THE VERY PUBLIC falling-out in January at the Guggenheim Foundation, culminating in the resignation of the organisation’s chairman and chief benefactor, would seem to represent a significant setback to the development of the ‘global museum’. Over the past two decades, the Guggenheim, under the flamboyant directorship of Thomas Krens, has pioneered the concept of museum branding, in an often crude imitation of corporate practice. For all the razzmatazz that accompanied the 1997 opening of its Bilbao branch, its record has been erratic: projected new museums in Salzburg and Seoul have been shelved, while those planned for Mexico, Brazil and Taiwan have all run up against legal obstacles. And the promised economic salvation that this global expansion was supposed to deliver has not materialised; indeed, the Foundation continues to lurch from one budgetary crisis to another. Most alarming of all is the situation at its New York headquarters, where the permanent collection is now hardly ever on view and where exhibitions are increasingly geared towards the lowest common denominator, political or financial.

Undeterred by the Guggenheim’s problems, other museums have rushed to follow its lead. The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is further expanding its network of satellite museums: to existing outposts in London and Amsterdam, a third, at Mantua, will be added this spring. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, despatches regular shipments of Impressionist paintings to its sister-museum at Nagoya in Japan – when not otherwise leasing them to Las Vegas casinos. And in recent months the twin peaks of French visual culture, the Musée du Louvre and the Centre Georges Pompidou, have both unveiled plans to extend their activities abroad, in addition to opening antennes at home.

The Louvre’s confirmation that it has entered into a three-year arrangement, beginning in 2006, to share its collections with the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, sets a disturbing precedent for an institution that, hitherto, has remained admirably aloof from the global circus. The Louvre will be allocated one of three new wings in the Museum in which to show an as yet unspecified number of works from its collection (examples by Raphael, Rembrandt, Dürer and Poussin are among those promised, although the details have been kept vague). In return, the Louvre will receive a fee of several million dollars – earmarked for the refurbishment of its eighteenth-century French furniture galleries – as well as advice on fundraising and marketing. Meanwhile, the Centre Pompidou has announced its candidature in a competition to operate a new museum of modern art scheduled to open in 2012 in the West Kowloon Cultural District of Hong Kong (among its rivals is, inevitably, the Guggenheim). The Pompidou’s eagerness to be awarded the commission may be gauged from its willingness to allow Picasso’s curtain for the ballet Parade, a work so fragile that it has only rarely been exhibited over the past half century, to be displayed for several weeks last autumn in a Hong Kong shopping mall. Alert to the economic potential of collaboration with China, the French government has lent unqualified support to the Pompidou’s bid; and it appears to look equally favourably on the Louvre’s proposals, which have in part been prompted by changes to the Museum’s funding whereby it must raise the costs of future renovations. But whether the State should be sanctioning the international circulation of its collections in this way is a question that, so far, has provoked surprisingly little scrutiny.

If financial imperatives, in large part, have determined these expansionist plans, politics are the underlying motivation for decisions by both the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou to build new branch museums within France – at Lens, in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, and at Metz, close to the German and Belgian borders, respectively. Décentralisation is a policy at the heart of the government’s political programme, albeit one that has failed to generate much popular enthusiasm and which, in areas such as the transfer of ownership of historic monuments, has brought decidedly mixed benefits. The case for a second Pompidou, a large proportion of whose holdings are confined to storage, is perhaps stronger than that for another Louvre, whose reserves of hidden treasures are hardly excessive. In particular, the choice of Lens, an economically depressed former mining town, as the site for Louvre II is unashamedly ideological. That new museums can act as a spur to urban renewal has been widely demonstrated, from Les Halles in Paris to the port of Bilbao, and from the Liverpool docks to the south bank of the Thames. But social and economic regeneration should always be an ancillary benefit of, rather than the primary justification for, such projects. What these expensive buildings will actually contain is ominously imprecise.

These moves come at a time when the two museums are otherwise in robust health. Over the last few years the Louvre has mounted an increasingly ambitious programme of temporary exhibitions, in particular its surveys – not always felicitously displayed – of early French art; and it has continued to make some outstanding acquisitions (see, for example, Fig.102 on p.290 below). The online publication by the Département des Arts graphiques of its entire holdings sets a very high standard for similar projects. Meanwhile, necessary improvements have been made to the fabric of the Museum, with the magnificent restoration of the Galerie d’Apollon and the re-opening this month of the Salle des Etats as a new home for the Mona Lisa. Following its major programme of renovation five years ago, the Pompidou has at last established a coherent arrangement of its collections. Recent exhibitions may not have attained the heights of those of the 1980s, but they have included some excellent monographic shows, while the inauguration of Espace 315, a dedicated space for contemporary art, has regained for the Centre an audience that had threatened to migrate elsewhere. But, given the additional curatorial and administrative demands that these far-flung projects must inevitably entail, the danger is that, pace the Guggenheim, both the Louvre and the Pompidou will find it more and more difficult to uphold their current pre-eminence.