comes the hard part: delicate phone calls with collectors who believe in the artist’s work, in which the dealer explains the possible acquisition and asks, “What do you think about supporting this?” That can mean a lot of conversations, even in the cases where the dealer is successful in her appeal. For an ambitious piece at a considerable price, there might even be a handful of people supporting the acquisition, each pitching in a percentage of the cost.
Yes, the benefits are many, said the gallery director, but, she added, “It is a lot of work.”
The veteran dealer agreed with the gallery director, only more so. “It’s really, really hard work for the dealers to cobble together money to get an acquisition for a museum,” she said.
The process isn’t always smooth, either, she added: “It has tax implications. It’s not so straightforward how the money gets paid and acknowledged.”
What’s more, it’s true that collectors who own works by a given artist may be motivated, even if only out of self-interest, to see the artist’s work enter a museum’s collection. But, said the veteran dealer, “You can’t keep going to the same people again and again. It has to be super important.” These conversations are taking place against a backdrop of great pressure on collectors, too, she added: “Collectors are being inundated. So many nonprofits are asking people for money right now.”
An Increasing Enmeshment of Museums and the Market?
Museums and the art market are enmeshed in many ways.
In 2015, I reported on how collectors wanting access to in-demand artists in a superhot market might have to buy two artworks by a coveted artist, promising to give one to a museum, meaning that museum acquisitions might be driven more by what is approved by the market than in an ideal world. Artnet News‘s Katya Kazakina would revisit the subject in 2022 when it came under discussion at the New York Talking Galleries conference, referring to the practice as BOGO: “buy one, give one.” Opinions on the arrangement differ: adviser Benjamin Godsill called it a win-win, while Lisson Gallery’s Alex Logsdail called it “very, very problematic.”
That same year, the Art Newspaper determined that nearly a third of the major solo exhibitions mounted in US museums between 2007 and 2013 featured artists represented by just five galleries—Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Marian Goodman Gallery, Pace, and David Zwirner—raising questions about, among other issues, the outsize influence of just a few companies. What’s more, art dealers often support institutional exhibitions of their artists in an arrangement that benefits everyone—not least the collectors who have amassed holdings of the artist’s works from the gallery and may now see their value rise as the artist receives the imprimatur of an institution. That arrangement also raises questions about what factors are really driving museum programming.
Dealers finding clients to support acquisitions represent just one more way that the commercial and institutional worlds are intertwined.
One concern is that the practice tends to prioritize acquisitions of artists supported by galleries that are already connected with museums and who have the kinds of collectors who understand the importance of donating to them. “I don’t think that all galleries are set up to make those efforts,” said the New York gallery director, adding that it leads to a degree of homogeneity between what’s on view at galleries and institutions. “So,” she said, “museums are boring for a reason.”
New York adviser Lara Björk, based on her experience facilitating gifts to museums from her clients, sees this arrangement as far superior to a BOGO, in which market forces seem to drive museum donations, rather than being directed by curators’ efforts. In any event, those BOGO arrangements, she added, aren’t even necessarily legally binding, so a planned gift might not ever arrive at the museum. “I think it’s a great thing,” said Björk. “It’s cleaner than a BOGO and feels more direct and intentional.”
New York attorney Judd Grossman is in the same camp. “The symbiotic relationship among advisers, dealers, galleries, collectors, and museums is a wonderful thing!” he said in an e-mail to ARTnews, explaining that the artist’s legacy benefits; the gallery’s reputation improves; and the collector may get access to works that otherwise would not be available to them. “When done properly,” he said, “everyone—including, but perhaps especially the artist—wins.”
But one museum expert has his reservations.
“It’s good when museums are the beneficiary of generosity, but at the same time, museums are already quite enmeshed in the marketplace, and there are risks to increasing that enmeshment,” said Stephen Reily, founding director of think tank Remuseum.
A 2013 article in the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts pointed out that “more than ninety percent of the art on display in museums in the United States was acquired through private donations.” From that we can extrapolate, Reily pointed out, that “museum acquisition budgets are a very small part of the growth of museums’ collecting.”
Why can’t museums raise the money to make all their acquisitions themselves, Reily asks? “They’re trying to raise money for operating dollars,” he said, including, ironically, funds required in storing and caring for museums’ rapidly growing collections. If gifts are responsible for the growth in museums’ holdings, he notes, ideally they would be gifts from donors with a longstanding connection to the museum (and perhaps even donors who give financially to support the care of the works they give).
“By contrast, look at the way that museum collections traditionally grew, through gifts of collectors who had lifelong connections of generosity to the institution,” said Reily. “The collector may have had curatorial input from the museum, and those collectors felt connected to the long-term vitality of the museum.” Under the newer arrangement, he says, “an unknown donor may get a tax break when a work of art goes to a museum to which they have no connection.”
