Contemporary art leads museum purchases

LONDON, April 23 (UPI) -- U.S. museum are focusing their buying on works of contemporary artists, installation art and multi-media, according to The Art Newspaper's annual survey.

The publication's 2004 list of top purchases Friday showed Matthew Barney, an American artist who uses a wide range of mediums including film and even live pigeons in his work, clearly led the survey with purchases by the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, the Art Institute and Museum of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Other sought-after artists were Tony Oursler, Fred Tomaselli, Sarah Sze, and Ernest Neto in the multi-media and installation fields. Also widely bought was video art, with the favored artists being Anri Sala, Philippe Parreno, Elija-Liisa Ahtila, Jeremy Blake, Rodney Graham, Tacita Dean, Gillian Wearing, Brian Fridge, and Jonathan Monk.

With the declining availability of Old Master paintings, those classic works were at the bottom of the list, with only the Getty Museum in Los Angeles making significant purchases, including a Titian, a Lucas Cranach, and a J.P.S. Chardin.