William Poundstone has a very interesting post analysing the holdings of two of Los Angeles’s most recent museums. One of the complaints about the Contemporary art world and its mega-collectors has been the way they converge on a few ‘market-friendly’ artists.

Poundstone is one of the first to take this issue seriously and provide some concrete information:

Nearly all of the Marciano works shown on the website were made in the past decade. They are split between well-known mid-career artists and younger ones. Of 33 works shown, 15 are by artists also collected by the Broad […]

I can’t say how representative the works shown on the Marciano website are. Probably the selection skews toward big names, exaggerating the degree of overlap with the Broad. Note however that both the Marciano and the Broad own Takashi Murakami’s Oval Buddha Silver (2008). It’s an edition of 10.

What Does the Marciano Have That the Broad Doesn’t? (Los Angeles County Museum on Fire)