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Directors of the three of Europe’s great museums were gathered on the stage, fielding questions from the host, Milton Esterow, the editor/publisher of ArtNews magazine.

Ulrich Krempel, the director of the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany (which has by far the world's greatest collection of the work of Kurt Schwitters and top-notch Paul Klee holdings) began by offering a frank, if politically incorrect view, of one of the primary problems facing museums.

Museums today, he said, are acutely number conscious, especially in terms of visitors, and feel pressured by the press, politicians and the museum's own board to get more and more bodies through the door.

The challenge, Krempel warned, is in creating popular shows without diluting their intellectual quality. He was somewhat pessimistic that this challenge could be overcome on a regular basis.

As an example, he cited the "Dada" show that had to be dumbed down when it moved from Paris' Pompidou Centre to that cultural backwater known as Washington, D.C. The 2,000 objects that had been on view in Paris (allowing for an in-depth study) were slimmed down to 500 for the show at the National Gallery. "It is now a-historical, fitted to the average American museum visitor," Krempel said.

This is a prime example, Krempel said, of "[the pressure to attract] too many visitors producing a problem of lowering the intellectual quality."

In a polite way, Klaus Albrecht Schroder, director of Vienna's Albertina Museum, was having none of that. While conceding that blockbuster shows, such as a recent Durer exhibition at his museum, could draw crowds so large that seeing the work becomes difficult, the regal-looking egalitarian declared, "Think of the time when only the privileged could look at great art. It has become fashionable now [among much wider classes of people] to go to museums, and we should welcome that. They could be wasting their time elsewhere at the movies, instead of learning about their own feelings at a museum."

When Esterow asked the panel if the real power in the art world today resides in the hands of collectors, Schroder rushed to disagree. "Museums are more powerful than the biggest collectors," he declared to applause.

As an example of this power, he talked about the plans for his 50th birthday party, which occurred at some undisclosed time in the past. He had wanted to spend the day with his family, but had decided it was his duty to hold a big bash to attract donations to the museum: The event wound up bringing in €7 million for the museum.

"When a collector becomes 50, there are no gifts from artists," Schroder said to laughs.

The panel was unanimous in its views that one plague afflicting mid-tier museums was sameness: Every institution feels compelled to have its one Warhol, its one Rauschenberg, etc., with the end result that visitors aren't quite sure if they're in a museum in Houston or Hong Kong.

Schroder noted that this phenomenon is making smaller museums more interesting in the grander picture. "Minor museums have specific profiles, and their focus on local traditions can make for wonderful experiences."

Krempel said that museums simply have to strive to be different, to have a concept or focus that sets them apart. In the case of his institution, he pointed to a recently completed, 11-year effort to produce a catalogue raisonne for Schwitters: "If you focus on one thing, you can create something of everlasting quality."

Esterow then asked the panelists to name artists whose work has become more, or less, appealing to them over the years. Krempel cited Bernard Buffet, that French painter of sad clowns, as one he admired in his Existentialist teenage years, but not so much now. On the flip side, "the late tragic work of Paul Klee has become very moving to me."

For Schroder, "Bruce Nauman was my most admired; not any longer." After seeing the recent Richard Serra show at Gagosian in New York, Schroder said he found the artist now "wiser, more moving" and suggested that Serra would have made a much better choice to design the Holocaust memorial in Berlin (which was designed by American architect Peter Eisenman).