ABSTRACT
The growth of museums, both in the creation of new ones and expansion of older ones, has served as the under-pinning for a vast increase in the amount of art consumption that now occurs in the leisure sector. In that sense, museums remain a core anchor to the wider art business, but they maintain an uneasy relationship with the market itself. On the one hand museums act as a deadend to the commercial process: where objects go to never be traded again (with notable exceptions). On the other hand, museums can be some of the most important buyers in the market and what they buy and exhibit can quickly influence tastes and speculative activity. In the nineteenth century, only a few public collections in the model of today’s museums existed in Europe and North America. From those beginnings, the current level of expansion can be described as nothing short of exponential. Governmental entities now clearly understand how important central public collections are to a thriving cultural tourism industry, and ever more wealthy collectors are establishing private museums to give their artwork a permanent home and a platform by which it can achieve the canonical status that public exhibition provides.
