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Not too many years ago, people in the know began to say that museum directors needed training in business as well as art history to cope with an art world that was increasingly concerned with money. But almost as soon as that notion became conventional wisdom, the price of doing art business escalated so abruptly that the wisdom seemed futile.
"An MBA won't do it anymore. A lottery ticket is what you need," Tom Freudenheim, assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian Institution, told participants at the 1989 Artnews World Art Market Conference.
Speaking Friday on a panel called "The Future of Museums," at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan, Freudenheim and other museum administrators warned that spiraling costs may cripple operations in the future.
Even a winning lottery ticket probably wouldn't provide sufficient funds for museums to continue presenting international loan exhibitions of Vincent van Gogh and other artists whose work has brought record prices at auction. Insurance alone, which can account for half the cost of an exhibition, is prohibitive.
And no museum is likely to get lucky enough to buy the loaned artworks that are leaving their walls and going off to auction.
The latest is "Portrait of Duke Cosimo I de'Medici" by Jacopo da Carucci, a Florentine Mannerist known as Pontormo. After hanging for 19 years at the Frick Collection in Manhattan, the painting will go on the block May 31 at Christie's. Valued at more than $20 million, the Renaissance portrait is "the...