What’s not to like about museums? They offer information, cultural awareness, things to do and see, a pleasant place for people to meet, personal enlightenment—and on and on. However, for the people who live or work near arts institutions, the opening or expansion of a museum may mean noise, traffic congestion, gentrification, the appropriation of public parkland and a never-ending sinkhole for public money.

Filmmaker George Lucas of Star Wars fame is aware of both the praise and denunciations that museums attract, as he plans to open the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park this December after a 16-year effort that saw those same plans rejected in Chicago and San Francisco. Lucas packaged the $1 billion, seven-story, 400,000-square-foot museum as a gift each time, agreeing to pay for all construction costs and providing the museum with a $400 million endowment—but only Los Angeles saw it that way.

Between 2010 and 2014, Lucas sought to erect his museum in a park near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, meeting considerable resistance from groups unwilling to cede public spaces for a private museum. He next offered to build it on an undeveloped 17-acre parcel of parkland between Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michigan in Chicago, but was met with similar pushback from a group called Friends of the Park. “The parkland belongs to the state as a public trust, and under the public trust doctrine,” said Thomas Geoghegan, the Chicago lawyer representing Friends of the Park. “You can’t just give public property to a private individual.”

Los Angeles’ Exposition Park was deemed a better fit, as it already is home to several museums, a science academy and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where the University of Southern California Trojans play football. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will house the filmmaker’s extensive collection of illustration art, photography, animation and comic art.

Opposition to museums is hardly rare when their backers seek to build or expand them. Perhaps the most notable recent instance is Congress’s narrow rejection in mid-May of funding for a Smithsonian Institution American Women’s History Museum on the National Mall. It was another casualty of the culture wars; Republicans in the House of Representatives sought to exclude transgender people from any of the museum’s exhibits.

Many other opponents of museum building and expansion argue that when institutions open, public land is taken away from the public. For several years, lawsuits delayed the construction and opening of the Memphis Art Museum (formerly the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art) in Tennessee, which will open in September in its new home on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, several miles from the downtown Overton Park where it sat for over a century. The opposition, Friends for Our Waterfront, claimed that the building would take up too much space, limit greenway access and violate longstanding rules that riverfront land should be kept for public use. A judge ruled in March that a museum is public use, clearing the way for construction to continue.

Opposition to building a William Eggleston Museum in Overton Park, however, was successful. The museum would have displayed the photography of the city’s most renowned artist, but the plan never even came up for discussion as city council members and supporters of the local zoo only wanted to debate whether an unused section of the park should be used for additional parking. “The problem wasn’t with Eggleston,” said Tina Sullivan, former executive director of the Overton Park Conservancy, “but over parking. Nothing could move forward until the parking decision is resolved, and this has gone on for years with lawsuits back and forth.” Instead, the William Eggleston Foundation was created, lending photographs to museums elsewhere.

Museums are certainly in no short supply. The Washington, D.C.-based Institute of Museum and Library Services estimates there are around 35,000 museums of one type or another in the United States, more than double the number since 1990. Some of those most bothered by the proliferation of museums are the communities in which new ones are proposed, worried about how an institution may change the character of their neighborhood—a massive construction project that adds noise, takes away views, brings more cars and more foot traffic. And what if the museum fails to reach its fundraising goals or visitor numbers and memberships lag, especially if the municipality has issued a bond to help cover construction costs?

When multi-millionaire media mogul and philanthropist Fred Eychaner sought to expand his noncollecting architectural exhibition space, Wrightwood 659, in a condominium building in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, through the purchase of units, a current owner who did not sell her home brought a lawsuit claiming that Eychaner’s plans would create construction noise and block her views and light. That lawsuit is still pending.

This past spring, political leaders in Jersey City put a stop to a proposed branch of France’s Pompidou Centre in an abandoned building in the city’s downtown. The city faced a $255 million budgetary shortfall and had already spent $20 million on consultants and another $4.5 million for licensing and branding rights to the Pompidou Centre in Paris when the State of New Jersey rescinded a $24 million grant for the project. Quite unlike George Lucas’ Museum of Narrative Art, the Pompidou Centre would not shoulder all the costs.

Other museums have faced pushback from locals when seeking to expand their footprint, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History and the Frick Collection, with opposition proving largely successful in each case. Those who contested the expansion of Manhattan’s New Museum, which reopened in March, were not so fortunate. In Spain, a two-decade-long effort to create a Guggenheim outpost on a wildlife sanctuary near Bilbao was dropped in 2025 after opponents claimed the plan had been pushed through without sufficient community consultation on land declared a U.N.E.S.C.O. World Heritage Site in 1984.

The objections may stem from land-use or zoning issues (buildings deemed too tall, for instance), political tensions or plain not-in-my-backyard sentiment. Whatever the cause, the common thread is often institutional overreach. “Boards and directors often try to use the assumed positive public image of the museum to steamroll land-use-based or neighborly opposition,” Stephen Rustow, principal at Museoplan, a Brooklyn-based museum consulting firm, told Observer. “This happened at MoMA, where the museum literally paid off residents of the Museum Tower with renovations, new amenities and lifetime entry passes to quiet their opposition to the 2000-2006 expansion.” Whether or not there is actual elitism on the part of museum officials, he added that “there’s a class-based tension that sees the patrician, moneyed interests trying to take advantage of regular working folks.”

Museums are public charities, existing to benefit the public, but that is not always how they appear to the communities around them. “I’ve never known a community that was asking for a bigger museum. But many donors and collectors do,” said Stephen Reily, founding director of museum think tank Remuseum, told Observer.

Museums that make their surrounding communities a priority tend to experience less opposition and more acceptance. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, recently expanded its facility by 114,000 square feet—a move welcomed by area residents, Reily said, because the institution’s “purpose is to double down on a mission grounded in access and community engagement.” He also cited Los Angeles’ The Broad, which first opened in 2015, displaying the modern and contemporary art collection of Eli and Edythe Broad, and “where general admission is free and has attracted the largest and most diverse audience of any art museum in Los Angeles.”

Increasingly, many museums are viewed as “billionaire pet projects” to be accepted gratefully by the communities in which they are located, according to Mark Walhimer, managing partner of the California-based Museum Planning LLC. “The museums that are succeeding in the current climate are the ones that are hyper-local, positioning themselves as direct service providers to schools, libraries, parents and neighborhood organizations. That identity is very difficult to argue with politically. The ones facing opposition, in most cases, made a different choice: They led with what they had and why it mattered, rather than asking the community what it needed.”

Museum planning consultants stress the need for genuine community outreach. Marcy Goodwin, president of M. Goodwin Museum Planning in Albuquerque, New Mexico, said that the museum development process requires listening, as well as planning.  “Every museum exists in a community. It’s a two-way dialogue. It’s important to send out questionnaires to the museum’s future neighbors and audiences, or to have town hall listening sessions to ask people what they want the museum to be or do.  To succeed, the museum must offer planning that acknowledges its audiences.”

As a point of contrast, former President Obama sought to create a presidential library on parkland in Chicago, which triggered a lawsuit from a Friends of the Park group. However, those responsible for bringing the library to fruition held numerous meetings with community groups, emphasizing community service and engagement. The library, which opened in late May, includes a museum, public meeting spaces, a recording studio and an athletic center. “The resistance it faced initially was a land-use fight, not a community rejection,” Walhimer told Observer. “That’s a meaningful distinction.”

The growing number of instances of opposition to museum creation and expansion may reflect a rising public expectation that museums earn their place—justifying their footprint, demonstrating their relevance to surrounding communities and committing to resisting becoming instruments of private interest. Some of the opposition may also be part of a broader political skepticism about government and higher education, a sense that such institutions serve the “elites” and are anti-populist. “I take seriously the broader decline in public trust in institutions,” said Maria Elena Gutierrez, founder and president of the museum planning company The Chora Group, adding that she counsels institutions to make “serious strides in opening up and serving increasingly wider audiences beyond the elites.”

Still, as the failure of the effort to create a Smithsonian Institution American Women’s History Museum shows, the problems go beyond good intentions and good actions. “Museums that engage with American history—slavery, Reconstruction, representation, and the experiences of communities of color—find themselves on the front lines of a national argument about whose story gets told and who controls the telling,” Walhimer said. “That’s not a communications problem that better outreach can solve.”

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The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation has a large mandate—in fact, it has two: to promote photography as an art form and to support medical research focused on  HIV/AIDS. Knowing that he had been diagnosed with and would soon die of AIDS, Mapplethorpe (1946-89) established his foundation the year before his death, placing all his assets (including real estate) and unsold photographs (plus negatives) into it to finance his goals.

Millions of dollars have been granted by the foundation to both areas since then, with money used to create the Robert Mapplethorpe Laboratory for AIDS Research at Harvard Medical School in Boston, the Robert Mapplethorpe Residential Treatment Facility at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York and the Robert Mapplethorpe Center for HIV Research at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. On the photography side, the foundation awarded three multi-million-dollar grants supporting photography programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, the Guggenheim Museum and the National Galleries Scotland, resulting in galleries or facilities permanently named for Robert Mapplethorpe.

Millions more are being granted by the foundation, according to its president, Michael Ward Stout—$1.5 million annually “in an average year.” Thirty-seven years in, where does the Mapplethorpe Foundation get all the money it keeps doling out?

Not to worry. In an average year, the foundation earns between $2.5 and $3 million from a variety of sources. The lion’s share comes through the sale of Mapplethorpe’s photographic images. At the time of the artist’s death, there were 400-500 prints signed by Mapplethorpe, another 15,000-20,000 that were unsigned but have received an estate stamp (Stout noted that the average price for 16″ x 20″ or 20″ x 24″ signed and unsigned prints is $25,000-$30,000, and a growing number of posthumously printed images that are larger (54″ x 54″) and sell for more.

There’s more. The Mapplethorpe Foundation earns a quarter of a million dollars annually from merchandising and licensing, as companies lease the right to use the artist’s images on a variety of products, and another $200,000-$250,000 per year in exhibition fees, as museums borrowing prints from the foundation pay $1,000 per image.

“When the foundation was started,” Stout told Observer, “I thought it would last 20 years, during which time we would turn the inventory into cash. Our obligation is to maximize the assets and make a lot of money.” Closing in on 40 years, the foundation shows no sign of running out of assets any time soon.

Most foundations that artists set up, referred to as artist-endowed foundations, exist to promote the legacy of those particular creators—encouraging research into the artists’ lives and work, underwriting publications that inform the public about the artists, creating catalogue raisonnés and authentication committees to identify all known works, making grants to institutions that display that artwork and inventorying, conserving and storing objects in their possession. Their goals are focused squarely on keeping these artists relevant and in the public eye. The Henry Moore Foundation in England, for instance, was set up in 1977 to “advance the education of the public by promoting their appreciation of the fine arts, particularly the work of Henry Moore.” A bit more wordy is the foundation created by Salvador Dalí in 1983 in Spain, which aims to “promote, boost, divulge, lend prestige to, protect and defend in Spain and in any other country the artistic, cultural and intellectual oeuvre of the painter… and the universal recognition of his contribution to the Fine Arts, culture and contemporary thought.”

Other artist-endowed foundations look beyond their own creators to help living artists who have their own needs. The foundation established through the will of painter Joan Mitchell (1925-92) both “cultivates the study and appreciation of artist Joan Mitchell’s life and work” and seeks “to aid and assist working artists,” which it has accomplished with annual fellowships of $60,000 to 15 artists and six- or 10-week residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans that include private studio space, weekday meals and a $150 per week stipend. The foundation set up two years after the death of painter Adolph Gottlieb (1903-74) exists exclusively to provide money to artists in financial need, through individual support grants and emergency assistance grants.

Whatever the purposes of individual artist-endowed foundations, they all need money to fulfill their missions, and coming up with it requires ingenuity. Their initial and perhaps only real assets are the artworks created by the artists, which can be sold to fund their goals. “The sale of works of art from our collection is our major source of income,” said Sanford Hirsch, executive director of the New York City-based Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and chairman of the board of directors of the Nancy Graves Foundation, which both promotes the legacy of painter and sculptor Nancy Graves (1939-1995) and offers grants to individual visual artists. That foundation also raises money through sales of the artist’s work. “The Gottlieb Foundation annual budget is around $2,000,000. The Nancy Graves Foundation annual budget is around $700,000.”

The Joan Mitchell Foundation’s budget is considerably higher, just over $10 million, according to its executive director, Christa Blatchford, who noted that “the foundation’s annual budget is covered through investment returns and strategic artwork sales, which further build the foundation’s investment portfolio to support our mission-based work.”

There are other ways of generating income for artist-endowed foundations, as the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation has made clear. “Product licensing by artist-endowed foundations is not an uncommon activity,” said Christine J. Vincent, managing director of the Aspen Institute’s Artist-Endowed Foundations Initiative. She noted that licensing copyrighted images “generally serves multidimensional purposes, including increasing the public’s access to and knowledge about the artist’s creative achievements and principles, even as it may also represent an important source of income to support operation of a foundation’s charitable programs.”

Royalties and licensing fees may range widely, from $10,000 a year at the Woodman Family Foundation to $6,227,894, which the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts reported in 2024. As a point of comparison, the Dedalus Foundation (Robert Motherwell) reported royalty income in 2024 of $18,227, while the Irving Penn Foundation earned $131,032 and the Easton Foundation (Louise Bourgeois) brought in $256,639. The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation earned royalties of $182,188, as well as authentication fees of $7,690 and “reproduction fees” of $51,124. The Calder Foundation earned $529,250 from “exhibition income,” charging museums that borrowed the artist’s work for displays and another $26,938 from conservation work on Calder artworks owners brought in for repairs.

The Keith Haring Foundation and the estates of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Roy Lichtenstein are among the leaders in licensing and merchandising, with revenues used to support the larger goals of promoting the individual artists and their stated missions. The Keith Haring Foundation, founded in 1989, a year before the artist’s death, looks to promote Haring’s artistic and philanthropic legacy by supporting exhibitions and scholarship on the artist, as well as “organizations providing assistance to youth and those living with HIV,” according to its executive director Simon Castets. In fiscal year 2024, the foundation earned $13.1 million through licensing, the sale of Haring artworks and investment income, allowing for their grantmaking to add up to approximately $8 million in this fiscal year. “We do better than break even every year—we are able to grow and support our mission, advancing Haring’s pioneering vision.”

Some artists’ profitability can last for many decades. “We do not share information about our annual revenue,” Frank Avila-Goldman, executive director of arts and intellectual property for the estate of Roy Lichtenstein, told Observer, “but the estate has managed the copyrights of Roy Lichtenstein for many decades.” He noted that “we license internationally, year-round,” citing “recent projects such as Uniqlo, PUMA/BMW, Skateroom, Supply Stickers, Commes des Garcon/Junya Watanabe, USPS stamps, as well as various movies, streaming services and TV licensing.”

Licensing generally involves permitting a company to create products based on an artist’s work, but some artist-endowed foundations have taken it upon themselves to make reproductions and other items for sale to the public. Celia Bertoia, the daughter of sculptor Harry Bertoia and founder and director of the Harry Bertoia Foundation, has authorized the production of an edition of 300 tabletop sculptures based on a sketch by her father. The Isamu Noguchi Foundation offers a line of Noguchi Coffee Tables based on a design the artist realized in 1944, available in various colors at $2,913, including in-home delivery but not assembly. The Louise Nevelson Foundation established its own separate entity, NevelsonLLC, offering a small but growing number of products. “NevelsonLLC is a way to generate revenues,” said Marie Nevelson, the artist’s granddaughter.

Single-artist museums also need ways to generate revenue, turning in many instances to creating and selling their own editions. Both the Musée Rodin in Paris and the Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, New York earn a third of their annual revenues through the sale of reproductions and original castings of the respective artists’ work. “Rodin bequeathed to the museum his works and possessions including his intellectual property rights and the right to cast original bronze editions of his works beyond his lifetime,” said Amélie Simier, director of the Musée Rodin, told Observer. “We are a self-supporting museum.”

A company that licenses images from a number of European single-artist museums, Boutiques des Musées, offers reproductions of painted images and sculptures, including from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Marc Chagall Museum in Nice, the Fernand Léger Museum in Cannes and the Musée National Picasso-Paris. Among the Picasso-themed items are head scarves and cushion covers.

The Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation has been in operation for half a century, but keeping an artist-endowed foundation in business is not a sure thing. Magda Salvesen, director of the Jon Schueler Foundation, formed in 2024, told Observer that “nothing is very solid in the art world. The appreciation of artists’ works is totally unpredictable, with excellent years of demand and then a fizzling out. Prices can totally depend on the reputation of the gallery, increasing by 150 percent or much more when picked up by a blue chip very wealthy gallery or dropping when the artist’s work is let go or discarded.”

At present, the foundation earns what she called a “minimal” amount of money from the sale of postcards, posters, catalogs and DVDs featuring the artist’s (1916-92) work. A “modest” endowment helps the organization pay the bills but, she said, “the foundation will inherit when I die the shares of the co-op where the paintings are mostly stored, where the office is located and where I still live,” as well as “some private money.” Then, “the foundation will be in better shape, and at that point my co-directors can have a broader idea of how long the foundation can run for and they can determine more easily what the average income may be from sales of paintings.” Artists, the saying goes, only become famous after they die—or, in this case, after the director of their foundation does.

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Like no other time in history, art has been on the move. Fairs keep artworks traveling from one country to another, but that’s just dealer inventory. Larger museums, usually in major metro areas, have also taken to making long-term loans of objects they have kept in storage to smaller, often more rural institutions. There’s the National Gallery of Art’s “Across the Nation” program and, more recently, the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden—in conjunction with the Art Bridges Foundation—announced a three- to five-year loan program called “50 for 50” that will place artworks in art museums in all 50 states and Puerto Rico.

Then there are the museum outposts. The Guggenheim in New York City and the Centre Pompidou in Paris plan to open branches in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates and Seoul, South Korea, respectively. The former institution led the way with its satellite museum in Bilbao, Spain, which opened in 1997, and the outpost at Deutsche Bank in Berlin that same year. This was followed by the Louvre inaugurating a branch in Abu Dhabi in 2017. In 2028, MoMA will launch what it’s calling a “partnership” with Hong Kong’s M+.

“These are not just cultural investments—they are instruments of economic strategy and soft power,” Maria Elena Gutierrez, founder and president of Chora Group, an advisory firm that works with museums on strategy, governance and financial sustainability, told Observer. “Cities like Abu Dhabi, Seoul and Bilbao enter into structured partnerships with globally recognized institutions, leveraging the brand, collections and curatorial authority of names like the Louvre, Pompidou and Guggenheim to accelerate their position on the global cultural stage.”

And these cities are actually paying. Abu Dhabi licensed the use of the Louvre brand for 20 years at a cost of €700 million to the French state, while Pompidou Hanwha in Seoul is paying France €20 million in a four-year deal. As government entities, the Louvre and Pompidou museums are obligated to make these arrangements public, while the privately owned Guggenheim and Museum of Modern Art are not, and both declined requests for more information about the deals.

Not all museum outpost plans have happy endings, however. Earlier this year, the Pompidou canceled plans to build a satellite museum in Jersey City, New Jersey, after the mayor announced that the city had a $255 million deficit, making any payments to the French museum unlikely. But Jersey City had already paid $20 million in consultant fees and another $4.5 million to the Centre Pompidou for licensing and branding rights before the faucet went dry.

Besides appealing to Western travelers, Gutierrez speculated that cities in countries such as the U.A.E. and China—which have a less relaxed attitude toward political dissidence and social freedoms than the U.S. and Europe—view these museum outposts as “opportunities to experiment in neutral spaces. In Abu Dhabi, how do men and women occupy the same space, for instance. I think they are looking ahead to a post-oil economy and using art and culture to help their societies transition.”

On the other side are Western museums looking at their own futures. “Museums are struggling to make a case for themselves, with declining attendance, rising costs and shrinking support,” Maxwell Anderson, former director of the Whitney and current president of Souls Grown Deep Foundation, told Observer. “These outposts are intended to attract resources and audiences.” He added that “expansions are, for the most part, ill-advised unless governments are ready to shoulder the cost.”

Different institutions have different reasons for setting up or licensing an outpost. “I think it is important to understand that different partnerships have different motivations,” said Stephan Jost, director of the Art Gallery of Ontario and former president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. “It is clear that the French State is very sophisticated in using cultural power and partnerships to strengthen their global standing. This has real economic benefits for Paris. That is very different from the Guggenheim, which is a private organization that leverages its brand, expertise and culture to create destinations in places like the U.A.E.”

Guggenheim Bilbao is probably best known for its Frank Gehry-designed building rather than the artwork inside of it, which Gutierrez said is to be expected. “What’s inside are not always masterpieces”—in part because the directors of these museums don’t want to remove artworks that their home visitors pay to see, and partly because some outposts are located in regions of potential geopolitical instability. “You have to protect against acts of war,” she said, adding that Western museums usually “offer two or three recognizable works of art” in these outposts.

Artworks featuring nudity or political opposition are not likely to be exhibited in these partner institutions, Anderson said. “Outposts in locales with no guarantees of free speech are inherently limited in what they will put forward,” and institutions such as the Guggenheim, Louvre, MoMA and Pompidou are likely to self-censor rather than face actual censorship.

When contacted by Observer, neither the Museum of Modern Art nor the Guggenheim would comment on the artworks they plan to exhibit in Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi, and the Centre Pompidou was similarly tight-lipped. However, according to Julie Narbey, the Parisian museum’s general manager, the outpost’s opening exhibition, titled “The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision,” will “feature 92 works from Centre Pompidou’s modern collections. These include masterpieces that are very frequently on display, as well as works that are shown less often.” She added that “Centre Pompidou exhibitions are organized with curatorial independence.”

Of course, not all outposts are power plays, and some last longer than others—often for reasons of money. The Whitney museum, for instance, had a satellite branch at the Altria Group’s Manhattan headquarters from 1983 to 2008, which closed when Altria moved elsewhere and phased out its charitable arts donations. In the decade prior, from 1973 to 1983, the museum operated a satellite at 55 Water Street, a building owned by Harold Uris, who gave the museum a lease for $1 a year. The Whitney has also had branches at Maiden Lane, Equitable Tower and in Stamford, Connecticut.

The Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, which opened at Deutsche Bank in 1997, closed in 2013. The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art operated the Pacific Design Center for 20 years, closing it in 2019, while the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego opened a downtown branch in 2007, which it sold two years ago. In 2024, Fotografiska, a Swedish-based network of photography museums, closed its Gramercy Park outpost in Manhattan after five years, claiming to be searching for a new site that has yet to be found. In 2021, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art closed its Fort Mason Artists Gallery as part of Covid-related budget cuts. On the other hand, the Museum of Modern Art acquired an existing art space in 2000—the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens—that it continues to use to host more experimental exhibitions to this day.

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This story begins where most would end. On April 16, 1828, Spanish artist Francisco de Goya died at the age of 82. It is often said that an artist’s work becomes more valuable in death than in life, as it dawns on prospective buyers that scarcity is now a factor with no more artworks being created. Buyers of Goya prints needn’t have worried, however, because far more of his etchings have been produced after his death than before. All of the artist’s printing plates became the property of Madrid’s Prado Museum not long after his death, and the museum has regularly leased them to various publishers to bring in funds.

These are posthumously created artworks—they are Goyas, certainly, but not ones that the artist ever saw or approved for sale. These works fall into a gray zone of the art trade, and it isn’t just works by Goya. Graphic art prints, photographic prints and cast sculptures are all produced using plates, negatives and molds that can be reused any number of times.

“Posthumous editions of both Diane Arbus‘s and Peter Hujar‘s work arose to satisfy exhibition demands,” Christian Whitworth, director of San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery, told Observer, noting that “private collectors and institutions alike collect both lifetime and posthumous works.” Indeed, most Arbus works in institutional collections are posthumous prints, as she ended her own life without concern about the future interests of the market. Whitworth confirmed that buyers pay more for lifetime prints, sometimes called “vintage” prints, though the price gap between work created when an artist was alive and after their passing varies considerably. “Arbus’s lifetime prints are typically priced about 10 times higher than her posthumous prints;” the price difference between lifetime and posthumous Hujar prints is not nearly that large.

Goya had a much longer life than Arbus, but he oversaw the creation of only one edition of his 80-work set of etchings known as Caprichos in 1799. The second edition was produced posthumously in 1855. By 1937, when the definitive study of his graphic work was published, there were 12 editions. (There is no record of how many other editions were created in the almost 90 years since.) His most famous set of images, the 82-work Disasters of War, was first published in 1863. By 1937, seven editions had been published.

In 2013, New York’s Paul Kasmin Gallery presented an exhibition of newly created metal sculptures by Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) produced from molds found in the artist’s studio. Kasmin represented the Brancusi estate and was involved in the decision to create posthumous pieces, which were priced up to $4.5 million. There was some debate at the time about how true to the artist’s intentions these posthumous works were, since Brancusi tended to work over each cast piece—polishing here, roughing the surface there—to make every one unique, while these newer sculptures were all shiny and smooth. Hybrids? Knock-offs? Posthumous is the only word that adequately describes them.

There are other examples. The United States pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale featured an untitled sculpture by Félix González-Torres, who had died 11 years earlier and had left only rough sketches of what he envisioned the final artwork would look like. Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector organized the creation of the work based on those sketches for the international exhibition. No one faults Spector, but what visitors encountered was essentially her best guess.

There is no expiration date for producing posthumous works. “There are a number of artists in whose market you will find posthumous prints, specifically in Old Master Prints,” Monica Brown, managing director of fine art and head of the department of prints and multiples at Freeman’s Auctions, told Observer. “For instance, because Rembrandt’s copper plates are still extant, you will find a number of posthumous impressions over the many centuries since he passed.” Life is short, but art goes on and on.

With Arbus, Hujar, Brancusi, Goya and Rembrandt, nothing illegal is taking place, and lower-priced but otherwise identical versions of lifetime artworks allow buyers with less money to acquire artworks with famous names attached. (More copies also allow more people to see these artworks in person.) Collectors at every tier should learn enough about the market for posthumously created artworks to know whether a piece is appropriately priced. Or to put it another way, to know whether something is an investable artwork or a Goya-esque souvenir.

A gray area in the art market

As noted, posthumously produced artworks are generally less valuable than those made during an artist’s lifetime. Christine Berlane, who is in charge of prints and multiples sales at Eldred’s auction house in East Dennis, Massachusetts, told Observer about the sale of a print by Isabel Bishop titled 14th Street Oriental. “We had miscatalogued it as a proof printed before the edition, which meant that it had been printed on her own press in small numbers and was rare and desirable. Cataloged as this, it sold for $1000. Upon examination of the work out of the frame by the buyer, he saw the double S embossed chop mark of Steven Sholinsky, who was a printer hired by AAA in the 1980’s to print editions of Bishop’s prints.” Given that information, the auctioneer is reoffering the print with a much lower estimate of $200-300.

That said, the price a work of art demands doesn’t always depend on whether the artist was alive when it was made. The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation has authorized the creation of editions of the artist’s (1946-89) images, generally at larger sizes (49×60 inches or 60×60 inches) than those created during Mapplethorpe’s life, which range in price “from the low to the mid six-figures,” according to the foundation’s managing director, Joree Adilman, who told Observer that the average price for a lifetime print by the artist—most sized at 16×20 inches or 20×24 inches—is $25,000-30,000. On the other hand, Davi Weston, owner of the Weston Gallery at Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, said that “rare and iconic works” by her grandfather Edward Weston have sold for well over $1 million, while those printed by the photographer’s youngest son Cole from Edward Weston’s original negatives after the artist’s death in 1958 command $10,000-15,000 “in today’s market.” Cole’s older brother Brett Weston also made prints of his father’s work under his father’s direction when he could no longer make his own prints due to Parkinson’s disease, and they sell for prices closer to those made by Edward Weston himself, though not for quite as much.

Somewhat more anomalous, one can purchase a “wall drawing” by Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), which would be executed by the specially trained assistants in charge of his estate, at a price no lower than when the artist was still alive. In fact, LeWitt never actually executed any of his wall drawings himself while he lived, always leaving the task to assistants.

In some cases, the market is flooded with prints and sculpture castings produced years after artists’ deaths, resulting in works of questionable quality that cause confusion among buyers. Painter and printmaker William Hogarth died in 1764, but editions of his engravings continued to be produced until 1850 by his widow and later her cousin, and then by a series of publishers who purchased the printing plates from whoever owned them.

The worst instance of posthumously produced artwork is generally acknowledged to be the bronze sculpture of Frederic Remington (1861-1909). Alice Duncan, director of Gerald Peters Gallery in New York City, referred to some Remington castings as “a whole can of worms.” After the artist died in 1909, editions were cast under the auspices of his estate and widow, Eva. After her death in 1918, editions were produced without any authorization at all, which Duncan called “midnight casts.”

“One assumes they are either cast from other bronzes”—referred to in the sculpture field as surmoulage—”or from molds that were unseen at the foundry when the estate lawyers requested all molds to be destroyed,” she said. Editions continued to be made and are produced to this day, for instance, by the Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, New York, which earns a third of its annual revenues through replicas. You might also call them souvenirs or décor, but certainly not investment works. “In our gallery, we call them boat anchors or doorstops,” Duncan said, adding that one often sees ‘Remingtons’ of this type on eBay. Gerald Peters Gallery will only take on consignment Remington sculptures that can be proven to have been produced during the artist’s lifetime or that were produced by authority of his widow.

An ounce of prevention

Buyers looking at posthumously created artworks should do their own sleuthing or hire an advisor—preferably a dealer familiar with this material—to determine when and by whom a particular work was produced. One of the first sources experts consult is the catalogue raisonné (the published annotated listing of all known artworks by an artist), such as Tomas Harris’ Goya’s Prints or Michael D. Greenbaum’s Icons of the West: Frederic Remington’s Sculpture. These provide illustrations that can be checked against an artwork one is looking to buy, noting when certain editions were produced, the number of copies made (if that information is available), which print publisher or foundry made the edition, changes made to the images and the quality of the impressions. Greenbaum went so far as to test the metals used in different editions, finding that an estate edition of Remington’s 1905 The Rattlesnake, produced on May 31, 1918, contained more tin and lead than those produced in a posthumous 1920 casting. (A metal test is not an uncommon tool in sculpture authentication.)

Joe Stanfield, director of fine art at Wright Auctions, recommends that prospective buyers ask for a printed copy of an artwork’s provenance—its history of ownership—which ideally will reveal an unbroken chain of custody, as well as where and when an artwork was first purchased. That information may be less available for much older works, such as a Rembrandt, than for a Remington, but it may still be intact for a Hogarth or a Goya. But, he added, it pays to work with an expert. “I might not be able to tell when a work was created, but there are scholars who know what to look for, and they can save you a lot of money and heartbreak,” he said.

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There is quite a bit to do and see at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, with men’s and women’s professional basketball, boxing matches, college basketball and hockey, concerts (Ariana Grande and Bruce Springsteen are on the docket for this spring), places to eat, places to drink and a store with Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty merch. Next up, Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, parent company of the Barclays Center, is going all in on art. This fall, Sarah Sze’s Wave, which consists of 250 screens projecting moving images, will be installed in the arena’s atrium, followed by the installation of large-scale paintings by Rashid Johnson and Mark Bradford in the new Flatbush Premium entrance. In the spring of 2027, Kambui Olujimi’s We Always Have Room For One More will go up on Ticketmaster Plaza.

Placing works of art in sports stadiums and arenas is not new. The first venue to do so in a big way was Arlington, Texas’s AT&T Stadium (home of the Dallas Cowboys), which in 2009 installed works by Doug Aitken, Olafur Eliasson, Ellsworth Kelly, Julie Mehretu and many more. Several others followed suit, including those used by baseball’s Florida Marlins, football’s Kansas City Chiefs and Minnesota Vikings, and basketball’s Golden State Warriors. What makes the Barclays Center’s embrace of art notable is that it recently inaugurated the sports world’s first residency program. Paul Pfeiffer, the arena’s first artist-in-residence, is well-known in the art world, having been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Whitney and other institutions, with works in the permanent collections of New York’s MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and other institutions in Europe and South America. He had a major solo exhibition at LA MOCA in 2023-2024 titled “Paul Pfieffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom,” which subsequently traveled to MCA Chicago and the Guggenheim Bilbao.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, sports has been a sustained focus of his practice, including his 2000 video The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which features a series of images of basketball games, and the 2001 The Long Count (The Rumble in the Jungle), which features the 1974 bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman—both of which edited out the actual athletes. In other works, Pfeiffer presents stills of basketball players with the ball removed or videos of basketball players in motion with the ball digitally edited out, revealing the athletes’ shapes and gestures. “He’s had this interest in the question: What is the player outside of the game? What is the player as a body?” Andria Hickey, artistic consultant to the Barclays Center, told Observer. “This sort of question of movement in space and taking out some of the specifics of the game to really examine that form. So, that was also a big interest of ours, his clear focus and investigation of basketball.”

Pfeiffer’s residency will be a collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Shaun Leonardo, whose social practice explores the intersection of community engagement and experimental pedagogies, often engaging the subjects of masculinity, sports and race. The two artists will create a media workshop bringing “together local participants, artists and community partners, with Barclays Center as both subject and site of inquiry,” Hickey explained. “We intentionally created the residency without the expectation of producing an artwork, allowing artists time to observe, think and dream.”

This isn’t Pfeiffer’s first time engaging with a sports venue. His audio and visual work Red Green Blue examined the mechanics of performance through close-up footage of  University of Georgia Redcoat Marching Band members and their directors during and between periods of football play. “Paul is very well known for the work he’s done with other stadiums,” Hickey said. “He’s created a number of films and video works and sound installations that have all dealt with the space and spectacle of sport, and in particular the arena as an architectural space. He’s also made sculptures about that. And he’s very invested in the whole infrastructure of what a sports stadium can be, from the people that work there, to the audience, to the way that the cameras frame the game. He’s investigating that space as it relates to broader social and cultural changes.”

Nominations from an art committee formed in 2024—currently consisting of LACMA director Michael Govan, LA MOCA chief curator and director of curatorial affairs Clara Kim, Serpentine director Hans Ulrich Obrist and Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak—guided the arena’s selection of artists, but the push to bring more art to the area came from co-owner Clara Wu Tsai. “It’s really a passion project of hers to bring art, sport and social justice into conversation,” Hickey said. “She’s very excited about the idea of bringing art to non-traditional spaces and non-traditional audiences.”

Sports fans and concert-goers probably know the basic rules—don’t touch wall works, don’t climb on sculptures and don’t take out your post-game aggressions on the art—but it is something of an experiment that sports venues have been conducting. “People really do respect the art and don’t damage them,” said Tracie Speca-Ventura, owner and president of the California-based company Sports & The Arts, which has installed artworks in more than 13 stadiums around the country over the past 15 years. “Concession carts damage artworks much more than fans do.” (She added that European soccer fans are rowdier than U.S. sports fans by a long shot.)

Hickey acknowledged that security is a priority. “We’re thinking about safety, but we’re also kind of working around it, if that’s a way to think about it, by specifically working with media and artists that make it easy for engagement with large crowds who may have a lot of beer in their hands.” She added that artist LaToya Ruby Frazier’s large-scale portraits of the New York Liberty, reinstalled at Barclays’ suite level, have been viewed by “large groups of people” whom she has found to be “quite respectful.”

Another less-than-surprising fact about art in sports venues is that it is often contextually themed. The artwork at Arrowhead Stadium and U.S. Bank Stadium celebrates regional artists in Kansas City and Minneapolis, respectively. But the large-scale artwork in AT&T Stadium is less about Dallas or sports and more focused on marquee artists such as Aitken, Mel Bochner, Eliasson, Kapoor, Jenny Holzer, Sol LeWitt, Mehretu, Odili Donald Odita and Lawrence Weiner. The stadium’s full collection consists of 99 paintings, sculptures and photographs by 66 artists, and local school groups regularly tour the works. “Our family always envisioned AT&T Stadium as more than just the home of the Dallas Cowboys,” Charlotte Jones, co-owner and chief brand officer of the Dallas Cowboys, told Observer. “It was designed to be a cultural landmark where sports and art exist side-by-side in a way that no other stadium has been able to replicate.”

Barclays veers a bit more toward the AT&T model than toward Arrowhead. “We are interested in Brooklyn artists, of course, and we will be showcasing a number of them, but we’re also really interested in bringing international global artists to Brooklyn,” Hickey explained. “We wanted to really allow the artists to be as creative as possible, to be as inspired as possible, and to follow their own inspiration. And so we did not create an umbrella theme. We are simply letting the artists lead.”

Artworks are not out of place in these venues because “sports arenas are not just for sports. These are event centers,” Speca-Ventura said, adding that “for sports franchises, an art collection opens up marketing opportunities and very good press.” The audience for this marketing includes people planning weddings, high school proms, birthday parties, graduations, bar mitzvahs, corporate outings and themed events, as sports venues compete with hotels, historic homes, convention centers and museums for these and other events. As usual, where there’s commerce, you’ll also find art.

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Noah Scalin, a multimedia artist living in Richmond, Virginia, had never heard of the South Carolina town of Lake City before looking online for arts festivals where he could show and sell his work. What caught his eye about ArtFields, at the time an eight-day town-wide visual arts festival in Lake City, was the best-in-show grand prize of $50,000. “I thought, ‘wow, that’s better than most other shows I enter,'” and he promptly submitted a stickers-on-panel work titled Of America: The Problem We All Still Live With, based on a Norman Rockwell 1964 image of Ruby Bridges integrating an all-white elementary school in New Orleans flanked by federal marshals. That artwork didn’t win the grand prize—he won it the following year with his stickers-on-panel Of America, September 4, 1957, which was based on photographic images of the integration of the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas—but it did propel his career trajectory. He was offered a solo exhibition that year at a Lake City art space, given another solo show at a gallery in North Charleston, and the painting itself was purchased by billionaire Darla Moore, the wealthiest person ever to hail from Lake City.

Moore did not get rich in Lake City, located in eastern South Carolina, approximately 80 miles from the state capital, Columbia. After graduating from high school, she left for college at the University of South Carolina, then earned an MBA at George Washington University before heading to New York City, where she moved up through the ranks at Chemical Bank and then Rainwater, Inc., founded by her husband, Richard Rainwater. Called by Forbes “The Toughest Babe in Business,” her specialty was turning failing companies into profitable ones, a skill she later applied to revitalizing Lake City, an agricultural town of 6,000 whose main source of income, tobacco, had declined amid nationwide reductions in smoking.

Her goal was to turn Lake City into a place where people would want to go rather than leave, which meant improving prospects, particularly for younger residents. Working with the local public schools, university and technical college, she invested millions to convert an old Walmart into the Continuum regional education center, where students may earn advanced placement credits, welding certifications and mechatronics training. She also developed scholarship programs that expand access to higher education across the state.

“ArtFields was designed to reimagine my hometown of Lake City and restore our community’s belief in itself by transforming into a living art gallery,” Moore told Observer. “The response has been beyond anything we imagined. Thousands of people now travel from far and wide to attend the festival and our year-round programs. Most importantly, young people who had left Lake City are coming back home because they see a future here for the first time in a long time.” (This isn’t her only philanthropic effort in the cultural sphere. Most recently, Moore made an unrestricted gift of $25 million to the Shed, the cultural center in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards that commissions, produces and presents a wide range of visual arts, performing arts and pop culture. In recognition, the Shed is renaming its level two gallery the Darla Moore Gallery.)

Going from eyesore to destination meant giving Lake City a purpose, and the arts have become the headline attraction. Artworks are displayed in local shop windows for the 17 days of the festival and, in some cases, businesses purchase the artworks to display year-round. These works, in addition to other rotating and permanent art installations, make the town look like an art gallery for a good part of the year. The U.S. is full of towns and cities that were once prosperous until their biggest employer closed up shop and left, leaving residents and local and state officials scrambling for ways to revive things. Does Lake City offer a model for the rest of the country? Asked more broadly: can the tourist industry replace actual industry, and can the arts lead the way?

The record isn’t fully clear. Perhaps the most notable example of an arts project leading an economic development effort is MASS MoCA—the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art—in North Adams, at the northwest corner of the state, which opened in 1999 with $60 million in state funding. The idea was to turn the abandoned Sprague Electric factory complex into a multi-arts center that would draw tourists: visitors who, many of them coming to Berkshire County during the summer months when Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow and the Williamstown Theatre Festival are in full swing, would eat at local restaurants, stay in local hotels, shop at local stores and generally spend money that would benefit the local economy.

MASS MoCA itself has proven to be a success, drawing 160,000 visitors annually, but the hoped-for revitalization of North Adams has been harder to identify. The downtown storefront occupancy rate is little changed from when the museum first opened. North Adams’ current unemployment rate of 6.9 percent, just above what it was when MASS MoCA opened, remains stubbornly above the state average of 5.1 percent, and its public schools’ rate is considerably below the state average in reading, science and math proficiency as well as high school graduation rates. Joe Thompson, MASS MoCA’s first director, lived in North Adams but sent his children to public schools in the neighboring city of Williamstown through a school choice program.

The most visible repurposing of a rural site into an arts hub is probably Marfa, Texas, a quiet ranching town that has become a much-lauded global arts hub primarily thanks to minimalist artist Donald Judd, who, when he moved to the area from New York in the 1970s, repurposed abandoned military buildings for to create space for massive installations, which eventually led to high-end art tourism, boutique development and cultural investment that now attracts tens of thousands of visitors annually.

Then there’s the repurposing of the Bethlehem Steel factory in Pennsylvania, which ceased steel production in 1995. Its large campus has since been turned into an arts and entertainment district, with free music, films, art displays, a casino and a National Museum of Industrial History that has created jobs not only within the 65,000-square-foot complex but in the surrounding community.

There are numerous ways to make the arts an attraction, one of which is designating areas of town as cultural districts—and there are hundreds of them around the country. Texas has 35 such districts, Louisiana 83 (22 in New Orleans alone), Iowa 34, Massachusetts 35, Maryland 24, Rhode Island 9 and New Mexico 7. There are others in California and New York, where the Fort Greene area of Brooklyn is a cultural district. The Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Americans for the Arts currently puts the number at “500+,” while the National Association of State Arts Agencies tallied more than 1,000. These designations do not themselves promote economic activity, but they point tourists to areas of possible interest.

Somewhat harder to chart is whether these districts have succeeded in revitalizing previously underutilized areas of town and generating new business activity. Louisiana, Rhode Island and Maryland exempt fine art from the state sales tax within arts and culture districts and artists in these districts are not required to pay state income tax on the sales of their artwork within the districts. The Louisiana legislature, faced with a budgetary shortfall, ended its tax exemption in 2025 after a seven-year run, suggesting that the benefits did not outweigh the drawbacks. In 2013, Rhode Island’s 1998 law was amended to permit artists throughout the state—and not just those living in a cultural district—to forgo the state income tax on artwork sales taking place within the state. The plan, modeled on Ireland’s national income tax exemption for the first €50,000 of profits or gains from the sale of their work by writers, composers, visual artists and sculptors who live and work in that country, is intended to encourage artists to move to or remain in Rhode Island.

The arts district in the one-time blue-collar city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, was sited where 23 unoccupied textile mill buildings stood, with the idea that it would attract artists and creative-sector companies to the mills. That has happened, but those loft spaces have also attracted people who work in Boston, where rents are much higher. Herb Weiss, former economic and cultural affairs officer for the city, noted that “the arts district was an effective marketing tool to pull artists and developers to the city.” Information on how many artists have moved to the city and whether their presence has stimulated economic growth is “anecdotal at best,” according to Jason Pezzullo, commerce director for the City of Pawtucket. “We’ve seen $1 billion in new investment over the past 10 years. Some of that may be due to the tax-exemption, but it’s something I wouldn’t know how to measure.”

Evidence that the arts, in particular and tourism, in general, can stimulate an economic turnaround is more anecdotal than data-driven—perhaps best described as aspirational. “The evidence base is weak, but the rhetoric from arts advocates is great,” said Douglas S. Noonan, a professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University who has studied cultural districts. Designating an area as an arts and culture district generally “doesn’t move the needle in terms of employment or reducing poverty or increasing the tax base,” although it sometimes increases property values.

“Arts and tourism aren’t a one-to-one replacement for the legacy industries that once anchored many communities,” said Stephanie Fortunato, director of special projects at the Global Cultural Districts Network, an initiative of the New York- and London-based AEA Consulting. “But they can diversify local economies by activating networks of public and private partners with shared interests. In communities facing disinvestment and job loss, where historic buildings need new uses after manufacturing has declined, this can be a stabilizing force.”

She noted that “many communities invest in artists and creative businesses as part of a comprehensive economic development strategy.” The elements of this often include adaptive reuse of vacant and underutilized buildings, support for resident artists and small businesses, stronger civic participation, creative use of public space, downtown revitalization, preservation of diverse cultural traditions, improved access to arts education and increased tourism. “In that mix, cultural districts are effective policy tools because they can advance multiple aims at once.”

The focus on increasing tourism is based on the idea of attracting outsiders who will invest or spend money, leaving the town more prosperous. However, the jobs most associated with tourism are service positions, which are generally minimum-wage, part-time and without benefits. Noonan believes a better approach is to “develop activities, such as arts activities, for locals. Make your community nicer to live in,” so that others will want to visit and live there, too.

ArtFields proved to be a success right away, but Randy Wilson, consulting architect for Lake City, said “the question we asked ourselves was how can we convert Lake City from being just an art festival to being a year-round destination.” Making the town itself a work of art was key to its transformation. “What unifies people are three things—music, food and art—and we have followed that path.” He noted that in 2011, two years before ArtFields held its first festival, “storefront occupancy was 20-30 percent. It’s 90 percent now, and the people inside have full-time, benefited jobs.” He added that the goal for Lake City is to be self-sustaining, with a workforce that stays rather than leaves, and that much of his current focus is on building additional housing units for the approximately 6,000 people who call the town home.

Over the course of 20 years and together with other community members through the Greater Lake City Alliance, Moore took over and began renovating downtown buildings, creating hotels, restaurants, a bookshop, barbershop, florist, salon, a bakery, a gift shop, three nonprofit art spaces and even a recording studio—the type of establishments that visitors would patronize during the ArtFields festival and throughout the rest of the year. ArtFields itself seeks out professional artists, but the town also created a juried art competition for school-aged children, ArtFields Jr., as well as a free summer art camp. “The goal is exposing young people to art,” said Carla Angus, ArtFields’ program director since 2021, who was born and raised in Lake City. “More students participate in the arts and want to make art. They are not intimidated by art, because they feel it’s for them.”

Meanwhile, Noah Scalin is back in town, now Lake City’s artist-in-residence, where he is working with community members on an outdoor 30-foot-long “interactive sticker mural.”

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President Ronald Reagan was generally seen as easy-going; not so much his wife. When portrait artist Aaron Shikler (1922-2015) was asked to paint the official White House portrait of the then-former president, neither of them liked it. Shikler painted the president’s portrait three times, and each one was rejected—one was too large, one was too casual and one “they just didn’t like it”—and the commission was finally given to a different artist. It didn’t kill his career, though. His posthumous portrait of President John F. Kennedy hangs in the White House along with those of First Ladies Jacqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan, and he had also painted likenesses of U.S. senators, Supreme Court justices, cabinet officers, socialites and people who simply had a lot of money.

Still, no one enjoys being rejected. Just ask Sarah Boardman, who painted a portrait of President Trump that was briefly hung in the Colorado State Capitol. President Trump didn’t like it and said so, but his followers were truly vitriolic in their scorn. Admittedly, it wasn’t a great likeness, but the hatred directed at the artist was remarkable. Her website does not list where she lives, and she would not discuss the circumstances at all. “I have had so much negativity from the whole debacle that I am not entering into that fray again,” she said in an email.

Someone who would talk about his experience is Paul Emsley, whose portraits of author V.S. Naipaul and former South African anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela hang in London’s National Portrait Gallery. However, his 2013 portrait of Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was the subject of withering scorn by critics and others on both sides of the Atlantic after it was first displayed at the National Portrait Gallery. One writer in the Guardian referred to the portrait’s “sepulchral gloom,” while another in the Daily Telegraph likened the painting to a “mawkish book illustration.” It scarcely matters that Prince William called the portrait “just amazing” and “absolutely beautiful,” an assessment with which his wife agreed. Perhaps they were just being polite.

Emsley, too, claimed that “I like to think I’m polite, considerate of the feelings of the sitter”—he met with Kate Middleton four times before completing the portrait, talking with and taking photographs of her, and just looking at her—but he also asserts the right to be an artist. “In the age of photography, portrait painting is almost anathema. Why on earth do we still paint portraits? If you look at the photographs of Kate, on which my portrait was based, you see that I’ve changed an awful lot. There is a balance of realism and going beyond to something more mysterious. There is a consideration of the structure of the face, drawing out what’s distinctive about the face, the sense of mystery, timelessness, quiet.”

The negativity he received was nowhere near as violent as that Sarah Boardman experienced but, still, “the response was a surprise. My previous portraits had been well received, which made the reaction hard to understand. It was a difficult time. There seemed to be a kind of hysteria in the media and on social media. There was no attempt on the part of the critics to understand how the portrait fitted in with the rest of my work.”

Portraits are inherently a celebration of a life, but whose vision of that life? Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Winston Churchill so offended the prime minister that he had it destroyed, and Peter Hurd may best be remembered for President Lyndon Johnson’s verdict on his portrait (“the ugliest thing I ever saw”). Everyone wants to be younger or trimmer, with a less prominent nose and fuller lips.

Parents may sometimes be difficult clients when commissioning portraits of their children—painter John Singer Sargent was once asked why he completely redid the face of a young woman 15 times, answering, “She had a mother”—and especially if the portrait is posthumous. In that case, the artist will need to work solely from photographs, and different people may have competing images they want represented in the final work. Jennifer Welty, a painter in Santa Cruz, California who specializes in portraits of children, said that a problem for her is that a finished portrait may take as long as a year, during which time the looks of the young subject may change significantly. Taller, thinner, suddenly pubescent. “I have to discuss this all with the parents so that they understand that the painted image doesn’t grow older with the child,” she said.

With older subjects—the politician, the university president, the chairman of the board, the foundation director—the portraitist will need to know at what age the subject will be depicted and what aspects of the individual are to be brought out, such as dressed in a business suit or in a golf shirt. Portrait subjects generally want to be depicted as they looked when they started the job, not when they are leaving it. Marc Mellon, a portrait sculptor in Redding, Connecticut, stressed the need to determine “who is approving the commission from the get-go: Is it a committee? Is it the head of the company, or is it the widow?” That wisdom came to him the hard way, after he was commissioned to create an eight-foot-tall statue of Dr. Alton Oxner, after whom the Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, was named and which had commissioned the posthumous statue. A committee composed of medical center directors provided Mellon with a series of photographs of Dr. Oxner, most of which were taken toward the end of his life.

The committee approved both the small-scale and full-size models of the statue, and Mellon was ready to go to casting when the doctor’s widow “came to my studio to look at the sculpture.” She wasn’t happy with the work and asked how he had picked that pose and that expression, at which point the artist showed her the photographs he had been given. “‘Oh, I’m going to give you better photographs,'” she said, and supplied Mellon with pictures of her husband taken 20 years earlier, looking younger and more vital. The changes that needed to be made were extensive, not only to the head, “but also to the whole carriage,” he said. “A man in his 60s holds himself very differently than one in his 80s.” Fortunately, “adjustments were made in the budget” to pay for the changes.

Nothing says luxury and extravagance as much as a portrait, and the people who commission one are almost invariably wealthy. The clients may be the CEOs of large corporations, foundations or universities, or are to the manner born, and they are accustomed to giving orders that underlings must carry out. “Occasionally, I get treated like the plumber coming to unclog the toilet,” said Jim Pollard, a portrait artist in Cazenovia, Wisconsin. Many artists describe an unspoken tug-of-war with their clients, both sides outwardly looking to please but each wanting to assert control over the process and final image. “Ultimately, I am an artist, and I’m painting what I see, which may not be exactly what the person commissioning me wants to see,” Welty said. “I’ve asked people, ‘Why did you hire me?'” She noted that some people think of a painted portrait as though it were a selfie, where one can make instant changes on a cell phone. “You can’t make major changes with a flick of a paintbrush.”

Portrait artists not only need artistic skills but also a great deal of people skills, the type that psychologists often need to develop. Australian painter Paul Newton recalled “unveiling a portrait to an important client in New York. The subject and his wife attended and were very happy with the portrait overall, but in their words, there was ‘something not quite right about the mouth’. I immediately thought of Sargent and felt like I was in good company. I told them I would be more than happy to tweak the mouth to get it right. I remember they stood back several meters from the painting, which was on a display easel. I mixed up some paint on my palette, and before beginning the process, I described to them in detail what I was proposing to do. They nodded their assent, and I walked up to the canvas to place my first brushstroke. As my brush touched the canvas, they said ‘Stop, that’s it, you’ve got it!’ To this day, I’m still not sure whether I actually applied any paint to the canvas, but they seemed happy with the result. The gallery director and I exchanged a smile. My takeaway from that was that sometimes people just want to feel like they are being heard.”

Finding a good fit in a portrait artist requires more than just Googling those words. Many artists are found by clients who see their work in friend’s or associate’s homes. Not long after President George W. Bush left office, he and his wife were invited by old friends Annette and Harold Simmons to dinner at their home in Dallas. The dinner celebrated both Harold Simmons’ successful kidney transplant and the Bushes’ reemergence as private citizens and residents of Dallas, but the conversation turned to the nearby Southern Methodist University, where a school of education was being built and named for Annette (based on the Simmons’ $20 million gift to the university in 2007) and where the former president was setting up a presidential library. Annette mentioned a portrait was being painted of her by John Howard Sanden, which was to be displayed inside the education school, and the subject piqued the interest of the Bushes, who were looking for someone to paint his official White House portrait. President Bush asked “Is he easy to work with?” and she offered profuse praise of Sanden. Within a few weeks, a staffer in the Bush presidential library emailed Sanden about coming to meet the former president. The resulting portrait now hangs in the White House in the Great Hall where all the presidential portraits are displayed.

“Is he easy to work with?” is likely to be a question on a lot of people’s minds, but it may mean a range of things. Will sitting for a portrait take up a lot of my time? Will the artist take suggestions or make changes? Will the artist make me look younger? Who will win this tug-of-war? John Singer Sargent defined a portrait as “a picture of someone who has something wrong with his mouth”—meaning that people are often dissatisfied with their mouth, ears, nose or other features and take it out on the artist painting their portrait. Raymond Kinstler (1926-2019) claimed that one of his most difficult sitters was actress Katharine Hepburn, because “she was very opinionated. She had very strong ideas about her persona and questioned me about every brushstroke. I would carefully explain what I’m doing, but at one point she told me, ‘You talk too much. Why don’t you paint a little more?'”

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• What Collectors Need to Know When Buying Art and Antiquities Abroad

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Imagine examining an auction catalogue description that read, “Old painting, looks Dutch (or something).” But describe that same picture as being by a “Follower of Rembrandt” or “In the manner of Rembrandt,” and buyer interest is piqued. Maybe it is an unknown Rembrandt, or as close to a Rembrandt as you will ever be able to afford. “An important artist’s name still gets people excited, even if a work might not be by that artist,” Monica Brown, managing director of fine art at Freeman’s auction house, told Observer.

At a 2025 Freeman’s sale of Old Masters and 19th-century art, one painting, View of the Bacino with the Bucintoro and Gondolas attributed as “Manner of Canaletto,” fetched $25,600, well above its $4,000-6,000 estimate. Canaletto was a highly esteemed Venetian painter whose c. 1732 canvas Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day set an auction record for the artist in July of last year at Christie’s, earning $43.9 million—but how do you value a picture that merely looks like his work? At that same auction was another painting, The Grand Canal Looking South From the Molo With a View of Santa Maria della Salute, attributed to a “Follower of Canaletto,” which also sold for $25,600. One might guess that the same person bought both pictures, perhaps hoping to arrive at a more exact attribution for a work that, if it turned out to be an actual Canaletto, could also be worth tens of millions of dollars. It would be like buying a scratch ticket at the gas station that turned out to be a winning Mega Millions ticket.

“Manner of…” and “Follower of…” are just some of the auction house designations that have no true art historical meaning but are a form of marketing, according to Richard Wright, partner and CEO of the auction house conglomerate Rago/Wright. “Truthfully, it is a way of saying ‘We really don’t know.'” This terminology of ignorance has its own hierarchy, as explained in Sotheby’s official glossary of terms. Artworks that cannot be fully authenticated are placed on a sliding scale of information and belief:

1 GIOVANNI BELLINI In our opinion a work by the artist. (When the artist’s forename(s) is not known, a series of asterisks, followed by the surname of the artist, whether preceded by an initial or not, indicates that in our opinion the work is by the artist named.

2 ATTRIBUTED TO GIOVANNI BELLINI In our opinion probably a work by the artist but less certainty as to authorship is expressed than in the preceding category.

3 STUDIO OF GIOVANNI BELLINI In our opinion a work by an unknown hand in the studio of the artist which may or may not have been executed under the artist’s direction.

4 CIRCLE OF GIOVANNI BELLINI In our opinion a work by an as yet unidentified but distinct hand, closely associated with the named artist but not necessarily his pupil.

5 STYLE OF…………; FOLLOWER OF GIOVANNI BELLINI In our opinion a work by a painter working in the artist’s style, contemporary or nearly contemporary, but not necessarily his pupil.

6 MANNER OF GIOVANNI BELLINI In our opinion a work in the style of the artist and of a later date.

7 AFTER GIOVANNI BELLINI In our opinion a copy of a known work of the artist.

Only the first designation, “By Giovanni Bellini,” is both art-historical and legal. In the first instance, the attribution is certified by documentation of a particular painting—known as provenance, providing a chain of ownership from the artist’s studio to the consignor in the present day—and/or the opinion of acknowledged experts in the artist’s work, such as academic or independent scholars.

“A consignor brings in a Giacometti, and we send photographs of it and any documentation to Paris to get it authenticated,” Wright explained. Paris here refers to the Fondation Giacometti, based in France, which has an authentication committee that verifies the authenticity of paintings, sculptures, drawings and decorative art objects by the Swiss-born Alberto Giacometti. “Otherwise, we need sales records.”

He added that the auction houses he oversees have research teams who look for experts or, in the event that there aren’t recognized experts, dealers in particular artists’ work for their opinions. Frequently, those opinions are provided free of charge, but sometimes experts require a payment, usually between $150 and $5,000. If a payment is required, “there usually is a negotiation with the consignor over who pays. It usually is the consignor,” although the cost might be split if the work is authenticated as being by the particular artist. “If the piece is authenticated, it usually will sell.”

Without full attribution, a work represents a gamble for the auction house, the consignor and the buyer alike. According to Wright, a work properly attributed to Giacometti might sell for $100,000, while one that is only “Attributed to” the artist might be estimated at $2,000-3,000.

Marianne Berandi, director of European art at Heritage Auctions, told Observer that the cost to the consignor is usually less if the experts contacted are willing to offer opinions based on photographs of an artwork. However, “many artists’ foundations, particularly those in France, want to see the original, which requires shipping the work” abroad, adding significantly to the cost of authentication.

Claiming that a given artwork is “by” a specific artist is ultimately a legal matter—a guarantee—as the Uniform Commercial Code in all 50 states requires that items have to be what the seller claims them to be, or the seller—in this case, the auction house, although it could be an art gallery—is obligated to take them back and refund the money paid. Artworks that are “Attributed to…” or “Studio of…” or “Circle of…” or anything else have no similar protection.

Auction houses deal regularly with artworks whose consignors claim are by well-known artists, and in many instances, these consignors are given unwelcome news. At that same Freeman’s sale, a consignor claimed the painting A Capriccio With Figures Gathered Around the Obelisk of Augustus, a View of the Pantheon, the Statue of Marcus Aurelius and the Temple of Sybil, Tivoli was by Giovanni Paolo Panini, and “we showed it to some specialists who said it was by Panini and others who said they couldn’t be sure but might be ‘School of Panini,'” Brown said. “It wasn’t definitive, so we attributed it to ‘Giovanni Paolo Panini and Studio.'” The painting sold for $76,700, well under the $100,000-150,000 estimate—the art market’s way of saying “Maybe, maybe not.”

Informing consignors that their works are not provably by the artists they claim can be fraught. “Some consignors take back their works, perhaps to try their luck at some other auction house,” she said. “However, if the estimate doesn’t change on the basis of the attribution, the consignors usually are satisfied and let us sell it.”

Then there are artworks that are only partially by the artist. John Constable, Berandi said, painted numerous portraits throughout his career and had a studio of apprentice artists helping him. “You wouldn’t expect Constable to paint every square inch of those portraits, but you can recognize some areas that clearly look like the hand of Constable.” In those instances, the artwork would be attributed to “John Constable and Studio.”

Buyers of artworks with uncertain attributions vary in their motivations. Some winning bidders are dealers in particular artists, or treasure-hunting collectors, willing to do some research to prove the art is authentic. “Some buyers appear to have more information than we have,” Wright said. “They’re not just buying a lottery ticket.” He pointed to a work in a 2021 sale at Rago Auctions identified as being by an “Unknown Artist” titled Infanta Margarita Teresa of Spain. It resembled paintings by Diego Velázquez and was estimated at $2,000-3,000 but sold for $27,500. Perhaps in the future, it will show up at a major auction house as a Velázquez with a multi-million-dollar estimate. Similarly, someone took a gamble on a painting of feathered creatures at Freeman’s November 4 sale that was untitled and attributed to a “Follower of Melchior de Hondecoeter (1636-1695) | Attributed to Philips van Kouwenberg (1671-1729),” when it fetched $89,400 against an estimate of $15,000-20,000.

Part of the job of Old Masters dealers is to find misattributed or underpriced works by well-known artists, doing in artworks what hedge fund traders do in securities. One of the most notable examples of a misattribution took place in 2006 when Sotheby’s London sold a painting titled The Cardsharps, labeled in the catalogue as being by a follower of Italian baroque artist Caravaggio, for £42,000; it was later reattributed as a genuine Caravaggio, triggering a lawsuit. The auction house had consulted Caravaggio experts who claimed that the consigned painting was a copy of another on display at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The consignor claimed that the auction house had been negligent, but in early 2015, London’s High Court decided that Sotheby’s had “reasonably come to the view that the quality of the painting was not sufficiently high to indicate that it might be by Caravaggio.”

But some buyers simply like the look of a certain artwork, believing it would suit their home’s overall décor or fit nicely in an existing art collection. Berandi said that interior decorators frequently “snap up” works in the “Manner of…” and “Style of…” categories that suit their clients’ tastes. If the bidding price isn’t all that high, there is no real harm in buying it and “you can get a lot of painting for your money.”

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You may think of banks as places to keep savings, take out loans and manage credit cards—but a growing number of major financial institutions also want to help you build and manage your art collection. Citi and Emigrant banks have been in the lead here, but Bank of America is the most recent to launch an art consulting service for its high-net-worth private banking clients. “We help clients acquire works of art, whether they’re just starting or they’re looking to refine their collections,” Drew Watson, head of Bank of America’s art services group, told Observer. “And then also consignment services. That’s the service that we offer on the sell side, where we help clients sell art through partnerships with the major global auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s.” The offerings don’t stop there. “We also formalized our art planning expertise, where we’re actively talking with clients about incorporating art into their estate plan, thinking about the succession plan for an art collection, and then also helping them think through all of the tax and non-tax related issues that relate to the transition of a collection.”

Banks weren’t always so attentive to clients who collected art. Whatever bank steel magnate Andrew Carnegie used probably didn’t advise him on which Old Master paintings to purchase, but of course, back then, art collecting was seen as a hobby. The idea that art could be an asset class—which is the prevailing view today—was decades off. “Clients have, over the years, come to us requesting specific services around their art collections, because as you know, art as an asset class has really increased in value over the past two, three decades and represents a significant portion of many of our clients’ net worth,” Watson said. “And they are looking to their banking institution, their fiduciary, for unbiased guidance and intelligence about how to best manage this particular asset.”

For private banking clients, art consulting functions more as a concierge benefit than a pay-for-service arrangement. “We’re looking for clients with a $100 million net worth and an art collection of $20 million fair market value or greater,” he explained. “For art consulting, the client criteria, the relationship minimum is $50 million net worth with $25 million on the firm. For consignment services, it’s similar. And then for art planning, it’s really for our strategic relationships at the firm, which are $10 million-plus.”

Many of the specialty services offered by Bank of America, Citi and Emigrant overlap with those provided by independent art advisors. “We provide collectors globally with objective, curatorially informed guidance across the full arc of art collection and maintenance, whether they are buying one artwork or building a collection,” said Betsy Bickar, head of art advisory at Citi, which inaugurated its program in 1979. Art consultancy services offered by banks run the gamut from educating clients on artists or a particular work of art, doing due diligence (provenance, literature, exhibition history and condition) before the purchase of an artwork, helping them navigate the process of buying and selling, as well as how to care for, ship, store, appraise, insure and create documentation for objects in a collection.

There are several other services not generally offered by independent art advisors, including art-backed lending that uses artworks in a collection as collateral. Suzanne Gyorgy, a partner at Emigrant Bank Fine Art, told Observer that the firm “can arrange all aspects of collateralized art loans, from appraisals to negotiating the terms of a loan and finally lending the money, and we can do it all in-house.” Emigrant offers loans of between $1 million and $100 million with terms up to 15 years, secured by a broad range of collecting categories. Trust and estate planning and tax strategies are additional areas where bank art consulting groups have an advantage over independent art advisors, serving clients whose art collections are but one aspect of their overall investment portfolios. “Under the Emigrant umbrella, we can tap into a lot of expertise,” Gyorgy said.

The cost to high-net-worth individuals for bank art consulting is not particularly high and, in some cases, there is no charge at all. “For art consulting, there is no additional fee as long as you meet our client relationship minimum,” Watson said. “That’s just a value-added service for those particular relationships at that size. For consignment services, the sell side, we do charge a fee of two percent to four percent on the transactions with the auction houses. And then for art planning, again, it’s value-added, no fees.” For art-backed loans, he noted, there are origination fees as well as an interest rate spread—the difference between the interest rate charged by banks on loans and the interest rate they pay on deposits—that is charged over the base interest rate.

The professionals doing this work are bankers, but they’re bankers with extensive experience in the art field. Bickar was a director of New York’s Sean Kelly Gallery and founded an art space in Costa Rica that showcased emerging artists from Central America. Gyorgy, a member of the Association of Professional Art Advisors, was global head of Citi Art Advisory for 14 years before moving to Emigrant Bank in 2023. And Watson was a business manager at Christie’s, where he oversaw commercial finance, deal structuring and negotiation, business operations and cross-functional teams for six art sale categories across auction, private sale and online channels.

The main reason a collector might work with a bank art consulting department versus an independent advisor is that the banker-advisors can tailor their advice to their clients’ broader financial interests. “Going back to this idea of art as an asset class, our clients don’t really think about art as a pure investment per se, but they know that it is an asset that they carry on their balance sheet that is a significant portion of their net worth,” Watson said. “And any activity that is done around an art collection is in the context of their broader wealth strategy and their banking relationships. So, we don’t run into a situation where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”

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Can you tell the time on that Swatch watch, or does the look of splattered paint on the dial and wristband make the time hard to see—or perhaps irrelevant? Swatch, which for 40 years has produced limited-edition lines of watches with designs by such artists as Keith Haring, Nam June Paik, Sam Francis, Yoko Ono, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Piet Mondrian, Roy Lichtenstein and quite a few others, has recently released two new ones: a Jackson Pollock featuring his 1947 painting Alchemy and a Paul Klee edition with a portion of his 1919 The Bavarian Don Giovanni. (Both works are part of the permanent collection of the Guggenheim.) As wristwatches go, the Pollock ($115) and Klee ($105) are priced between a Timex and a Citizen—expensive for your 12-year-old’s first timepiece but the right sort of novelty gift for an art-enthusiast boyfriend on your second anniversary.

Perhaps the greatest novelty of all is finding so many mostly well-known images by mostly well-known artists on a growing number of products. Swatch has worked with several museums in the U.S. and Europe, according to Carlo Giordanetti, a member of the Swatch Design Committee and chief executive officer of the Swatch Art Palace in Shanghai. These include the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Centre Pompidou and the Louvre in Paris, Tate and Tate Modern in the U.K. as well as MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York City. Additionally, he told Observer, “Swatch Art Journey Collections are also sold in the museum shops of the institutions involved in each collaboration.” He added that the brand has also licensed images from living artists such as Kenny Scharf and Joana Vasconcelos.

Swatch isn’t the only company producing wristwatches with notable art images on their dials. Musart has its own collection, with licensed designs by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian and Andy Warhol. Another company, WatchCraft, has artistic images on a series of its watches, although none of them appear to be based on artwork by well-known artists, including its Gaudi Three-Tone-Wide, which is unrelated to the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí.

Licensing of art images for one product or another has been on an upward trajectory for years, and it is difficult to find a big-name artist of the present or past who has not been swept up in it. In recent weeks, the Amsterdam-based clothing brand Scotch & Soda released a collection of apparel items said to be “inspired” by the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, including a striped long-sleeve t-shirt priced roughly the same as the Pollock Swatch. A few years back, the Metropolitan Museum of Art partnered with PacSun in a deal that, according to Martin Cribbs, vice president of brand management at the brand extension licensing firm Beanstalk, “blew the doors open” to Millennial and Gen Z audiences.

A study conducted in 2024 by Licensing International, a New York City-based trade organization for the global licensing industry, found that global retail sales of licensed merchandise for art properties reached $2.47 billion in 2017, increasing to $3.95 billion in 2024. Its members licensed $3.69 billion for merchandise and services worldwide in 2024. Art properties are defined as everything from individual artists supporting their artistic endeavors via licensing to businesses and organizations that create or own art and design specifically used to decorate a range of products, including prints, NFTs, home décor, housewares, textiles, publishing, giftware and apparel. According to a spokesperson for Licensing International, “nonprofit licensing still has a low share of the market at less than one percent but appears to be a high potential segment moving forward,” adding that nonprofits increased their licensing by 16.8 percent in 2024 and 2023 itself saw growth of 19.4 percent.

The Artists Rights Society, which represents more than 100,000 living artists and artists’ estates in negotiating licensing agreements with manufacturers of all types, has also seen “an increased interest in art licensing,” according to Andrea Fisher-Scherer, director of merchandise licensing. “We receive more and more requests for licensing art images,” many of those inquiries coming at the annual Licensing Expo, which takes place in May in Las Vegas.

Among the licensing deals that the Artists Rights Society has arranged are with clothing designer Ulla Johnson for patterns based on images by painters Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, Shinola watches that borrow from the palette of painter Georgia O’Keeffe, a Louise Bourgeois collection for Mene jewelry, Orlebar Brown swimsuits using imagery from painters David Salle and Stuart Davis, Herschel Supply backpacks with designs by painter Miriam Schapiro and New York’s Museum of Modern Art for its Matisse slippers. “Licensing revenues are significant for artists’ estates and foundations,” Fisher-Scherer said. “Particularly for the foundations that give grants, licensing helps them generate money.”

Although the estate of Roy Lichtenstein is not a member of the Artists Rights Society, Frank Avila-Goldman, executive director of arts and intellectual property for the estate, said that the estate licenses images by the artist for a variety of products, including “Uniqlo, PUMA/BMW, Skateroom, Supply Stickers, Commes des Garçons/Junya Watanabe and U.S. Postal Service stamps, as well as various movies/streaming services/TV licensing.” The revenues earned from these licenses are generated “in the interest of supporting museum and cultural institutions.”

Licensing arrangements are individually negotiated, but Ilana Wilensky, president of Jewel, a global licensing company whose clients include the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, New York Botanical Garden, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Natural History Museum, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum as well as contemporary artists around the world, says they “most typically run for two to three years. During that time, the artist or museum receives a royalty on each product sold. They also retain approval rights over how their brand and images are used, ensuring the final products align with their standards and identity.” She added that there are benefits for the licensee and the buyer, as “licensing can help cultural institutions extend their archives beyond the walls of the museum and reach entirely new audiences,” while for many buyers “owning an original work of art isn’t possible, but wearing a dress inspired by an artist or having a pillow featuring a work from a museum collection allows them to express that love of art in a personal, accessible way.”

Perhaps the single largest licensee is the Norman Rockwell Licensing Company, based in Niles, Illinois, which licenses images by the artist (1894-1978) for use on hundreds of products every year, including jigsaw puzzles, coffee mugs, fabrics, date books, paper plates, scented candle boxes, wine bottle labels, Christmas ornaments and bedspreads and sheets.

Not every artist’s estate or foundation welcomes the opportunity to license images for products. Adolph “Gottlieb’s position was that the manufacture and sale of reproductions reduces interest in (or creates a reduced desire to experience) the original,” said Sanford Hirsch, executive director of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. In 2023, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, which opposes the use of Mitchell imagery for commercial purposes, sent a cease-and-desist letter to French luxury brand Louis Vuitton after it featured the artist’s paintings in the background of advertisements for the brand’s Capucines handbags. Fisher-Scherer noted that the Mark Rothko estate “generally doesn’t care for the artist’s images used on three-dimensional products,” since that entails a “manipulation of the artwork to fit the products.”

A great-niece of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo brought a lawsuit against a Panamanian-based licensing agency that represented the artist’s heirs for permitting the artist’s name and image to be used on alcoholic drinks, dolls and other products. The principal offending product was a Mattel-produced Frida Kahlo doll as part of its “Inspiring Women” series. “It should have been a much more Mexican doll,” the great-niece said, “dressed in more Mexican clothing, with Mexican jewelry.”

“Licensing revenue can indeed be an important resource for grantmaking programs, including those of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, as well as the Keith Haring Foundation,” said Christine J. Vincent, managing director of The Aspen Institute’s Artist-Endowed Foundations Initiative. “The artists associated with both of these foundations embraced a robust involvement with the marketplace as a dimension of their art practice during their lifetimes.” Noting that some artists’ foundations avoid licensing images for souvenir items such as refrigerator magnets and coffee mugs, she said that “a number of artist-endowed foundations license the manufacture of objects created by their artists as artistic endeavors and licensed by the artists themselves during their lifetimes, including the Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Judd Foundation. In each of these cases, product licensing plays an important role to increase the public’s awareness and understanding of the artist’s creative works and principles, even as it may also generate revenue used to support the Foundations’ charitable programs.”

Jeff Koons, Vik Muniz, Julian Schnabel and Kara Walker have all licensed images to the giftware company Bernardaud, while Samsung has a line of “Frame” televisions that, when the set is off, display a work of art on the screen; among the artists represented are Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Jackson Pollock. A separate arrangement between automobile manufacturer BMW and living artists has produced 20 “art cars” decorated with designs by a range of artists, including David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Julie Mehretu, A.R. Penck and Andy Warhol. The first car in the series, a 3.0 CSL, was created in 1975 with designs by Alexander Calder and the most recent was in 2024, the BMW M Hybrid V8 with imagery by Julie Mehretu. These automobiles are not produced in quantity but are singular vehicles used primarily in the annual 24-hour race at Le Mans, France. After the race, the cars become museum pieces for BMW.

“The idea for the BMW Art Cars was born at the racetrack back in 1975, when drivers and management thought it would look amazing if an artist such as Alexander Calder could design a car,” Thomas Girst, global head of cultural engagement for the BMW Group, told Observer. The artist was contacted and provided a maquette—a small-scale version of a larger sculptural design—for the car that entered the race. Most of the other artists in the series, who are selected by a jury of international museum curators and directors, travel to Germany to paint directly onto the cars or oversee the application of their designs. “In 2010 Jeff Koons spent weeks with our designers and engineers. In 1979, Warhol flew over from NYC with his entourage and painted his M1 race car in just 28 minutes.” Julie Mehretu, on the other hand, “created the African Film and Media Arts Collective as part of her work on the art car.”

They are still race cars, he noted, and artists cannot do anything that adds weight to the vehicles or affects aerodynamics and their ability to race. “Julie thought of her car not so much as a rolling sculpture but rather a performative painting.” Notably, the professional drivers of these cars don’t treat them as precious objects and race to win. Jenny Holzer’s car won in 1999, while Roy Lichtenstein’s came in sixth in 1977, though first in its class. Mehretu’s car crashed at Le Mans. “The drivers were overeager,” Girst said. While the art cars themselves are not licensed products, many are produced in miniature as editions costing between €199 and €1,000, available at BMW dealerships or online. The artists receive a royalty for each miniature sold, and some have been more sought-after than others. Both the Warhol and Koons miniatures have sold out, while the unlimited edition of Mehretu’s has already sold more than 9,000.

More art market insights

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• Inside the Art Marketplace, Elliot Safra’s Bid to Make Private Sales More Efficient

• What Sotheby’s Buyer’s Premium Increase Reveals About the Major Houses’ Evolving Commercial Strategies

• Artificial Intelligence Is Quietly Rewriting the Rules of Art Valuation

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Dolores Olmedo was a prominent art collector and close friend of Diego Rivera who, over the course of her lifetime, acquired more than 140 of his works and 25 paintings by Frida Kahlo, many directly from the artists themselves. When it came time to consider her own cultural legacy, rather than donating her holdings to a museum, she opened Mexico City’s Dolores Olmedo Museum in La Noria, a 16th-century hacienda in Xochimilco, making clear that she wished the collection to remain there “for the Mexican people.” Olmedo died in 2002, having seen her museum, which holds the world’s largest collection of works by both Rivera and Kahlo, become a beloved cultural hub.

In opening the Dolores Olmedo Museum, she  joined the exclusive club of private museum founders that includes Albert Barnes, Henry Clay Frick, Eli Broad, Peter Brant, Norton Simon, Christian Levett, Henry Walters, Raymond Nasher, David and Carmen Kreeger, Sterling and Francine Clark and Emily and Mitch Rales.

Many other high-net-worth art collectors have also taken this path, though not all of them successfully. Chicago businessman and President Reagan’s ambassador-at-large for cultural affairs Daniel Terra (1911-1996) founded a private museum—actually two museums, one in Chicago and the other outside of Paris—to showcase his 750-work collection of Hudson River Valley and American Impressionist painting. Both closed, the result of a failure to achieve financial viability. The Terra Foundation for American Art then donated the bulk of its collection to the Art Institute of Chicago and shifted its focus to grantmaking. Donald and Shelley Rubin, collectors of Himalayan art, opened a museum to display 1,000-plus objects in the Manhattan building that had been the department store Barneys, but 20 years later, they shut down the venture due to budgetary shortfalls. The Rubin Museum of Art now operates as a “museum without walls,” lending objects to institutions that seek to display and research Himalayan art.

Another cautionary tale is the Hammer Museum, opened in 1990 by Occidental Petroleum Corporation chairman Armand Hammer (1898-1990) three weeks before he died. His large collection of Old Master and 19th-century European paintings and drawings was acclaimed, but by 1992, those in charge of the museum negotiated with the University of California, Los Angeles, to take over the whole thing. Running a museum cannot be just a vanity project for someone with money and ego.

Having your name on the door of a museum is one thing; keeping the place open and financially sustainable is quite another. The Barnes Foundation was established by Dr. Albert Barnes (1872-1951), who set up his collection of 2,500 works of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modern art in a museum in the town of Merion, Pennsylvania. He required strict adherence to his often unwelcoming rules. The museum was available to visitors by invitation only, open just two days per week. Prospective visitors needed to apply for permission to come, swearing to certain art theories held by Barnes. In the 1960s, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office prodded the Barnes, as a tax-exempt educational institution, to be more accessible to the public, but entry was still quite limited—100 visitors per day. As a business model, it hardly looked promising.

By 2002, the Barnes’ board, facing a rapidly declining endowment, petitioned the courts to amend the institution’s charter to permit a move to Philadelphia, where several foundations and philanthropists had pledged $150 million to erect a new building and endow the transplanted institution. That new building opened to the public in May 2012, without those restrictions, and could not have been further from the wishes of Dr. Barnes, who wanted nothing to do with Philadelphia society—but continuing the course Barnes had originally set was no longer possible. Today, there is a lot of engaging programming at the Barnes, including a monthly First Friday evening program featuring music and access to the collection, a film series, a lecture series and classes and workshops. Highlighting Barnes’ commitment to racial equality and social justice, exhibitions and films celebrate artists who are Black, indigenous, people of color and women, many of whom were “overlooked during Dr. Barnes’s time,” said a spokeswoman.

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In the back storage rooms at Rago Auctions in Lambertville, New Jersey, is a large inventory of mostly wooden pedestals, painted black or white, in various sizes, for consignments of sculpture that arrive without them. Sometimes, painting consignments come in without frames. Rago doesn’t keep a supply of frames in back, because “frames are customized,” Meredith Hilferty, director of fine art sales at the auction house, told Observer, adding that she wouldn’t want to squeeze a painting into the wrong-sized frame.

Some contemporary paintings have paint along the sides of the canvas and are not intended to be framed; for those that ought to be framed, Hilferty informs consignors that if they don’t want to provide a frame, she will have one made and deduct the cost from the sale price. “Frames and pedestals help the sale, because they elevate the presentation,” she explained. Prospective bidders get a sense, thanks to those frames and pedestals, of what the artworks might look like in their homes. Without them, bidders need to use their imaginations, and while a work might sell anyway, it might sell for less. Better not to chance it.

Pedestals for sculptures and frames for paintings are generally viewed as accessories to be switched out as tastes change from one era or one collector to another. The art is what has prominence. Still, paintings without frames often do not look complete, according to the dealers and auctioneers who sell them, and small and even medium-sized sculptures may seem inconsequential when not shown on a pedestal that raises them to eye level.

And it’s not just dealers who believe this. So do artists. Deborah Butterfield, well known for her large-scale sculptures of wood and metal horses, some exceeding seven feet in height and weighing two tons, also produces equine figures in smaller dimensions—20 inches high, perhaps weighing only five pounds. For these, she tells dealers that they must be placed on pedestals. “They aren’t colts or ponies but adult horses, and when people put them on the floor, it makes them look like poodles or door stops,” she told Observer. “It drives me crazy.”

Butterfield sometimes builds simple wood pedestals for these smaller works—plain boxes of light-colored wood that “don’t draw attention to themselves” but ensure the sculptures are seen at the proper height. The pedestals have no monetary value in themselves, according to Greg Kucera, owner of an art gallery in Seattle, Washington, that has shown her work for many years. Some buyers don’t even bother to take them. “They may put her work on a table or shelf, or maybe they have pedestals in their homes that they prefer to use,” he said, though he acknowledged that whether for Butterfield’s work or that of other sculptors, “the prices are higher when there is a pedestal.”

Kucera also keeps picture frames on hand for two-dimensional works that arrive without them or in frames “so shabby that they will detract from the price. We probably have 20 or 30 that we keep on a rack and try to recycle.” On occasion, the gallery will pay for a frame, subtracting the cost from what the consignor receives, “but we don’t get really precious about frames. Buyers tend to throw most of them away and get the paintings reframed.”

Some artists do produce or provide frames for their own paintings, and occasionally those frames have value in themselves or add to the price of the whole piece. Katherine Degn, owner and director of New York’s Kraushaar Galleries, told Observer that she has “sold many, many Maurice Prendergast watercolors in simple, narrow frames made by his brother,” Charles, who also painted but is better known for his frames. Together or apart, they are prized.

Most consignments to galleries and auction houses, however, arrive with whatever frame one or another owner thought looked best, regardless of the artist’s intentions. Sandra Germain, owner of Shannon’s auction house in Greenwich, Connecticut, recalled a consignment, “a very valuable painting,” which its seller had taken out of its original frame and put in “a really hideous one, a plastic Hobby Lobby frame.” There wasn’t much she could do, and the painting was shown unframed in the sale catalogue.

Dealers and auctioneers try to do their best for the artworks they sell. Roger Reed, owner of New York’s Illustration House, which sells illustration art in its gallery and via auction, noted that in 2001, the gallery was selling a consigned work by Norman Rockwell, Triumphant Woman Carrying Auction Purchases, which needed a frame. The gallery had a framing budget, “but I knew the painting would sell for the same amount independent of the frame, the value of which would just be a rounding error, so it was an opportunity to have some fun. The painting was humorous, depicting a modern young woman carrying away her antiques from a country auction. She did not show much discernment, having gotten a cracked bedpan among other items of dubious quality. I ordered a huge Victorian-style frame encrusted with ‘loud’ floral and berry ornaments, just the kind of thing that this young woman might have bid on. When it arrived, it was a little too nice, so I worked on it further myself, slathering on a murky brown patina to make it look like more of a ‘find.'”

According to Reed, the optimal situation is “when a work had its original, historical frame, which was still in good condition. Even if it was a bit dinged up, we’d prefer to show it and sell it that way, even picture it in the catalogue that way. The next best was when we had a budget to frame a work, and could put it in something solid, non-gaudy, and right for the period.”

Works on paper—drawings, graphic prints, pastels, photographs and watercolors—are always displayed in a frame, often with a protective mat and glass, because they are more fragile and more difficult to clean than most painted canvases. But unlike canvases, works on paper are typically stored in a flat file without their frames.

Frames on paintings and pedestals under sculptures often seem to be part of the package for art collectors. “Frames, pedestals and bases make the pieces feel more finished,” said Marc Fields, owner of New York’s The Compleat Sculptor, which sells pedestals and bases to artists at prices starting at $250 and going as high as $2,500, depending on whether the material is laminate and Formica, Lucite or hardwoods and stone such as marble. Prices also vary by size.

Frames and pedestals do more than encase a painting or raise a sculpture. They offer some protection from bumps and kicks and act to spotlight the artworks, separating them from the surrounding world and prompting viewers to look more closely. Some contemporary artists, of course, want their work to be part of that surrounding world rather than in contrast to it, and frames, pedestals and bases can violate that aesthetic. Of course, you can’t satisfy everyone. And some artists consider that they have done their job by completing the work, leaving presentation to others, such as their dealers. “There often is a push-pull between artists and dealers,” Louis Newman, former director of LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe, New Mexico, told Observer. “The artist wants the cheapest frame or pedestal, especially if the artist is paying for it, while the dealer wants something that is presentable.” Not only does a frame make a painting seem more finished, he added, “it’s one less thing for a client to have to think about. ‘Honey, what kind of frame should we get?’ ‘I don’t know, what do you think?'”

More for art collectors

• Why a Signature Can Make or Break an Artwork’s Price

• Clare McAndrew On Why the Art Market’s Future Lies Beyond the $10 Million Sale

• The Benefits and Drawbacks of Fractionalized Art Ownership

• What Collectors Need to Know When Buying Art and Antiquities Abroad

• Why Most Art Galleries Don’t Offer Discounts

• Want to Donate Your Collection to a Museum? Read This First

It’s tax time in the U.S., which means many collectors are trying to determine the value of works of art they’ve donated, because the Internal Revenue Service wants an exact number whenever a taxpayer claims a charitable deduction for a donated artwork valued at over $5,000. It describes that number as “the price that would be agreed on between a willing buyer and a willing seller, with neither being required to act, and both having reasonable knowledge of the relevant facts”—otherwise known as the fair market value.

Figuring out that price isn’t always easy, however. “You can’t always find a willing buyer,” Ralph E. Lerner, a lawyer and owner of Art World Advisors, told Observer, adding that he’s been representing clients contesting valuations “for 30 years.” The IRS suggests tax filers look at “comparable” sales, preferably sales that are close to the date of a donation, but artworks can be very unique, and “not every Picasso is the same.”

There appears to be no single way to value an object. Indeed, the New York City-based Appraisers Association of America identifies nine methods for establishing the value of an object: auction replacement value, fair market value, forced liquidation value, marketable cash value, market value, orderly liquidation value, retail replacement value, retail value, and salvage value. Beyond that are agreed-upon values (set in a policy by an insurance company and updated periodically), damage and loss appraisals, auction house estimates and auction sales records, as well as what dealers say something is worth. In short, the value of any artwork is situational.

Regular Antiques Roadshow watchers are used to seeing two sets of numbers—the first is the insurance valuation, and the other is what the piece might fetch at auction. There is almost always a difference. The insurance value is invariably higher, usually based on a retail replacement value. “You have something that has been destroyed, and you want it replaced in the most timely manner,” Deborah Spanierman, an art advisor and appraiser in Manhattan, told Observer. “You aren’t going to wait for a good deal. There will be no discounts. The painting may need to be framed and shipped to you.” The cost of all those things is part of this type of insurance settlement. Retail replacement value, she added, is often more expensive than fair market value or marketable cash value, which is the fair market value minus the costs of buying (an auctioneer’s buyer’s premium) or selling (a dealer or auction house’s commission and other fees).

An auction house’s high and low estimates are, at best, a guide to what something may be worth—particularly the low estimate, which is closer to the “reserve,” or the undisclosed lowest bid that a seller will take—but essentially are a form of marketing to prospective bidders. “Low estimates may stimulate a lot of bidding,” art advisor Todd Levin told Observer. “People think, ‘Gee, I can get it for this little.’” Otherwise, auction estimates are lures for bidders but may have only a tangential connection to an object’s value.

Auction houses garner considerable media attention when artworks sell for millions of dollars, but according to appraiser Sandra Tropper, “dealers often charge more for artworks than what the auction houses can get.” They do this because they have a greater investment in the works they sell, she noted. “Dealers provide more information about artworks to buyers; they pay to clean and reframe paintings, and they provide more of a guarantee to buyers, offering to take the piece back if you aren’t happy with it. Auction houses won’t take things back.”

Auction sales records are publicly available and provide hard facts about the prices buyers have paid for artworks, but those prices may not be typical of an artist’s market—again, not every Picasso is the same—and many artists don’t have auction records yet. In some cases, primary and secondary market dealers may be the best sources of information on an artist’s prices, although those sales and prices are not made public and are usually well guarded. When gathering information on an artist’s prices, both Tropper and Spanierman ask the dealers representing the artist what their works have sold for historically and currently. And then they hope they are being told the truth.

“This is a relationship business,” Spanierman said, “and I have good relationships with dealers. They need to tell me the truth.” When preparing appraisals for artworks in a client’s estate or that a client had donated to a museum, she expects dealers to provide correct pricing and sales information, “because my client may be their client.” Inflated prices may lead to heirs paying a higher estate tax, while artificially low prices will reduce the amount a donor can deduct on a tax filing.

Fair market value isn’t a single number but an analysis that considers several factors. Is the piece important in an artist’s body of work? Is this work from the most sought-after period in an artist’s career? Is this work in good condition, or does it require some degree of conservation? Have there been public sales of works like this one? Has there been much interest in the artist’s work in recent years? Does the owner of the artwork need to sell it right now (a forced liquidation value) or do they have time to sell it (an orderly liquidation value)? If the work has been damaged, is it repairable? If so, what was its fair market value before the damage, and what might it sell for now (damage and loss appraisal)? If the work is damaged and declared a total loss by an insurance company but might still have some value to a buyer—a damaged Picasso is still a Picasso, after all—what is that value (salvage value)? Is the work being used as collateral for a loan, at which point the costs of selling the piece, such as commission, insurance and transportation, are subtracted from its marketable cash value?

William Fleischer, president of the New York City insurance brokerage firm Bernard Fleischer & Sons, told Observer that “a particular challenge arises when no comparable works are on the market—something that happens when collectors are trying to complete a series or replace a rare piece. In those cases, appraisers often increase the insurance value by 20-40 percent to reflect scarcity and the difficulty of replacement. Without active sales, it becomes harder to know what a buyer and seller would agree on today.”

It’s worth noting that appraiser fees can vary widely, from $100 to $550 (based on location and experience), with the average for an experienced appraiser being $300-400 for appraisals of single objects or small groups of pieces. Appraisals of a larger number of objects would call for a different, negotiated fee. The two largest appraiser associations—the American Society of Appraisers and the Appraisers Association of America—list in their code of ethics for members that fees are not based on the value of items appraised, as that might skew an appraiser’s determination of an object’s worth. And if the artwork has provenance issues, that might also mean contacting not just an appraiser, but a lawyer who will also charge fees.

It can all be “very confusing,” said Sharon Chrust, an appraiser in Brooklyn, New York, “as most people don’t understand why there are all these different possible values for the same thing.” She noted the surprise of a recent client who donated graphic art prints by nine different postwar and contemporary artists to her alma mater, Wake Forest University, and learned that the donation’s value was less than the amount she was insuring these artworks for. “My client thought she could deduct more, and she wasn’t happy about it.”

More for art collectors

• Why a Signature Can Make or Break an Artwork’s Price

• The Benefits and Drawbacks of Fractionalized Art Ownership

• What Collectors Need to Know When Buying Art and Antiquities Abroad

• Why Most Art Galleries Don’t Offer Discounts

• Want to Donate Your Collection to a Museum? Read This First

Judd Grossman is a major player in the fine art world, someone many art dealers, auction houses and even museums have to contend with. But he isn’t a collector, museum director or an art advisor. Rather, he is a Manhattan lawyer, and many of his clients are high-end art collectors who turn to him when contemplating the purchase, sale or loan of a high-value artwork. Whatever these clients want to do with their art, they rely on Grossman or lawyers like him to legitimize the transaction, often with lengthy contracts.

These sales contracts cover every conceivable contingency, clause after clause. Does the seller own the artwork free and clear, with the right to convey title? Who pays the sales tax? What happens if there is a change of attribution years after the sale? Does the buyer have the right to reproduce the image? Who is responsible for legal costs if there is a challenge to the artwork’s title? What is the price, and how will the artwork be paid for… in cash, in Bitcoin or over a period of time? When does the title pass to the buyer? Does the buyer, with a conservator, have the right to inspect the artwork before taking possession? Who pays for crating, shipping and insuring the work? Will the dealer guarantee not to disclose the name of the buyer and the price paid? What happens if that information goes public? Who pays the commission to the art advisor? There are paragraphs addressing warranties, provenance, condition reports, indemnification and escrow accounts. The list goes on and on.

“A big chunk of our practice is writing purchase agreements, consignment agreements and loan agreements,” Grossman said, describing the sales he has been involved in as “papered.” Lots of paper. William Pearlstein, a New York City lawyer who also represents numerous art collectors, told Observer that the sales agreements he writes for gallery purchases “usually run about seven to twelve single-spaced pages.”

Welcome to the world of big-ticket art sales, where the traditional ‘handshake and an invoice’ has largely disappeared, replaced by an invoice paired with a formal contract that runs for pages and attempts to account for every conceivable contingency. Driving this shift is “a new group of collectors within the past 20 years, extraordinarily wealthy people, who are used to doing business in a certain way, used to getting their own way and who like to spend legal money,” art lawyer Susan Duke Biederman told Observer. One of her clients was handed a contract for an art sale that ran to 27 pages (she referred to that buyer as a “lunatic”), but more and more of the sales in which she is involved now include buyers and sellers accustomed to “passing everything through legal.”

Ours is a litigious world. Lawsuits arise when terms and conditions in a sales agreement are violated, but those disputes would likely occur even if no contract had been in place. “If the contract clearly states the parties’ rights and obligations on these issues, that would tend to minimize the scope of legal issues that can arise,” said Amelia Brankov, a Manhattan lawyer with a substantial art law practice. She noted that the most common disputes “generally include which party is responsible in the event the work is damaged while in transit from the seller to the purchaser, which party bears responsibility if the work is later discovered to be a fake or forgery, or what happens if a third party later claims to be the ‘true owner’ of the artwork.” In the latter case, an artwork may be put up for sale while it is still collateral for an unpaid loan.

Megan Noh, co-chair of the art law department at the New York law firm Pryor Cashman, noted that some sales agreements also address anti-money laundering statutes, requiring “written assurance that the parties are not themselves (and are not associated with) sanctioned persons or entities and are not using proceeds of criminal activity, and that the conduct of the transaction is not going to effect any unlawful end such as money laundering or tax evasion.” The art trade can at times be opaque, and a clause such as this “may be particularly important” when one or both parties are working through an agent and their identities are obscured, she added.

If buyers rely on their lawyers to draft sales agreements, art dealers must hire lawyers to review, approve and negotiate those same contracts, and all of it adds to the cost of purchasing works of art. And there does not appear to be any real alternative. As one New York City gallery director put it, “people want it in writing, or there’s no deal.”

Of course, gallery owners themselves have become more legalistic in their work. A number of gallery owners require buyers of certain artists’ works on the primary market to sign agreements that ensure the works will be resold exclusively through them, not through an auction house. New York gallery owner Andrea Rosen noted that she has included those terms on every invoice since opening her gallery. Artists may impose their own conditions on the resale of their work, as James Turrell and Sol Lewitt have done, demanding that owners apply to them (in Lewitt’s case, his estate) for “transfer” documents permitting the artist to approve or disapprove a sale to a new owner. Both the South African artist Marlene Dumas and the Scottish-born artist Peter Doig want buyers of their paintings to agree to donate the works to museums rather than resell them. Those terms are spelled out and enforced by their dealers. When collectors have gone against their wishes, lawsuits have followed. In 2010, Dumas directed galleries representing her work to refuse to sell any more of her paintings to a collector who had sold one through a New York gallery, and that collector brought a lawsuit against the gallery, essentially for snitching. (That lawsuit was dismissed in a Manhattan federal court.)

“Sometimes, lawyers over-lawyer things,” Grossman said, and some lawyers have only a limited understanding of the art their contracts are meant to govern. Lucy Mitchell-Innes, a former Manhattan gallery owner and now a private art dealer, recalled a sales agreement submitted by the lawyer of a collector for a 1952 Barnett Newman painting she was selling. In one clause, the agreement declared that the deal would be voided if it were shown that the artwork had passed through Nazi hands in Germany. “I had to point out to the lawyer that Barnett Newman painted this after the war was over and that it had been painted in the U.S.,” she said. The effort to dot every “i” and cross every “t” can sometimes go too far.

“I’ve heard some dealers say, when they’re handed some 20-plus page contract, ‘Are you out of your mind? That’s not the way we do business,’” Biederman said. “I ask clients who want me to write a contract for a purchase, ‘Do you want to anger the dealer? Do you want this deal to go through quickly? How much do you want to spend on legal fees?’” Still, she added, more and more dealers are concluding that nowadays “this is how you have to do business. It’s fine for me. I make money.”

More for art collectors

• Why a Signature Can Make or Break an Artwork’s Price
• Clare McAndrew On Why the Art Market’s Future Lies Beyond the $10 Million Sale
• The Benefits and Drawbacks of Fractionalized Art Ownership
• What Collectors Need to Know When Buying Art and Antiquities Abroad
• Why Most Art Galleries Don’t Offer Discounts
• Want to Donate Your Collection to a Museum? Read This First

It was an absolute mess. “The art dealer’s sales team was locked out of its inventory information, freezing their sales transactions,” Steve Pincus Sr., managing director of insurance brokerage firm Risk Strategies, told Observer. A cybercriminal was holding the gallery’s data hostage by hacking into its systems and encrypting the files, agreeing to decrypt them only after payment—in other words, the gallery was dealing with a ransomware attack. “Once the ransom was paid and system access was restored, it still took several months to be sure that the existing data was not manipulated in any way.”

Until the data was verified, it was effectively useless. In the meantime, the sales team could not access inventory. “They didn’t know what works were for sale, for how much, or any other data related to any individual work of art,” Pincus added. Sales were lost, and the gallery filed what is known as a Business Interruption claim.

Fortunately, the gallery had taken out a cyber policy that covered business interruptions, and the insurer paid out a claim exceeding seven figures. This is not simply a story about the value of business insurance, however, but about the risks individual dealers, galleries and auction houses face from hackers seeking sensitive client data, including names, addresses, occupations, credit card numbers, bank accounts and even passport numbers—everything clients provide in order to buy and sell at the highest levels of the commercial art world

“We get attacked very regularly—weekly if not daily,” Sam Spiegel, technology principal at Heritage Auctions, told Observer. The company’s security systems generally blunt those attacks, though the occasional hacker breaks through. In 2019, a ransomware attack took down its website for several days, but Heritage had backups in place and didn’t lose any data. More importantly, it did not have to pay a ransom. There have also been denial-of-service attacks, in which a hacker floods a targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests to overload systems and prevent legitimate traffic from being processed. “We’ve had a couple of those, the last one in 2021, but it only lasted a few minutes. We were able to get things back up and running.” Credit goes to the auction house’s layered back-up systems, fail-safes and redundancies, along with its use of multiple third-party payment platforms where all client financial data is processed.

Spiegel did not come out of the tech world. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in classics and history and joined Heritage in 2013 as part of the auction house’s World & Ancient Coins department. His first foray into the online realm was creating an index of modern and ancient coins that provided clients with pricing and historical context. Technology is something he learned along the way. It is, he admitted, a thankless job, since most clients don’t think about data security until something goes wrong. “We could put out a press release saying ‘Nothing bad happened this week,’ but our clients don’t even want to know that something bad was a possibility.”

What is possible is never far from mind for those tasked with protecting against known and unknown threats. Joshua Eldred, president of Eldred’s auction house, experienced ransomware incidents twice in what he now calls “the old days,” before the company began using a third-party payment platform—Authorize.net—to handle transactions. “We outsource everything,” he told Observer. “We have no sensitive information on our system.” The storage and protection of sensitive client information is left to firms whose core business is defending against cyberattacks, allowing the auction house to focus on selling. Numerous comparable service companies work with galleries and auction houses, with new ones emerging regularly, including Bidpath, Stripe, Square, Chase PaymentTech, Dwolla, AliPay, AuctionPay, Plaid and PaymentCloud. Still, Authorize.net does not relieve Eldred’s of the need for vigilance. Employees are trained to recognize phishing attempts, and staff conduct is periodically reviewed. “We tell staff, ‘don’t click on anything unless you know where it came from.’”

Cybersecurity is not a subject auction houses are eager to discuss publicly. “If I say that we’ve never been hacked, that likely would lead to hackers targeting us, so no thank you,” the CEO of one auction house said on condition of anonymity. Few buyers or consignors ever ask about safety protocols. A spokesperson for Sotheby’s stated that the auction house “takes proactive steps to safeguard our systems and data by regularly updating our security protocols and enhancing our monitoring capabilities to better protect our clients and their valuable information.” A spokesperson for Phillips said that the auction house “remains continuously focused on strengthening our defenses as digital engagement with our auctions continues to grow.”

A worst-case scenario unfolded at Christie’s in May 2024, when the auction house experienced a ransomware attack that lasted 10 days, resulting in a payment of an undisclosed sum to hackers and a $990,000 settlement of a threatened class-action lawsuit to compensate approximately 45,798 people whose data was compromised.

Every sector of the arts economy is vulnerable to hackers, of course. Security breaches have occurred at museums across the U.S., including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Arlington, New York and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, as well as at numerous for-profit companies. In 2020, the online art marketplace LiveAuctioneers suffered a data breach affecting 3.4 million buyers and sellers, exposing names, email and mailing addresses, phone numbers and encrypted passwords.

Galleries are particularly vulnerable because “they don’t have a dedicated IT person whose job it is to monitor the online systems,” said James Carroll, founder of Hacket Cyber, a Syracuse, New York-based firm hired by large and small businesses, including galleries and museums, to test the security of their databases and other software. “The people working in galleries want to talk about art and artists, not about the security of clients’ information.”

Galleries also tend to outsource client data storage and rely on security software that may or may not be kept up to date. Cristin Tierney, a gallery owner in New York City, told Observer that “we do not keep client financial and banking information in our database,” adding that “all staff are asked to periodically change their passwords.” She said the gallery has never experienced a breach; perhaps those measures have been sufficient.

The Manhattan-based Art Dealers Association of America serves as an information hub for its members, circulating alerts on active scams, fraud patterns and emerging cybersecurity risks so galleries can take appropriate precautions. Kinsey Robb, executive director of the association, stated that “as the art trade becomes increasingly digital, cybersecurity has shifted from a back-office concern to a core operational issue. Our focus at the ADAA is on education and timely information-sharing, helping galleries stay alert to evolving risks and contributing to broader conversations around internal protocols, staff training and cyber insurance as part of sound risk management. The challenge is no longer whether the art trade will face cyber risk, but how proactively the field adapts as those risks continue to evolve.”

To qualify for cybersecurity insurance, one fine art insurer said, galleries must have certain “protocols in place,” including “firewalls and dual-identification systems,” along with procedures for verifying vendor information before making payments. Some galleries take the process seriously, while others assume the third-party companies they use will keep them safe.

As the cyber threat landscape continues to evolve, Imani Barnes, an associate director at Cyber Risk at Risk Strategies, told Observer that insurers “remain concerned about several controls that could impact a client’s ability to obtain cyber insurance terms.” They include:

• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Employees, contractors, vendors and administrators should verify their identity with more than just a password (such as a code sent to a phone) when accessing cloud applications or company systems.
• Endpoint Protection: Galleries and auction houses need to install advanced security software on every device connected to the network to detect unusual activity and stop potential cyber threats before they spread.
• Cyber Incident Preparedness: This means maintaining daily encrypted backups stored offline and regularly tested, along with a clear, tested plan for how the business will continue operating during events such as ransomware attacks or major system outages.
• Employee Training: All employees should train annually on basic cybersecurity awareness and run phishing simulations, since phishing emails remain the most common way hackers gain access to systems.
• Data Management: Galleries and auction houses should understand what sensitive data their organizations collect and store and how much of it exists to ensure it is properly protected through measures such as encryption and secure storage.

“A well-informed bidder is a confident bidder,” Spiegel said, defining well-informed as someone who understands the quality and value of the objects they are considering. That confidence can erode if buyers worry that the personal data they provide when registering for a sale is not secure. “Heritage is a very technology-forward company, and we have the largest IT department of any auction house,” with many of those employees monitoring phishing emails and, more recently, A.I.-driven scams in which bots impersonate clients. “A.I. is definitely the next wave of cyber attacks,” which will no doubt keep him and his counterparts at auction houses and galleries busy well into the future.

More for art collectors

• Why a Signature Can Make or Break an Artwork’s Price

• The Benefits and Drawbacks of Fractionalized Art Ownership

• What Collectors Need to Know When Buying Art and Antiquities Abroad

• Why Most Art Galleries Don’t Offer Discounts

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In the years she served as New York director of Crown Point Press, Kim Schmidt worked with numerous artists—John Cage, Francesco Clemente, Richard Diebenkorn, Al Held, Pat Steir and Wayne Thiebaud, among others—on their print editions, and each produced images according to their own processes, which could vary widely. However, Schmidt had one iron rule for every artist and every edition they created: “We wouldn’t let works go out that weren’t signed and numbered.”

Like a vigilant parent, Schmidt would stand watch as the artists examined their prints, signing and numbering those they approved and discarding those that weren’t up to standard—she shredded them in front of the artists. “I made sure we didn’t skip a print, because we don’t want unsigned and unnumbered prints floating around the market,” she told Observer. It isn’t a particularly interesting or creative activity for either the artist or printmaker to move methodically through an edition, writing ‘1/50 Richard Diebenkorn, 2/50 Richard Diebenkorn’ and so on until they reach the 50th print, and then signing additional impressions identified as Artist Proofs or Printer’s Proofs or HC (hors de commerce, or not-for-sale) proofs or other special designations.

“Artists rarely are happy to have to sit down and sign their names again and again,” Schmidt said. “Sometimes, artists would get tired doing it, or their handwriting might get a bit sloppy. I could see this happening with Richard Estes, and I suggested that we take a break and go out to lunch and have sushi.” Presumably, that break helped restore the artist’s patience for signing and numbering the remaining prints.

The task of signing artworks—paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures or otherwise—can ultimately mean a much larger financial reward than a meal. The signature informs the viewer that the artist created the work and approved it for sale. “It says ‘This work is finished and is ready to go out in the world,’” Edwynn Houk, a Manhattan gallery owner who specializes in photography, told Observer. That implied statement also carries monetary value, since “unsigned works sell for less or take much longer to sell.” There is more effort involved in selling unsigned pieces, he explained, because “I need more paperwork,” meaning proof that the work was produced in the artist’s studio, released for sale and exhibited publicly. A print may have been created by an artist but set aside as unsatisfactory, which is why it was never signed. Evidence that a particular work was exhibited suggests that the artist approved it for display and sale.

“I’ve been offered unsigned and unnumbered works by Ellsworth Kelly,” Schmidt, who now works as a dealer, said. “I almost always say, ‘No, thank you.’ Kelly was known to be meticulous about each print, and I don’t want to take a chance on something he might have overlooked.”

In some cases, the entire economic value of a print lies in the signature. Salvador Dali and Marc Chagall both signed blank sheets of paper that were later used for reproductions of their most famous works. Picasso’s granddaughter, Marina, published a series of the artist’s prints to which she signed her name—her signature reportedly resembling Picasso’s closely. Last fall, the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat published an edition of screenprints based on the deceased artist’s 1982-83 drawing King Alphonso, signed by Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, Basquiat’s sisters and administrators of his estate. In all of these cases, the artists never saw the finished prints, yet the works still sell at prices suggesting they are authorized original artworks.

The estates of artists often help address questions of authenticity. Jill Newhouse, a gallery owner in New York City who specializes in American and European art of the 19th and 20th Centuries, told Observer that “while some works are signed during the artist’s lifetime, many works are estate stamped, meaning a stamp is applied posthumously by the artist’s executors on works which remain in the artist’s studio at the time of death. This is true of Delacroix, Degas, Bonnard, Matisse and others.”

The tradition of artists signing their prints dates back roughly a century; before that, artists often used monograms instead. Artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard would sign some works and leave others unsigned, depending on collector demand and circumstance. They often signed works at the time of sale, while prints that remained unsold during the artists’ lifetimes sometimes went unsigned. In those cases, the market does not necessarily distinguish between signed and unsigned impressions, since there is no doubt that the artists authorized their production and sale.

The convention of signing an entire edition at once is more recent, dating back to the 1930s, when Paris dealer Leo Spitzer persuaded several major artists, including Matisse and Picasso, to produce refined reproductions that they would sign, and he would sell.

Most artists are aware that their signature can increase the value of their work. Picasso produced a series of etchings in the 1930s known as “The Vollard Suite,” which he began signing in the 1950s and 1960s to help raise funds for left-wing political causes he supported. Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth signed editions of prints to support their respective museums—Rockwell’s in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and Wyeth’s in Brandywine River, Pennsylvania. Other artists have used signature editions for less charitable purposes.

“Signatures are a mark of authorship,” Henri Neuendorf, a Manhattan art dealer specializing in postwar and contemporary art, told Observer. “They say to the audience or prospective buyers that the artwork is indeed by the artist.” Still, some artists simply neglected to sign certain works, which does not diminish their authenticity. “About a year ago,” he noted, “I had an unsigned Warhol portrait on consignment. Given the scale of Warhol’s studio and his working methods, unsigned Warhols are not unusual. Importantly, the piece was stamped by the estate of Andy Warhol and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, used on unsigned Warhols in lieu of a signature and accompanied by an estate number that can be cross-referenced in their records.” Even so, uncertainty can remain. “The Sam Francis estate has posthumously sold works that the artist left behind unsigned in his studio and marked them with a stamp. Some market participants believe that he didn’t deem these works good enough to be sold and to represent his oeuvre, and hence signed works sometimes sell for more than stamped works. It’s impossible to know for sure what Francis’s intention for these works was, of course, since he is no longer with us.”

Problems arise when signatures are forged onto reproductions or printed directly on the paper alongside the artist’s image, which can often be detected by examining the printing dots under magnification. Houk claimed that “the legal heir” of photographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940) “made his own unlimited editions of Hine’s images, selling them with fake signatures.” Such practices introduce uncertainty into the market and force dealers to provide extensive documentation establishing provenance.

Many, but not all, buyers know to look for a signature on a work of art. Is it on the front of the painting or the reverse of the canvas? Is the sculpture signed on its base? Is the photograph signed on the back of the print? Even when collectors know to check, recognizing whether a signature is genuine can be difficult. One notorious example emerged during the Knoedler Gallery forgery scandal, when court documents alleged that one of the disputed works attributed to Jackson Pollock bore a misspelled signature reading “Pollok.”

“Generally, an unsigned work by an artist will not bring what a signed example will,” Joshua Eldred, president and chief executive officer of Eldred’s auction house, told Observer. The auctioneer may also face significant research. “For example, 18th- and 19th-century folk art paintings are rarely signed, but they often exhibit distinctive characteristics that allow us to identify the artist,” referring to outside specialists in particular artists or artistic categories. “In some cases, paintings come with documentation certifying their authenticity. If it’s a letter from the acknowledged expert for the artist, that’s just as good as a signature on the piece, especially if the expert has included the work in the artist’s catalogue raisonné”—a publication listing all known works by the artist. “If the letter is not by an expert on the artist, it doesn’t carry much weight. I often caution clients about ‘certificates of authenticity,’ especially on antique paintings. Anyone with a laser printer can print one, and they are often used by unscrupulous people to provide a false sense of security to a buyer.”

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In the past year, the Toledo Museum of Art received several dozen works on paper by the Pop artist Marisol, a series of black-and-white photographs by Brett Weston, two sculptures by Roxy Paine, a painting by Richard Diebenkorn, four sculptural works by Martin Puryear and a linoleum-cut print by Kara Walker, among other artworks. Most donations to the museum, of course, came in the form of cash—such as the gift from one local family that funded free parking for visitors for 10 years—but not all. Other gifts included shares in startup businesses (a pharmaceutical and a tech company among them), an estate and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Solana, and others.

“There is a lot of flexibility in the kinds of donations we will accept,” Adam Levine, the museum’s director, told Observer. The museum’s board determines the types of gifts the institution will accept, and it becomes the development department’s job to figure out what to do with donations that aren’t artworks or cash. “We don’t have people on staff with expertise in real estate and crypto and startup companies,” he said, adding that the museum can “accept a variety of things, generally liquidating them immediately.”

The estate, for instance, was turned over to realtors who sold the house and property for $800,000, while the crypto was deposited in an account at The Giving Block, a Pennsylvania-based platform that helps nonprofits convert cryptocurrency donations into usable cash. The Toledo Museum of Art began accepting crypto in 2023, with donations amounting to more than $100,000 in 2025, “and that amount has been growing every year,” Levine said.

A growing percentage of gifts to museums arrive in the form of “real estate, pension plans, life insurance payouts, boats, cars, crypto—you name it,” said Ken Cerini, managing partner of Cerini & Associates, which helps not-for-profit groups value and make use of non-cash donations. “I tell people who want to donate crypto to a nonprofit to reach out to the organization to see if they will take it. Most organizations will find a way to make it happen, particularly if it will be a sizeable donation.”

Among high-profile museums that accept non-cash donations are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which accepts cryptocurrency; the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which accepts appreciated securities; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which accepts real estate. All three, along with others such as the Guggenheim, accept donations of stock.

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, according to a spokesperson, accepts stock (“several times each month”) and real estate (“that’s a bit more rare”), as well as wine donations from winemakers for its annual wine auction. “But at this time we don’t accept Bitcoin,” the spokesperson added. As one might expect, the online-only Museum of Crypto Art does.

Receiving a crypto or other non-cash donation requires more than simply deciding to accept it. The Giving Block, a crypto fundraising platform, works with close to 30 museums and cultural institutions across the U.S., including the Smithsonian Institution and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Over $1.2 million in crypto was donated to museums and cultural institutions in 2025—a nearly 50 percent increase from 2024. “When a crypto donation is received, we instantly convert the crypto to U.S. dollars to capture the full donation value and then send the U.S. dollars directly to the organization’s bank account,” a spokesperson told Observer. Unsurprisingly, crypto donors tend to “skew younger than traditional major donors”—millennials and younger Gen X—“but they also tend to be meaningfully wealthier than the average online donor.”

Making non-cash gifts offers tax benefits to donors, Cerini said, noting that “with the uptick in the stock market and cryptocurrencies realizing significant gains, there is real value in the donation of these assets, as donors get the benefit of a charitable contribution for the fair market value of the asset” without having to sell it and incur capital gains tax.

Chris Haydon, founder of Crypto Appraisal Pro, which provides IRS-compliant appraisals for cryptocurrency donations, stated that more than 70 percent of the top charities in the U.S., as ranked by Forbes, accept cryptocurrency donations. “That’s up from just 12 percent in 2020.” Donations of crypto have more than tripled in the past year, driven by the fact that cryptocurrencies have “created enormous wealth. Bitcoin alone has gone from under $1,000 in 2017 to over $90,000 today. Early holders are sitting on massive unrealized gains.” He added that “five years ago, accepting crypto was a novelty. Today, for major charities, universities and hospitals, it’s becoming standard practice.”

As with any other non-cash charitable donation—such as artwork or an antique—donors may receive a tax deduction (usually 30 percent of the item’s fair market value) if the asset has been held for more than one year, with the value assessed at the time of the gift. According to IRS rules, if the charitable contribution deduction claimed exceeds $5,000, a qualified appraisal is required.

Finding an appraiser with crypto expertise who is qualified to submit an IRS-compliant valuation is not easy. None of the members of the two largest appraiser associations—the Appraisers Association of America and the American Society of Appraisers—list crypto as a specialty. While some nonprofit staff may suggest a name, most follow Adam Levine’s policy: “We don’t recommend appraisers for art or crypto or anything. That’s something for the donors to take care of… we don’t want to get embroiled with the IRS.”

Linda Selvin, executive director of the Appraisers Association of America, recommends seeking out individuals identified as “business appraisers” to conduct qualified crypto appraisals. Some companies that offer appraisal services for non-cash assets include Charitable Solutions, Havenwood Holdings, AppraiseItNow.com and Sickler, Tarpey & Associates. Platforms that enable crypto donations—such as The Giving Block, Dechomai and Fidelity—can also provide recommendations. Appraisal fees vary with the value of the gift: Randy Tarpey, a CPA and partner at Sickler, Tarpey & Associates, charges $120 for donations in the $5,000 range and $995 for donations above $500,000. Joe Kattan, owner of AppraiseItNow.com, said his fees range from $400 to $2,000.

Perhaps one of the defining features of crypto is its volatility, rising and falling in value rapidly since—unlike the U.S. dollar—it is not pegged to other currencies or backed by a central bank. Still, Haydon argued, “crypto is easier to appraise than art or collectibles. With a Picasso or a rare antique, you’re making subjective judgments about condition, provenance and comparable sales that may be years apart. With Bitcoin or Ethereum, you have transparent, real-time pricing market data across multiple exchanges, 24 hours a day. The asset’s value at any given moment is publicly verifiable.” CNBC provides daily pricing data for Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies; no one can tell you what that Picasso is worth today versus tomorrow.

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For the past several years, the board of trustees and senior staff at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, have been working to make the museum—founded in 1842 and one of the oldest continuously operating art museums in the country—more user-friendly. The institution’s website and gallery labels “are less jargony, more the way people actually talk,” April Swieconek, a spokesperson for the museum, told Observer. Security guards in the galleries have been replaced by “gallery assistants,” whose role is to help visitors navigate the museum and locate what they’re looking for. Staff and outside consultants have organized listening sessions to better understand how people in the Hartford area perceive the museum’s collections, exhibitions and programs. Curators still lead the exhibition planning, but members of the public are now invited to participate in selecting what will be shown and how it will be presented.

The institution also decided to stop using the word “Atheneum” in public-facing materials because, as Swieconek put it, “people don’t know what an atheneum is” or how to pronounce it, and the term struck many as “elite, exclusive, too clubby, which is the opposite of what we’re trying to project.” The museum didn’t actually eliminate the word Atheneum from its name, which remains part of its legal nomenclature as registered with the Connecticut Attorney General’s office, but it did, in December 2025, rebrand as The Wadsworth. At the listening sessions, “we found that the word ‘atheneum’ really did bother people,” Swieconek added.

Institutional name changes are not unusual, though they can be exceedingly contentious. In October 2025, the Philadelphia Museum of Art became the Philadelphia Art Museum, and the rebrand—which included a new logo that the museum’s Board of Trustees claimed they did not approve—was widely mocked, with critics referring to the institution as “PhArt.” (In February 2026, the museum did an about-face.) Some renamings, however, go off without a hitch. In 2024, for example, the New-York Historical Society removed the hyphen and the word “society” to become New York Historical. Like “atheneum,” the word “society” seemed to suggest exclusivity, and its removal, a spokesperson told Observer, signaled “that the institution is welcoming to all.” The new name came with a new logo—the letter H—which she said “reflects the history of New York state and Indigenous cultures of the United States, and has a prominent crossbar that nods to the legacy of the hyphen and the history of New York City as a bridge of peoples and cultures.” As New York Historical’s president and chief executive officer Louise Mirrer put it, “with our new name and look, we are embracing our responsibility not simply as stewards and storytellers of history but… as a contemporary leader in ensuring democracy’s future.”

Other name changes are on the horizon. Once renovations are finished, the Daytona Beach Museum of Arts & Sciences in Florida will become The Brown—short for The Cici and Hyatt Brown Museum of Art, Science & History, named for the couple who donated $150 million to fund the new building. Indeed, money often plays a decisive role in renaming. It cost billionaire real estate developer and art collector Jorge M. Pérez $35 million in 2013 to rename the Miami Art Museum the Pérez Art Museum Miami. (Other cultural institutions play the name game, too. In 2014, film and music producer David Geffen paid $100 million to put his name on what had been Avery Fisher Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center; Avery Fisher himself had donated $10.5 million back in 1973.)

Museum name changes aren’t always about money. They can reflect clarity, convenience or a shift in mission. According to a spokesperson, many visitors already referred to the Philadelphia Museum of Art as the Philadelphia Art Museum. That said, when and why institutions rename themselves isn’t always obvious. Locals may say Philadelphia Art Museum, but the Federal Reserve is still known as the Fed without any move to change its name. Italy’s Uffizi—“the offices”—remains the Uffizi because there’s no confusion in Florence over why a museum isn’t called a museum.

In San Diego, the Museum of Man faced decades of pressure to change its name. “There had been community pushback about the name for decades,” James Haddan, senior director of development for what became the Museum of Us, told Observer. “Anthropologically, the name ‘man’ means ‘mankind,’ but that’s not the way the word is used in everyday language. People would ask us if this was a museum about men. There was constant confusion.”

Beginning in 2017, museum staff held focus groups with community members, “shopping a number of names” to understand public preferences. Top choices included Museum of Cultural Connections, Museum of Humankind, Museum of We, The Human Experience, The Culture Project, Museum of Everyone and the eventual winner: the Museum of Us. “We didn’t want the museum to be seen as a stuffy place but a place for all of us,” he said, adding there was even discussion about dropping the word “Museum” altogether, though they ultimately kept it instead of “Center.”

In November, the Hockaday Museum in Kalispell, Montana—named for local graphic artist Hugh Hockaday, who gave art lessons in the area—was renamed Glacier Art Museum. “We’re located just outside of Glacier National Park,” executive director Alyssa Cordova told Observer. “People just thought of us as the Glacier Art Museum. Over time, it became more and more challenging to explain the name Hockaday to people who had never heard of him.” Kalispell has since become Montana’s fastest-growing city and a popular tourist destination. “When people look us up online, they search for Glacier, art and museum, so a lightbulb went off,” Cordova said. “It made a lot of sense to rename ourselves Glacier Art Museum.”

These changes don’t happen quickly—or cheaply. New logos, signage and business cards must be created. Letterhead and websites must be redesigned. Trademarks must be filed. Designers and consultants are hired. “We spent tens of thousands of dollars,” Haddan said of the Museum of Us rebrand. There was also a transitional period with a sign that crossed out “Man” and wrote “Us” underneath before final signage was installed.

According to Cordova, “we didn’t throw out our old letterhead. I still use it,” noting that the Glacier Art Museum’s relatively slow identity rollout helped spread costs over multiple years and budgets. The Wadsworth was less forthcoming; Swieconek declined to say what dropping “Atheneum” cost, but the museum did hire Saffron Consultants—an international branding firm with offices in London, Madrid, Tokyo and Vienna—for a 10-month engagement that included listening sessions and a strategic report.

The 2025 Philadelphia Museum of Art rebrand project spent $250,000 “on discovery, strategy and visual labs,” according to a spokesperson, with additional funds from the general operating budget covering “wayfinding and paid media.” The museum’s existing branding, it’s worth noting, wasn’t even particularly old; the institution went through a rebrand with Pentagram in 2014.

Museum name changes can be so pricey because they often reflect not just an identity update but also a mission update. In 2016, Seattle’s Experience Music Project (EMP) became the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) after several interim identities, including the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (EMPSFM). Founded in 2000 by billionaire Paul Allen, the institution had changed names five times.

Michele Y. Smith, chief executive officer of MoPOP, told Observer that the most recent change reflected the museum’s “expanding mission, programs and impact and ultimately celebrating a much broader swath of creativity beyond music and science fiction, so it was a natural evolution toward pop culture.” The update required legal filings, a logo and website redesign, a trademark search and a wide-ranging communications strategy. “A lawyer for legal guidance on the name change and to ensure compliance with local laws and regulations” was also involved—proof that sometimes a new name is a big megillah.

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Many successful people have time to plan their legacies, but the final months of Nancy Graves’ life were chaotic. In May 1995, the 55-year-old sculptor, painter and printmaker was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and five months later, she was dead. With no heirs, she had to decide quickly what to do with her belongings and wealth. Like many other artists with significant holdings of artwork and other assets, she created a nonprofit foundation through her will to shelter her estate from high death taxes. But what sort of foundation should this be? What would its purpose be?

Most artists’ foundations serve the posthumous interests of the artists, as trustees and administrators arrange exhibitions of their work, prepare a catalogue raisonné, inventory artwork and make documents and archival material available to scholars. The Henry Moore Foundation in England, for instance, was set up in 1977 to “advance the education of the public by promoting their appreciation of the fine arts, particularly the work of Henry Moore.” In somewhat more inflated language, the foundation created by Salvador Dalí in 1983 in Spain aims to “promote, boost, divulge, lend prestige to, protect and defend in Spain and in any other country the artistic, cultural and intellectual oeuvre of the painter… and the universal recognition of his contribution to the Fine Arts, culture and contemporary thought.”

Contrast that with Graves, who modeled her idea of a foundation on those established by Adolph Gottlieb and Lee Krasner, whose primary purpose is to provide grant awards to artists in need.

Fifty or even 30 years ago, there were far fewer artists’ foundations. However, “post-1960 artists have done much better than many earlier artists who often didn’t have the wherewithal to set up a foundation,” said Sanford Hirsch, executive director of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, which has been providing individual support and emergency grants to artists since 1977, the year after the foundation began its operations. “The Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant program has been operating every year since and currently offers awards of $25,000 each to 20 artists.” The foundation’s emergency grant program, which supports artists who have suffered a recent catastrophic event and lack the resources to meet resulting needs, provides one-time grants of $15,000.

Adolph Gottlieb’s will stipulated the creation of a foundation to assist “mature, creative painters and sculptors… who should otherwise lack financial resources.” Other artists have taken note. Late in her life, Lee Krasner sought to create a foundation to protect her art and that of her late husband Jackson Pollock from being hastily sold or donated to museums to avoid estate taxes, as well as to educate the public on their respective artistic achievements. However, it was only when her lawyer, Jerry Dickler, reminded her that “but for the grace of God, she might have had to apply to a foundation for a grant, if any foundation like that might have existed,” that she decided the main activity of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation should be supporting artists. Since 1985, more than 5,000 artists in 79 countries have received approximately $87 million in grants.

Some families or boards of artists’ foundations that offer individual awards work to give structure to the artist’s intentions. The grant program at the George and Helen Segal Foundation was designed by the artist’s widow and daughter based on his “wish to be helpful to artists,” said Rena Segal, the sculptor’s daughter and vice president of the foundation. The will of painter Joan Mitchell indicated a desire “to support painters and sculptors,” according to Christa Blatchford, executive director of the New York City-based Joan Mitchell Foundation. However, the mechanism for supporting artists—through nomination rather than application—and the amount of support ($60,000 per artist over five years, with 15 artists selected annually), as well as a second program offering paid residencies ($600 per month for one to five months) at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, were devised by the board.

Artists often have a specific idea of whom they want to help. Judith Rothschild (1921-93), for example, was a relatively obscure painter whose most critically acclaimed work came in the final six years of her life. The daughter of a wealthy furniture manufacturer, she inherited a collection of School of Paris artists from her parents. Upon her death, she established a foundation aimed at supporting the conservation, documentation, publication, museum acquisition and exhibition of under-recognized artists—those she believed shared her fate.

Similarly, Nancy Graves wanted to help artists like herself. Her foundation’s grant program provides financial assistance to artists experimenting with materials and methods, “who wish to have the opportunity to master a technique, medium or discipline that is different from the one in which he or she is primarily recognized,” according to the foundation’s website. Graves herself was often criticized for working across disciplines—from polychrome sculptures to the vividly painted pieces she is best known for, as well as photography, film, set and costume design, and painting, the medium in which she earned her MFA. Through her foundation, she hoped to encourage others to do the same.

With little time left, Graves did what she could to support fellow artists. She donated her 5,000-book library to the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, New York, and her art supplies to an art school in Santa Fe. As for her financial assets, she recognized the need for more direct grants to artists.

The Culture Wars—shorthand for the sharply polarized debates in the U.S. between conservatives and progressives over social issues— have led to a steep decline in congressional support for the National Endowment for the Arts. This included the elimination of most individual artist fellowships in the 1980s and ’90s, followed by cutbacks at many state arts agencies. More recently, in May 2025, the NEA abruptly terminated hundreds of grants to arts organizations nationwide.

In 2003, state arts agencies in 37 states provided fellowships to artists. That number dropped to 29 by 2014, according to research from the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. Total fellowships fell from 1,300 in 1994 to 762 in 2007. Meanwhile, combined fellowship and project grant funding to individual artists from state agencies declined from $10.18 million in 2003 to $6.77 million in 2015. As of now, 32 state arts agencies offer fellowships for individual artists. Of these, 27 provide direct, unrestricted funding and five partner with outside organizations to administer fellowships.

“These fellowships are a significant source of grant funding for individual artists,” Eddie Torres, president and chief executive officer of Grantmakers in the Arts, told Observer. He noted that state arts agencies have significantly increased support over the past decade, investing $38.1 million in 2023. Fellowship awards now range from $250 to $50,000, with a median award of $5,000. “State arts agencies support individual artists through a broad portfolio of grants and services, to the tune of about $38 million per year, or around a quarter of all state arts agency grant awards,” said Kelly J. Barsdate, executive advisor to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.

This is a marked improvement, but the need remains great. Over the past two decades, a growing number of artists have established foundations during their lifetimes or as part of their estates, with the principal mission of awarding grants or fellowships to individual artists.

Demand remains high. When the George and Helen Segal Foundation was established in 2000, its grant program was initially open to artists worldwide. “We were flooded with applications,” Rena Segal told Observer. The foundation soon limited eligibility to New York and New Jersey residents, and eventually only to artists in New Jersey. In recent years, it ended the grants program altogether to focus on promoting George Segal’s legacy through research and exhibitions. “Some artist-endowed foundations have sunset provisions,” Blatchford noted, adding that the Joan Mitchell Foundation is establishing an investment portfolio to maintain its grants program in perpetuity.

The Aspen Institute, a policy research organization in Washington, D.C., has identified more than 500 artist-endowed foundations, holding several billion dollars in aggregate assets, according to Christine J. Vincent, managing director of the Institute’s Artist-Endowed Foundations Initiative. Some of these foundations offer direct grants to artists or work with nonprofit organizations to provide awards through foundation funds. Others underwrite artist residencies. Their numbers are growing, Vincent told Observer, with some foundations “on the shelf, awaiting the artist’s passing.” Among these are the (Judy) Chicago (Don) Woodman Foundation, the Janet Fish Foundation, the (Joyce Kozloff) Crossed Purposes Foundation and the Pat Steir Foundation.

There are several different ways to invest in art. A collector might buy a painting with the expectation that it will increase in value and then sell it once that increase materializes. Beyond that, there are also high-end art funds, including Artemundi, Anthea and Luxembourg, which are pooled investment vehicles that cater to high-net-worth individuals who are essentially buying into a collection. Newer companies such as Rally, Masterworks and Yieldstreet are geared toward less wealthy investors who might buy shares of a single artwork for as little as $20 to $100. In late 2025, billionaire Thomas Kaplan said he was considering fractionalizing the Leiden Collection and launching it as an IPO. Another option that has grown increasingly popular is for two or more people to jointly purchase an expensive artwork, splitting the costs, with the agreement that they will sell the piece once the opportunity for profit has grown.

“Fractional ownership of artworks is not rare on the art market; it actually has been relatively common for quite some time,” Kate Lucas, special counsel at the Manhattan law firm Grossman LLP, told Observer. She regularly works with art collectors, dealers and investors and explained that these types of ownership arrangements “can also arise in situations where multiple family members inherit a partial share of a single artwork. Generally speaking, and unless there’s a contract that says otherwise, when a work is owned by multiple fractional owners, one of those owners can agree to sell or collateralize his or her own share, but not the other co-owners’ shares, without their consent.”

The obvious upside of fractionalized art ownership is that it allows investors to gain exposure to high-value artworks that would otherwise be financially out of reach, often with relatively small minimum investments. Fractional ownership also enables diversification across artists, periods or individual works without tying up large amounts of capital in a single piece. Potentially more important to some is that the model removes many logistical burdens of art collecting: storage, insurance, conservation and sales are typically handled by the investment platform, offering investors interested in art as an asset class rather than as a personal possession an inroad that doesn’t require deep market expertise or dealer relationships.

The downsides of fractional art ownership are largely structural. Investors typically cannot sell their shares at will and instead must wait for a platform-controlled exit or a secondary market that may be thin or nonexistent. Control is also limited, as fractional owners may have little or even no say over when an artwork is sold, how it is exhibited or how it is conserved, all of which can affect value. Valuation may be opaque and based on internal appraisals rather than active market pricing, making it difficult to assess true performance. Legal complexity adds risk, as ownership interests are contractual rather than physical, and disputes can complicate claims.

Fractional ownership arrangements usually run smoothly, but as always, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. William Pearlstein, a New York City lawyer who regularly works with clients in the art trade, noted that informal partnerships, generally consisting of two or three collectors or dealers, are “often undocumented or under-documented.” Under state law, these partnerships are known as “tenants in common” and are appealing because of their flexibility. “By contrast, art funds, like other private equity investments, are highly structured and well-documented.” The former arrangements, he said, “can get messy if the partners disagree about when to sell and for how much,” but the prevalence of fractional ownership suggests that such disagreements are relatively rare and that disputes are typically resolved privately with little fuss.

Not always, however. Between 2016 and 2019, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, postwar and contemporary art dealer Inigo Philbrick and his partner Robert Newland defrauded multiple individuals and entities in the New York and international art market by knowingly misrepresenting “the ownership of certain artworks, for example, selling a total of more than 100 percent ownership in an artwork to multiple individuals and entities without their knowledge and by selling artworks and/or using artworks as collateral on loans without the knowledge of co-owners and without disclosing the ownership interests of third parties to buyers and lenders.” The value of the artworks involved totaled $86 million. Newland, a British citizen who was extradited to the U.S., received a 20-month prison sentence, while Philbrick was sentenced to seven years in prison.

Collectors should be certain that when shares in an artwork are offered for sale by a group of shareholders, every fractional owner has agreed to both the sale and the negotiated price. Auction houses offer items only when they are confident that a good title will pass to a buyer, but because art dealers sometimes form fractional ownership arrangements with investors, it may make sense for prospective buyers considering a gallery purchase to conduct a UCC-1 search to determine whether the owner or consignor of the artwork is a single individual or multiple parties.

Consignors of artworks or other property to galleries typically file these forms with the corporations division of a state’s Secretary of State’s office. The documents identify the owner or owners of consigned objects, allowing them to retrieve the works if a gallery declares bankruptcy and ensuring the pieces cannot be used as gallery assets to repay other creditors. Similarly, when an artwork is loaned by a collector to a gallery for an exhibition, a UCC-1 form clarifies that the piece is at the gallery temporarily and has not been offered for sale, protecting the owner from potential loss.

For consignors who are also fractional owners of artworks, the filing of a UCC-1 form serves an additional purpose. According to Megan Noh, a partner at the law firm Pryor Cashman, it alerts potential buyers of the property, as well as creditors of the other fractional owners, to their interest in the work. “It is saying to the world, ‘Hey, Joe Schmoe can’t pledge this artwork as collateral, because he is not the sole and complete owner of this property—I also own a share of this property.’ Or, similarly, ‘Hey, Christie’s, Joe Schmoe can’t consign this property to you without my permission, because I am a partial-owner along with Joe Schmoe.’”

For buyers, a UCC-1 filing also offers a measure of protection by indicating whether someone has asserted an ownership interest or a lien against the artwork that would prevent a good title from passing to a purchaser. However, a UCC-1 form cannot answer every question a prospective buyer might have. It may list multiple owners but not whether all have consented to a sale or whether one or more have already pledged or sold their shares to another party. It will not reveal if a fractional owner is experiencing financial distress or if a price is suspiciously low. As with any art purchase, buyers must remain diligent, asking questions of the gallery owner about the work’s condition and provenance and researching its quality, importance and price. At higher price points, lawyers are sometimes brought in to review purchase agreements and secure contractual protections such as representations, warranties and indemnification provisions.

As to exactly how often buying a stake in an artwork happens, the data-shy fine art world does its best to obfuscate the number of fractional ownership arrangements, though the total number of people buying fractionalized art is likely relatively small. A 2023 ArtTactic report found that 9 percent of art collectors had purchased fractional art shares, although 61 percent of those surveyed indicated they would likely do so within 12 months. Since then, fractional ownership platforms have expanded their reach as the model attracts new and younger investors who may not be able to afford an entire masterpiece but can splash out a few hundred dollars for a couple of shares.

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• Artificial Intelligence Is Quietly Rewriting the Rules of Art Valuation

• A Collector’s Guide to Donating Art to Hospitals and Other Nonprofits

• Record Prices, New Buyers and Global Reach: Design’s Moment Has Arrived

• A Collector’s Guide to Art Authentication and Avoiding Costly Mistakes