Among my fondest childhood memories are the delightful spring afternoons I spent wandering around one of New York City's many great art museums. My parents may have figured that those hours spent roaming the museum galleries just might wean me off my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-watching ways and spark an interest in the highbrow world of art. I suspect, however, that their real motive was to employ the normally sedative effects of museums to cure my hyperactive hustling-and-bustling. If boring me to tears was their veiled purpose, they failed miserably because whether I was going googly-eyed over a Pollock or being awe-struck by a Monet, I was anything but uninterested. Although this newly-found appreciation for art did absolutely nothing to improve the abysmal quality of my finger-paintings, these countless museum visits did instill within me a great deal of creative inspiration.

Flash forward to 2005, and I now find myself extremely dismayed at the state of the art scene as experienced by the masses. While I do not consider myself an art aficionado by any stretch of the imagination, I have long valued both my personal exposure to art and the resoundingly positive impact it has on society as a whole. Sadly, the ability of museums to act as public trusts capable of providing average people access to a treasure trove of the highest achievements of human creativity is floundering.

The recent re-opening of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) after an extensive expansion and renovation serves as case in point to this growing divide between common folk and the art world. To defray the costs of the $425 million project, the MoMA is raising the price of general admission to a whopping $20, making it one of the most expensive museums to visit in the country. The museum's newly-acquired air of exclusivity is probably best typified by The Modern, one of the restaurants housed in the complex. The brainchild of Danny Meyer, the name behind some of New York's most renowned dining establishments, The Modern is a cafÃ(c)-cum-fine restaurant with the formal dining room (where the three-course prix menu runs about $75) divided by a frosted glass partition.

It comes as no surprise in this topsy-turvy world of pay-for-access art that Target, the mass-merchandiser that redefined cheap chic, will be sponsoring free admission at the MoMA from 4 to 8 PM every Friday for the next four years. After all, this seemingly ironic course of events is simply the end result of Corporate America having become the custodian of our cultural heritage, through not only their sponsorship of exhibits, but also through their aggressive accumulation of art for their burgeoning corporate collection. Usually displayed in office buildings and workspaces, the general public is often cut off from these vast hoards of art.

To make matters worse, as corporations have downsized their collecting efforts, the maintenance of previously accumulated works has also notoriously suffered. For instance, 3M, which boasts a collection of nearly 3,000 works, has not had a curator in years. Other corporations have simply sold off their collections to other private collectors. Though corporations have downsized their art collections in recent years, the corporate ownership of art will certainly continue to have severe consequences in the years to come.

Meanwhile, late last year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had its own run-in with the corporatization of the art world, as it was forced to pass up the opportunity to exhibit treasures excavated from the tomb of King Tut due to a financial disagreement. Although the original 1976-1979 touring exhibit was a runaway success, drawing 1.2 million visitors to the Met alone, the Egyptian government did not profit from it. This year, however, the Egyptian government has set a target of $10 million in profits from each stop on the tour and entered into a commercial partnership with the Anschutz Entertainment Group, a for-profit operator of sports venues and producer of live entertainment. With the Met standing firm on its policy of no extra charge for special exhibits, the price tag demanded by the Egyptian government was simply too steep to make Manhattan a feasible stopover, depriving New Yorkers of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Even the recent Gates exhibit in New York's Central Park was subject to the same dollars-and-cents scrutiny, despite its being a free public art project completely funded by the artistic husband-and-wife duo, Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Irrespective of the divergent opinions on the aesthetic qualities of the piece, the munificent endowment of a public display of art of such awe-inspiring scope should itself have been enough to assure everybody of it being a worthwhile endeavor. Nevertheless, the long-planned exhibit was only able to prevail over its formidable critics once Mayor Bloomberg began extolling the economic benefits that would follow. Bean-counters and bureaucrats methodologically tabulated the economic value-added by incremental hotel stays and the bonanza created for hot dog vendors, while completely ignoring the millions of smiling kids and adults.

The sad part in all this is that many of these people will never step foot in an art museum if admission prices keep spiraling and corporations (not to mention, affluent collectors) keep snapping up pieces of our common cultural legacy. The fact of the matter is that these art works need to be kept in the public domain for the collective good. If they continue to be treated as profit-making commodities and hoarded as status symbols, we risk the prospect of closing generations off from a magnificent and essential fragment of our history and culture: the accumulated collection of humankind's artistic sensibilities.