According to a recent article in the Los Angels Times and artjournal.com, Museums are  losing out to wealthy private collectors who can afford to acquire expensive works. Bottom-line - in today's market they can not compete.

According to the Times art museums exist to acquire and treasure important works for the benefit of you and me. Exhibitions, education and scholarship are all essential, of course. But those activities derive from art museums' primary function -- collecting works that deeply reward the public's admiring gaze.

Unfortunately, economics are challenging all that. Public collecting is endangered by a shortfall of resources, a decline in political support and even a loss of nerve that could cut off the flow of masterworks for the people.

How does this situation impact the works of artist like William Verdult?

It depends. Again, the individual collector and investor have an edge over institutions like museums when competing for Verdult art. However, there are astute investor - who understand that working with museums can be in the best interest of their investment in the long run. We will be providing more information on Verdult exhibits in the coming weeks.

It has always been hard for museums to compete with private collectors, but driven by the scarcity of great old works and an expanding class of wealthy buyers, the recent stratospheric rise of art prices has outstripped most acquisitions budgets.

Sadly, when museums are connected with top-quality objects in today's art market, it's often as sellers, not buyers. And even the richest museums aren't necessarily able or willing to compete in the marketplace. According to the Times the J. Paul Getty Museum can afford to indulge in the urge to splurge, but its acquisitiveness is much less voracious than when the "Getty factor" -- cornering and inflating the masterpiece market -- was routinely decried by competitors.

What about those donors? Museums always rely on the kindness of friends -- collectors whom curators and directors nurture with freely shared expertise, board seats and art-market contacts. Those grateful acquirers, in turn, share their bounty through loans and, eventually, gifts and bequests to the museums that cultivate them.

Today, many top collectors hire private advisors, and they simply aren't as beholden to museums as were their predecessors. Uncle Sam isn't helping. Last year, tax deductions for "fractional" donations were sharply restricted. Collectors used to be able to promise a work to a museum and take the tax benefit over time, sometimes over decades. Museums displayed the works occasionally, donors had them the rest of the time and the deductions appreciated as the work appreciated.

The new restrictions "effectively ended donations of fractional gifts to museums," wrote Gail Andrews, president of the Assn. of Art Museum Directors, in a recent letter to Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee. Andrews, director of the Birmingham Museum of Art, urgently requested changes in the law and described the plight of five unidentified institutions across the country that had lost donations.

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One offshoot of the decline of collecting by traditional museums is the single-collector museum spawned by magnates who want their trophies displayed in one place on their own terms.

Perhaps the most troubling challenge to public collecting is timidity when it comes to spending the acquisition funds museums do have. After ownership fights like the one between the Getty and Italian officials, many museums won't touch most antiquities even if there isn't a shred of evidence that they've been illicitly removed from their countries of origin.