I’m in Miami this week like many other art lovers. As always, there is a lot of talk about how dealers are doing given the financial crisis, but a subject – something I’m deeply interested in – the complicated issue of patronage, landed on the cover of the daily edition of The Art Newspaper today. The article addressed the elephant in the room: “The glitterati turned out last night for the Miami Art Museum’s Party on the Plaza. But will they support the institution with cash and their collections?” Patronage and collecting have always been closely connected, so it’s perhaps fitting that this debate bubbled to the surface at an art fair.

The rumored reasons behind Terry Riley’s recent decision to leave his post as Director of the Miami Art Museum, the opening of the de la Cruz Collection, making Miami home to three contemporary art spaces for major private collections and the installation of the highlights from the Jumex Collection at the Bass Museum, all reflect different points in this complicated and nuanced topology. Parallels are being drawn to the considerable amount of attention recently paid to the New Museum’s decision to ask Jeff Koons to install board member Dakis Joannou’s collection at the museum. As Financial Times noted (finally) “there is a widespread conversation taking place internationally about the shifting boundaries of the public and private realms of contemporary visual culture," in its exploration of recent examples involving Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Dakis Joannou, which represent "potential conflicts of interest...as well as what many see as a worrying, and increasing, breakdown of the boundaries between the non-profit and for-profit worlds."

I brought Michael Fitzgerald’s seminal book Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for 20th Century Art with me to Miami, in which he points out that Picasso understood the relationship between commercial success and critical commendation, which comes from institutions. Given this paradigm, the current state of institutions, and increasing popularity of the private model, are we at risk of laying the foundation for a new paradigm that negates the critical function of the public institution?

This is not a new conversation and these are not new issues for the art world but the financial crash has changed the recent terms, and urgency, of this ongoing discussion. While everyone can agree that art is an accepted vehicle for investment, what is unclear is how the institutional system that establishes the criticality of art will look in the future.

– Bettina Korek, Founder of ForYourArt