The photograph was called The Curators, and it was made by Yan Lei, a Chinese "bad boy'' artist in his early 40s. "You may recognize some of these faces," said Uli Sigg.

They are, he explained, people who visit China for a few days and give the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" on an artist's work. "Some live in New York, these curators" he added, urbanely.

Which was where we were. Uli Sigg, a slight man with a fashionably bald pate and a suit worn over a collarless pink shirt, was giving a slide show of his collection on the 14th floor of the UBS building on Sixth Avenue. It was midway through a UBS arts forum focused on the boom in Contemporary Asian art. Sigg, Swiss ambassador to China, North Korea, and Mongolia in the mid-1980s, when he began building a huge collection of Contemporary Chinese art, had the full attention of several rows of UBS clients, art dealers, and other interested parties.

The Swiss bank is one of the global financial institutions that have made support for the art world very much part of their business. UBS runs an annual arts forum in Wolfsberg, an 18th-century chateau in the canton of Thurgau. It has been the main sponsor of Art Basel, one of the world's most successful art fairs, for 14 years, and 2008 will mark its seventh year as the main sponsor of Art Basel Miami. Further recipients of funding have included the Tate Modern and the art biennial at Site Santa Fe, a not-for-profit contemporary art space.

Consequently, the news in spring that UBS was among the most significant European victims of the American economic crisis, with huge losses on subprime-related write-downs, caused much art-world disquiet. Its total loss has been more than $40 billion; the bank, which on August 12 announced it would separate its investment banking and wealth management businesses, has also faced accusations that it helped American clients evade taxes, and engaged in fraud related to sales of auction-rate securities. Deutsche Bank reported a $3.9 billion loss; Lehman Brothers waded through torrents of speculation concerning their liquidity—and survived, but announced on June 16 a $2.8 billion loss.

As repo men and vulture investors circle, a question has been rippling: Will banks jettison their investments in the art world—their sponsorship of major events, institutions large and small? At stake are tens of millions of dollars in funding.

"For UBS, the targeted audience in Basel and Basel Miami has seemed to be American," says Asher Edelman, a Manhattan-based dealer, gallerist, and collector. Hits to the U.S. economy make it unlikely that the bank will continue to sponsor the twin Basels, he predicts.

"I think that UBS will be looking pretty carefully at their spending on Art Basel and Miami Basel," opines Philip Hoffman, C.E.O. of the London-based Fine Art Fund. "It's good P.R., and the clients love it. But it costs them hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not into the millions, to have these events."

Hoffman is betting that some art will go too. "People like UBS who are having terrible hits really probably shouldn't have $500 million tied up in art," he says. "They have some Freuds, and they've got some major pictures in their collection. And Deutsche has got a fantastic collection. I'm sure they could realize hundreds of millions. In Deutsche's case, billions."

So far, the programs survive. And the institutions that support them are doing so for an interesting variety of reasons.

Take Lehman Brothers, which got involved in art through collecting. Philip Lehman, son of one of the founders, loved art; his own son's collection now occupies the Robert Lehman wing of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Roy Neuberger, who founded Neuberger Berman, now a Lehman subsidiary, set out to be an artist in Paris, but relaunched himself as a financier after learning that Van Gogh only sold one canvas in his lifetime.

"Neuberger Berman continued [the Lehman] tradition of collecting young, emerging or mid-career artists," said Francine Kittredge, head of corporate philanthropy for Lehman. "And Lehman has continued to collect art for its offices around the world." The company owns about 3,500 works, including pieces by Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Neo Rauch, and Damien Hirst. Few are sold.

"We just recently sold one work," Kittredge said. "And that in a very, very careful way."

Lehman has spent more than $14 million on sponsorships annually since 2002, supporting more than 80 cultural institutions. This year it was lead sponsor of ART HK 08, a new Hong Kong art fair that ran in May.

"Asia is not only part of the emerging strength of Contemporary art, but it is also a strategic focus for us," Kittredge says. "We have close to 5,000 employees working in Asia between India and the Pacific Rim. And spreading our brand is part of our worldwide business strategy."

Which helps explain the apparent immunity of the arts programs from the headman's ax.

"You can't build relationships with people in other countries and form business partnerships unless you understand what makes them tick, what their cultural references are, their traditions," Marah Winn-Moon, head of cultural sponsorship for HSBC, told me at the March preview of "China Design Now," a design show sponsored by the bank at London's Victoria and Albert Museum." HSBC also sponsors Design Miami, the fair that runs at the same time as Art Basel Miami and the Fondation HSBC pour la Photographie, which is based in Paris.

Winn-Moon predicted that HSBC cultural programs would remain untouched. "Economic problems affect everyone in financial services. But our commitment to culture remains an integral part of our business. And our identity as the world's local bank."

"We're not in it pro bono. Absolutely," said Tony Joyce, who runs HSBC Private Bank's sponsorship of Design Basel—an alternative to the fine-art scene where competitors like UBS and Deutsche Bank are firmly established. "We deal with people that have a lot of money but not very much time. And in order to grab their interest, often we have to do something that's a little bit more interesting, a little bit different to what other people are doing."

Richard Fitzburgh, a senior vice president at UBS whose specialty is wealth management, put together the UBS art forum with Wolfsberg and in partnership with outside parties such as Sotheby's.

"We work with major museums and major galleries," he says. "We do all of the art fairs. It's a client service that we feel we have to provide regardless. Our wealthy clients demand it. And it's important that we deliver it to them. It's not going to go away."