18. What makes Private Museums bad? + Are Galleries really 'not OK'?

Georgina and Tom are back from their summer break with two stories that have been bubbling away in the background all summer. First, private museums: with roughly 450 to 500 now in existence, almost all built this century, and prompted by the billion-dollar Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (lucasmuseum.org) in Los Angeles deciding to charge $25 entry and solicit public donations, they ask when these institutions serve the public good and when they're simply vanity projects.
In the second half, they turn to Marc Spiegler's much-discussed New York Times piece, "Art Galleries Are Not Okay (nytimes.com/2026/06/19/opinion/art-basel-fairs…)", and whether the former Art Basel chief is the right person to diagnose the problem, why art is not a luxury good, what is the right amount of price transparency, and why prints and editions may be the real future of collecting.
Enjoy!
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