UN-PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
What does it take to become a world-class private-museum owner? Mei Anne Foo speaks to a few ambitious art lovers and critics to find out
It’s not hard to imagine the mounting number of private art museums popping up today. While it is difficult to put an exact value on the total art held by private individuals, estimates reveal it to be worth up to an eye-watering $3 trillion.
Thus ardent art collectors, with their increasingly large collections, which over time surpass wall space in their private residences, are increasingly choosing to open private art museums, allowing the public access to art that might not otherwise be seen while in private hands or given to a public museum that doesn’t have enough exhibition space. Amid a global surge in collecting and a diminishing flow of once-generous government funding, entrepreneurs and collectors are stepping up. And this applies to Eastern collectors too.
According to Edie Hu, an art advisory specialist for Citi Private Bank, there were only 349 museums in China 40 years ago. That number has since increased to over 5,000 today – although by comparison, the us has over 35,000 museums, so China is just starting out.
“Many of these are privately funded by newly minted billionaires. For someone who has everything, it’s the ultimate ego project,” says Hu. “Many have been criticised for being merely vanity projects and for placing more emphasis on the architecture of the museum than the content.”
The Red Brick Art Museum on the outskirts of Beijing, co-founded by property developer and art collector Yan Shijie in 2012, is one such example. Though the brick-laden building is astonishingly beautiful, it remains largely empty of art, despite its website stating that the space is “dedicated to boosting the development of Chinese contemporary art, to participate in the international contemporary artists’ programmess communication, and to carry out research about distinctive problems and phenomenon in academic field, offering a feasible reference for the operation and development mode for private museums of Chinese Contemporary Art.”
But this tall trend really started in earnest from the Old World, starting in the mid-2000s, when French billionaire François Pinault, whose holdings include Gucci, Christie’s and the Château Latour vineyard, converted the 18th-century Palazzo Grassi in Venice into a showplace for contemporary art, with Japanese architect Tadao Ando in charge of the renovation. Soon after, Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France and the chairman of
lvmh, not wanting to miss out, developed his own idea for a museum, which took the form of the glass sailboat-shaped Fondation Louis Vuitton planted in the middle of Paris’ Bois de Boulogne. Not surprisingly, fashion houses continue to follow suit, as many take modernist masterpieces as their muse anyway. Another example is The Collezione Maramotti, the private contemporary art collection of Achille Maramotti, founder of fashion label Max Mara, located in the brand’s original warehouse in northern Italy’s Reggio Emilia, which contains some 200 works by Francis Bacon, Alberto Burri and more.
Yet, the motivation for opening a museum varies, acknowledges Hu. “While some are driven by vanity, others want to share their newly acquired culture with the masses. There are also those who want more control and show off their collection, creating more value for the pieces and thereby controlling the art market. The public ultimately benefits from the sharing
of the largesse of art. It gives people a chance to view, to study and to criticise the art. But you do have to be pretty confident about your collection to present it to the public and open it up to criticism.”
Savina Lee is one such person. The South Korean private art museum founder is confident in paving the way in terms of enriching her country’s prolific art scene. “I think I’m discerning in selecting good artists and artworks,” says the founder of Savina Museum of Contemporary Art, among over a dozen of such establishments in Seoul, which is the highest concentrated city of privately founded contemporary art museums in the world, according to a study on private art museums in 2016 by Larry’s List. “I wanted to share my ability with everybody. The museum is a good medium for connection and communication between the artists and the public too.” One of its most recent exhibition featured works by 28 Korean and foreign artists, which had therapeutic qualities.
The 21st century is definitely the golden age of collecting. And the main beneficiary is the public, for therapy and otherwise. “Art should be exposed,” Can and Sevda Elgiz tell Prestige. “Especially contemporary art, which needs an ongoing dialogue with its audience.” The husband‑and‑wife art‑collecting couple set up Elgiz Museum, Turkey’s first private contemporary art museum, in 2001. “The public museums house mainly the past while private contemporary museums have the opportunity to house today’s art... As our collection grew, we felt a responsibility to share the artworks and make the pieces visible. Friends would always see the art in our house and the office buildings, but a display in a public space allocated for the collection creates a different, much more powerful synergy.”
When it comes to the significance and sustainability of private museums, many cursorily look to public participation as a crucial set of measurement. As a new museum, for example, Museum macan (the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara) in Jakarta measures its significance by the number of visitors, and the number of public programmes produced and the number of people who have attended them. Opened in November 2017, the museum draws entirely from the private collection of billionaire Haryanto Adikoesoemo, a chemicals and petroleum mogul. His daughter Fenessa Adikoesoemo chairs the Museum macan Foundation, which runs the museum as a not‑for‑profit organisation, working with partners to ensure the sustainability of its programmes.
Asked if there were any hurdles when trying to improve operations and developments of the museum, the 26‑year‑old admits: “As one of the first cultural institutions that focuses on modern and contemporary art in Indonesia, with education at its core, we barely had any benchmarks prior to our opening. The simplest example is finding our ticketing benchmark. We had to benchmark it against movie tickets, or a cup of coffee in a speciality coffee shop, to determine our price, simply because there weren’t any institutions like ours. Along the way, we continuously build networks with private and governmental stakeholders to keep developing our institution, and sustain our programmes.”
That said, more than half of the private art museums worldwide have a strong inclination towards making their art collection accessible free of charge, often with the aim of making the museums as widely accessible as possible. Finnish‑born British business magnate Poju Zabludowicz and his British contemporary art‑collecting partner Anita Zabludowicz subscribe to this model. Tamares, the family’s holding company, purchased London’s 176 Prince of Wales Road, formerly a Methodist chapel and an acting school, and leases it to the Zabludowicz Collection, a registered charity set up by the Zabludowiczs to produce contemporary art exhibitions and events that are free for all audiences.
“Exhibiting and working with artists is natural to us,” shares Mrs Zabludowicz. “We don’t collect fiscal objects; we collect artworks that are stories and parts of people’s lives. They become part of our life as well and we want to share that passion as widely as possible. Art is increasingly becoming the only free politicised space these days, and we need to nurture and keep that possibility alive.”
While many aim to support the integration of their local contemporary art scene in a global context, some collectors take it one step further by sticking to a theme. Singaporean Woffles Wu is a prime example. “I didn’t want to make any of the mistakes or have that diversity that I had in my previous collecting phases.”
The manga‑styled painter‑turned‑plastic‑surgeon collected different things since he was a kid, ranging from football cards and comic books to paintings and sculptures. “I’m a bit of a hoarder,” he admits. But when it came to opening his own museum, the Museum of Contemporary Chinese Art in Singapore (or muccas when wittily abbreviated), Wu was adamant in displaying only Chinese contemporary art. “I said, if it’s going to be a museum, let’s be very disciplined. It’ll be a museum of Chinese contemporary art because it had a finite beginning, around 1989 at Tiananmen. What fascinates me about Chinese contemporary art is that it mirrors the social changes going on in China since then. It was initially used as a message to the West about helping them to liberalise China.”
Wu even started to get pieces that would fit into his museum’s jigsaw puzzle. “Some of them are huge; I’ve got monumental pieces. One painting is 8m long and 5m high.” The mere prospect of buying more pieces to feed a museum’s collection then begs the question: Does having art in a museum raise its value for resale?
While Hu says yes (“It normally does help a piece to have been displayed in a public institution. If anything, it helps raise the confidence in a piece
“WE FELT A RESPONSIBILITY TO SHARE THE ARTWORKS AND MAKE THE PIECES VISIBLE” — CAN AND SEVDA ELGIZ
of art, that it has been vetted by the museum and by the public and therefore, people are willing to pay more.”), Wu says who cares.
“Who cares if it’s a piece in your museum or even the National Gallery Singapore? At the end of the day, the buyer is going to want the piece for what it is and not for the fact that it’s been in a museum,” says Wu, who once missed an opportunity to nab Australian designer Marc Newson’s infamous Lockheed Lounge for A$10,000 (roughly S$9,670) during an art crawl around Melbourne; six months after his happenstance, he noticed the curvaceous metal chaise in Madonna’s music video for her 1993 track Rain. It has since appeared on the auction market several times, increasingly fetching a couple of millions of dollars each time.
Wu declares: “It’d be better resale value for your art piece to appear in a music video than in a museum, if you’re so inclined.”