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."