LONDON—American “friends” groups—The American Patrons of the Tate, the Shanghai Museum, the Louvre, the British Museum, the Israel Museum, the Hermitage State Museum and the Versailles Foundation—can and do raise millions of tax-free dollars for their respective institutions. Members receive curatorial advice and are invited to palace balls, elite dinners and tours of private collections. For some, though, this presents the question: Should Americans in these charitable organizations receive federal tax deductions for support of non-American museums? Even more, do they siphon off support and art from American museums?

New York–based collector Larry Warsh says that these American groups help to expand horizons by alerting art lovers to important art trends and providing information about some top artists who may be known only in their own country.

One American supporter of his city museums [where?] argues against the tax-exempt donations. “Why should our federal government contribute to the support of overseas museums?” he asks. He is fully supportive of the feds granting deductions for contributions of funds and art to American museums, saying “our government is substantially supporting our own cultural institutions.” According to this collector, it is fundamentally wrong for the U.S government to underwrite through tax deductions contributions to American foundations who support foreign institutions, many of which receive local government support.

James S. Snyder, director of the Israel Museum, counsels that each institution should be judged individually. By way of example, his is not a national museum: It receives only about 10 percent of its operating budget from the government. “We are a private, non-profit corporation which exists to provide cultural enrichment for an international audience,” Snyder says, who adds that his home base may be in Jerusalem but “we function as a world museum, working collaboratively with programs and exchanges with sister institutions around the world.”

Another issue is whether these groups are endangering donations of art and funds to American museums. Lisa Dennison, director of the Solomon Guggenheim museum (who declined to comment for this article), told an art forum held in New York that the lure of a $25,000 dinner with then–British Prime Minister Tony Blair for The American Patrons of the Tate—along with a bonus group photo by Annie Leibovitz—was a threat to smaller museums. During such an event last spring, Tate Director Nicholas Serota announced that a group of major American collectors had donated works by John Currin, Richard Tuttle and Elsworth Kelly, among others, to the museum. Dennison, in a separate Art Newspaper article, described this process as “Give us some money, give us some art, and we are going to give you something back.”

Countering objections that these groups are draining support from local institutions is Marc F. Wilson, director and CEO of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. “The amount of money coming from American pockets to the friends groups is a trifle compared with the level of support Americans give to American institutions,” he says, and adds that most Americans who participate in high-level support groups overseas are equally active locally. Warsh says that many American patrons also serve as donors, trustees or committee members at their local museums, using as an example Eugene V. Thaw. A major benefactor of the Met and the Morgan, Thaw also is the honorary director of the American Friends of the Shanghai Museum. “We Americans have a tradition of involvement with arts and cultural institutions—much more so than Europeans—so it’s easy for overseas museums to fish in the American pond.”