[Read Part 1 of this entry here.]

A once puritanical art world has become more comfortable with its capitalist side. In the present art market boom, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago have been some of the biggest sellers.

Museum provenance (owned or exhibited), like a Rockefeller provenance, undoubtedly contributes to an object's value. Christie's and Sotheby's include this information in their sales catalogues alongside exhibition pedigree. Retrospectives of artists like Richard Serra (above) at MoMA or exhibitions of younger artists like Neo Rauch at the Met irrefutably raise an artist's profile and prices. (Let's avoid for now what happens when museums possess or exhibit looted objects.)

Museum directors and curators are VIPs on the grand tour that is today's art market, which is as synchronized as the art fairs now taking place across the continent and due to come to a luxurious halt at Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips de Pury in London next week. The London evening sales of Impressionist & Modern and Contemporary & Postwar art could fetch more than $600 million, an encore to the $1 billion-plus sold at the evening sales in New York in May. As Robert Storr, former Museum of Modern Art curator and presently the dean of the Yale School of Art, who is curating this year's Venice Biennale, told the International Herald Tribune, "The art world no longer has a single center, or even two or three. It's truly international now." (In other words, it too is flat like the rest of the world.)

When museums sell artworks, they are often hoping, like any insatiable collector, to purchase something better. If they are fortunate, they acquire something headline-grabbing like Robert Rauschenberg's early combine painting Rebus (1955, at left). Two years ago the Modern paid about $30 million to acquire Rebus from French luxury goods magnate Francois Pinault, who coincidentally owns Christie's and just signed a $30-million deal (winning out against the Guggenheim Foundation) to transform the Punta della Dogana into a contemporary arts center to house his personal collection in Venice (he already owns the Palazzo Grassi). While sealing the deal for the Venice space last week, Pinault reportedly purchased the entire Sigmar Polke exhibition at the Venice Biennale, outmaneuvering several interested museums. He's planning to house them in a special Dogana room designed by Polke and Japanese architect Tadao Ando. If that doesn't work out, perhaps we'll see the works for sale at Christie's.

Who knows? Perhaps a museum will end up buying them.

--KELLY DEVINE THOMAS