The money flowed freely in the art world as museums kept growing, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

The New Museum became newer this fall when it moved into a metal-jacketed building, a glimmering, cutting-edge structure of stacked boxes sitting slightly out of alignment, perched on the Bowery in Manhattan. (Photo by Dean Kaufman)

More money than ever sloshed around the art world this year, sharpening the air of frenzy around the major auctions, propelling young artists from the cold-water walkup into sudden affluence, keeping private art consultants busy and raising museums' ambitions as well as costs. Just two contemporary art auctions - at Christie's and Sotheby's - brought in $641 million between them. And that's not counting the dead artists, whose work just keeps bounding in value.

For nonprofit organizations, prosperity cuts both ways. Museums have been able to raise staggering fortunes in recent years, but they've been finding it even easier to spend them. Acquiring an important work, even, say, a recent photograph by Thomas Struth, means competing with bottomless-pocketed tycoons - or else cajoling the tycoon into a donation. It's not just buying art that costs money: Traveling exhibits have gotten prohibitive to insure, partly because of the threat of terrorism, and partly because prices are climbing so fast that a planeload of masterpieces might practically increase in value between takeoff and landing. This spring, the Metropolitan Museum opens a traveling blockbuster show of works by J.M.W. Turner that includes more than $1 billion worth of paintings. The Cleveland Museum of Art had planned to host that show last year, but canceled when it couldn't cover the premiums.

But even as it's gotten more expensive than ever to hang art on the walls for the public to enjoy, many institutions are eager for more - more art, more walls and bigger crowds. Museums, like average Americans, keep expanding. This year the Met opened its new Greek and Roman galleries. That cost $218 million, but the museum estimates, perhaps generously, that between May and December, the galleries drew 764,000 visitors. Now, seven months later, the Met has opened its bigger, better 19th century galleries.

Other New York institutions are keeping pace. The Museum of Modern Art, which moved into its rebuilt digs just three years ago, plans to expand again, acquiring another 40,000 square feet on the lower floors of a residential tower next door. The New Museum of Contemporary Art has just built itself a shiny new landmark on the Bowery. The Whitney abandoned its hopes of expanding on Madison Avenue last year - but only because it had the option of erecting a Meatpacking District branch at the end of the High Line on Gansevoort Street, a plan that continues to advance. Meanwhile, the Guggenheim last month unveiled plans to export its brand to the United Arab Emirates, opening a new branch designed by architect Frank Gehry.

It's not just the blockbusters that are getting blockier: The Parrish Museum in Southampton continues to push its plans for a new building in Water Mill, designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron. And even the tiny Museum of Chinese in America, on Manhattan's Mulberry Street, plans to expand into a new space designed by Maya Lin.

Of course, all of this euphoric expansionism may deflate if the economy enters a recession, or if the still-stratospheric New York real estate market starts following the rest of the country's, or if the money starts draining out of art. Such a doomsday might not be all bad: Museums might find they can make do with the walls they have; artists could work without having to feed avid collectors, and the rest of us could once again start evaluating art by criteria other than its price tag.

The Top 10 Art Events:

1. "GEORGE SEURAT: THE DRAWINGS." Seurat's eerie, magnificent drawings have long been an open secret among connoisseurs. The stunning show at the Museum of Modern Art through Jan. 7 should ensure that the rest of the public comes to revere Seurat more as a genius of mystery than as the precise progenitor of pointillism.

2. JEFF WALL. Wall's vivid, lambent photographs hover between the observed and the imagined, between the commonplace and the surreal. A spectacular retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art revealed how the photographer draws on monuments of the past to make images that are majestically enmeshed in the present.

3. NEW GREEK AND ROMAN GALLERIES AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM. With the opening of the gleaming new galleries for ancient Greek and Roman art, the Met has definitively established itself as a wonder of the modern world. This is the contemporary museum at its best: a place for scholarship that doesn't stint on pleasure.

4. THE NEW MUSEUM. The New Museum became newer this fall, when it moved into a metal-jacketed building designed by the Tokyo-based architectural firm Sanaa. The glimmering, cutting-edge structure consists of a stack of boxes sitting slightly out of alignment. Perched on the Bowery, it very well may turn a neighborhood still infamous for its derelicts into an art Mecca rivaling Chelsea. Opened Dec. 1.

5. "ALAN SHIELDS: STIRRING UP THE WATERS." Shields, a Shelter Island resident who died in 2005, took his paintings off the wall and into three dimensions. The weirdly shaped, joyful structures he made out of sewn and dyed fabrics made up a gorgeous retrospective at the Parrish Art Museum.

6. "THE DISAPPEARED (LOS DESAPARECIDOS)." It's easy to forget that art really can unsettle and wound. The works in "The Disappeared," at El Museo del Barrio, dealt with the horrors wrought by state-sponsored terrorism in Latin America. They got under your eyelids and stayed there even after you turned away.

7. "KARA WALKER: MY COMPLEMENT, MY ENEMY, MY OPPRESSOR, MY LOVE." A disquieting retrospective of Walker's work at the Whitney through Feb. 3 invites us to plunge with her into violence and seething passions. With rage and insight, she exposes how the ghosts of slavery still haunt and traumatize blacks and whites alike.

8. "FROM THE NEW YORKER TO SHREK: THE ART OF WILLIAM STEIG." This charming exhibit running through March 16 at the Jewish Museum honors the poetic, self-effacing genius who was a New Yorker cartoonist and author of funny, deeply touching children's books, including "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble" and "Dr. DeSoto."

9. "VAN GOGH AND EXPRESSIONISM." The word "derivative" is considered a putdown when it comes to artists, but a stunning exhibit at the Neue Galerie proved that it's not a bad thing. Some of the 20th century's best - including Klee, Nolde and Schiele - owed their style, sensibility and colors to van Gogh, a debt that elevated their own originality.

10. "RICHARD SERRA SCULPTURE: 40 YEARS." Richard Serra can intimidate with his aggressive, hostile sculpture, but he also can entice, even exhilarate. The Museum of Modern Art's 21-gun salute of a retrospective finally gave viewers enough ammunition to decide whether to love or hate this prince of the art world pantheon.