Query- what makes an object a museum piece? Answer- because it is in a museum collection. There actually should be a corollary to this answer- because someone donated it to a museum or stumped up the money for its acquisition.
Everyone in the art and antiques trade feels an ego boost when selling to an institutional collector, but it is frankly something of a hassle to do so. In the first place, very few institutions have an acquisitions fund, and if they do, the museum professionals are so hamstrung in their ability to access it, they might as well have nothing. Moreover, any acquisition is made through a committee composed of curatorial staff and trustees that meets infrequently- and may change its collecting focus between meetings. Consequently, what might absolutely make the collection of any particular museum might be passed by because of a lack of funds, lack of focus, and/or the inability of the institution to act in a timely manner. While we do sell to museums from time to time, we also are familiar with the pat institutional declination of interest, phrased as follows- ‘We are not making any acquisitions at this time.’
I say this by way of expanding the discussion about collecting started yesterday. Although my own sense of collecting makes it difficult to understand any notion of a collecting end-point, even museums, ostensibly the most professional collectors of them all, often pursue collecting interests in a manner, if not erratic, that can certainly seem less than systematic.
The best collections cannot be put together in a short period of time, simply because the finest material of any stripe, be it English antiques or Roman antiquities, presents itself in the marketplace on a piecemeal basis. As an antiques dealer, this makes for a wonderful opportunity, as we are in the marketplace daily and can acquire pieces as they come along- and offer them first thing to the collectors who we know will be interested. No collection is composed solely of star finds, but the collection put together quickly, given the limited quantity of material available at any given time, will likely be of more, shall we say, uneven quality.
Ironically, collections put together with inordinate slowness might also suffer the same fate. The institutional collector whose purchase comes only when a donor has money will find it has money burning in its pocket that has to be spent- before the donor rescinds the donation, the result of suffering some financial vicissitude or because the museum director inadvertently gave him a game look.