The fall season starts today

"Today, many top collectors hire private advisors, and they simply aren't as beholden to museums as were their predecessors," Rosenbaum writes. Really? Is there any evidence for that? I don't believe it for a second. (Neither does Steven Cohen as he bounces back and forth between courting MoMA and courting the Met in pursuit of museo-validation of his spending spree.)

Then Rosenbaum offers this: "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." It is? That's been going on for decades and on several continents and Rosenbaum doesn't make the case that there's any discernible uptick now.

Rosenbaum then claims that single-collector museums "often lack the quality and administrative savvy of museums designed under professional rather than personal auspices." Again, no evidence. I'd bet that the incidence of bad management at 'multiple-collector' art museums such as FAMSF (ahem) or MFA Boston is at least as high as it is at single-collector museums. The Menil works pretty well. The Nasher's program is much-admired, so too the Chinati Foundation's. The Norton Simon, admittedly a hybrid, is one of the most-admired museums in America. The Clark Art Institute started as a single-donor collection and I don't hear Rosenbaum complaining about it.

Rosenbaum says that public collecting is "endangered" but when I look at American museums -- especially in Los Angeles where the Hammer is beginning to collect in earnest, where LACMA is resurgent, where MOCA isn't just creative but has the best contemporary collection no one ever sees, where the Getty Research Institute has found creative ways to collect LA's recent art history, and where Rosenbaum published this piece! -- they look as collecting-healthy as they've ever been. Endangered? "Threatened with extinction?" Not even close!

Related: The real story about museum acquisitions = success; how the Virginia MFA acquires, uses new art, two museums acquire Robert Irwin in a big way, Brooklyn Museum does what Lee Rosenbaum says no one does.