Daniel Grant uses his Huffington Post column to explain how dealers and museums use swaps to everyone’s mutual benefit. Since museum representation is valuable to dealers, there’s every incentive to upgrade a museum’s holdings:

Art gallery owners report that exchanges regularly take place with long-term collectors, as the buyers seek to upgrade their holdings. Trades between art dealers and museums, or collectors and museums, are not done as frequently, although they are not altogether unusual. “They don’t tend to get a lot of attention, but exchanges between museums and dealers happen quite often,” Ashton Hawkins, former general counsel at the Metropolitan Museum, said, “especially in the furniture and decorative arts areas. Some smart decorative arts dealer goes to a curator and says, ‘I have a table that’s better than anything you have,’ and the curator looks at it and sees the dealer is right. They negotiate, and the end result is that the museum gets the table, turns in another — perhaps one that it purchased previously from that same dealer — and gives a credit for the difference between the two tables.” […]

The fine art field also has experience in this realm of dealing. New York City gallery owner Paula Cooper did an exchange “a couple of years ago” with a museum, which had been donated two similar works by Carl Andre (an artist she represents), and another Manhattan dealer Lucy Mitchell-Innes recalled having made trades with museums on two separate occasions. “It’s a logical thing to do,” Mitchell-Innes said, “and it makes sense for a museum to propose it.”

Museums Acquire Some Artworks Through Swaps (Huffington Post)