As art prices mount Andrew Graham-Dixon asks whether museums can afford not to add to their collections.

THIS MAY be remembered as the decade when the world's great art institutions finally found themselves priced out of the art market. When Van Gogh sunflowers come at a million bucks a petal, when a work barely 30 years old, by a living artist, can fetch dollars 17 million at auction (Jasper Johns' False Start), who can blame the major museums for what has come to seem a collective mood of resignation in the face of market forces? Even the Americans have admitted to feeling the squeeze; The Chicago Museum of Con-temporary Art's director recently admitted that 'We are a collecting institution that finds itself unable to col-lect', while his opposite number at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has conceded that 'We are coming face to face with the fact that we are no longer major players in the art market'. It would seem that significant works of art are now considered affordable only by the massively rich private collector and by the Japanese, used to life in the land of the rising sum.
 
In this country, where financial crisis has become a way of life for most major art institutions, an adven-turous acquisitions policy is increasingly regarded as an unaffordable luxury. The government has actively encouraged museums to consider selling off parts of their collections to make ends meet, by giving their boards of trustees 'powers of disposal'. Acquisitions grants have been frozen. The message from above has been straightforward: be content with what you have, and concentrate on survival. Government pressure and spiralling prices in the auction rooms pose an equally straightforward question to those who run our major museums: should they, as they always have done, seek...

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