Actually : common misconception on the insurance for 'priceless' artworks. Most museums of the type of the Louvre carry no insurance. The premiums are out of

Actually : common misconception on the insurance for 'priceless' artworks. Most museums of the type of the Louvre carry no insurance. The premiums are out of their budgets, which are usually state / ticket sales funded, and there are major valuation problems on irreplaceable artworks, as you have pointed out. Musuems probably spend more money on public liability insurance than they do on their artworks. Instead they put the money they would have spent on premiums into fire and security systems, and 'self insure' to an extent. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if 'priceless' is actually originally a technical insurance term, like 'write off' that has entered the lexicon (probably not true, just using it to make a point) disclosure : used to do some coding for one of the worlds 'great' museums, learned a lot of this stuff.