VIRGINIA POSTREL: The Tragedy of the Monet in the Basement.

In 2008 Eli and Edythe Broad, the most important art patrons in Los Angeles, shocked locals by deciding not to give their 2,000-piece contemporary art collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — even though they’d donated $60 million for the museum’s new contemporary art gallery. Instead, they’re building their own museum in downtown L.A., which is scheduled to open September 20.

The Broads have said LACMA can borrow anything it wants. But it can’t have the collection because, like most big art museums, it would inevitably keep the vast majority of the artworks in storage. “We were concerned that if we gave our collection to one or several museums, 90 percent or so would be in storage all the time,” Eli Broad told the Los Angeles Times.

It’s a valid concern. Untold thousands of pieces stay hidden in museum vaults. Scholars may visit them by appointment, but the art-loving general public gets a look only every few decades, if ever. Is that really the best use of collections subsidized by taxpayers?

Not to Michael O’Hare, a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California-Berkeley. In an iconoclastic recent article in the journal Democracy, he argues that the goal of art policy — which in the U.S. takes the form of tax breaks given to nonprofit arts institutions and their benefactors — should be “more, better engagement with art.” He acknowledges that “more” and “better” can be defined in different ways. But whatever the definition, he says in an interview, “you have to wonder about all that stuff in the basement.”

There’s certainly a lot of it. At any given time, most large museums display only 5 percent of their collections.

As public choice economics suggests, institutions are run for the benefit of those who run them.