As the main actors on a vast and highly ramified private international circuit, they have the capacity to condition both the procduction and the enjoyment of art. Collectors, another important link in the system, have also been challenged by the economic crisis. In the eighties, they accumulated the works of individual artists or entire movements, thus influencing their success and economic value. They were something between private dealer and opinion maker, patron and entrepreneur.
Clearly, the recession has had a strong impact on the many precious links making up the art system. In the future, the scenario will probably be even more restricted and concentrated and private galleries, collectors and art journals further penalised.
In my opinion- and this is already becoming evident in some cases in America and Northern Europe- a new aggressive model of international museum is developing: halfway between public and private, it can absorb some of the functions previously attributed (healthily) to other actors of the art system.

Undoubtedly, a contemporary museum has a very particular role to play: on the one hand, it must celebrate art that is already recognised and, on the other, introduce experimental forms that contribute to transforming taste. The costs of running the museum machine are exhorbitant.
"Merchandising" has been used to amortise costs: products range from the simplest gadgets to the reproduction of works on fabric and all kinds of objects. However, this economic support and buffering are no longer sufficient.
As I see it, museums risk being transformed into "public companies of beauty".

Inevitably, this will lead to the emergence of a new type of critic-director-entrepreneur, with the capacity both to recognise what is new and impose it internationally. It is envisageable that this new company will want to buy up as many works by the same artist as possible and at a moderate price. The deal might include a major exhibition of prestige on its own museum premises and after that circulation in peripheral museums and distribution in private collections.
Basically, this new museum will not be able to survive on the yearly contributions of its own trustees. It will have to develop its own profit-making system to absorb the cost of running an enterprise expanding both physically and geographically. Museum directors will have to have a mixture of skills: absolute theoretical competence and managerial capacity.

In a second phase, the works of artists known internationally, but also of new talents (whose works have been purchased in advance), might also be distributed, sold or leased out to branch client-museums and private collectors.
Under the dynamic drive of the director-entrepreneur, museums will no longer be platonic institutions of beauty but unlimited aesthetic companies, dictating the economic value of works. Their "aura" as public depositaries of art allowing them also to act as guarantors of the objective queality of art.It is obvious that in this system galleries have much to lose: being private spaces directly linked to individual initiative, it is inevitable that they should feel the impact of the recession. All this endangers freedom of expression and plurality.

Private galleries guaranteed diversification and educated artistic taste. The "RipArte"initiative, with its select international concentration of space and time, underlined by the eccentric choice of venue (a hotel room for each gallery) offers an intense and happily precarious scenario. Proof that not only art, but also young galleries, thrive on nomadism and fluid spaces, non-permanence, is if in transit. Proof that art is on the road again. It will remain on the road providing it has the suppoort of many different sources and freedom of intent, providing it remains geared to public, but also to private and instant, collector.