LA’s Armand Hammer Museum has a small budget and big ambitions. “It’s an interesting experiment. The museum has a talented group of curators. (One collector called them “incredibly dynamic and magnetic.”) It is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles, home to one of the country’s top art departments. It has considerable good will among arts experts, locally and abroad. Now the Hammer is discovering how much that good will is worth in a marketplace where so many collectors are competing for the same artworks and so many museums are competing for the same collectors.”