Who's in the frame for the Tate's top job? (Warning: there's red tape attached)

Maria Balshaw is to quit as galleries director in the spring. Her successor will have plenty on their plate

- Vanessa Thorpe Arts and media editor

Britain's more ambitious arts leaders and curators will be weighing up a new prospect this weekend: should they go for the job of running Tate now that Maria Balshaw, who has headed the galleries for nine years, has announced she is stepping down in the spring?

Among them might have been Nicholas Cullinan, recently appointed to run the British Museum, but the Tate post, which includes running Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives, has come up too quickly for a seemly switch.

London's other successful major museum bosses, including Tristram Hunt at the Victoria and Albert and Gabriele Finaldi at the National Gallery, would have no clear reason to jump. Other candidates might include New York's Thelma Golden, the National Portrait Gallery's new appointee Victoria Siddall, Jessica Morgan, the director of the Dia Art Foundation, or the American art historian Zoé Whitley. But they would have to have a big appetite for bureaucracy, as well as art.