Prestige Hong Kong – Art Basel
PRIVATE VIEWING
The proliferation of private art museums
WITH THE TOTAL value of art held by private individuals worldwide estimated at US$3 trillion, it’s no surprise to find that ardent collectors, with their collections outgrowing wall space in their 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 be lent to a public museum that lacks sufficient exhibition space to show it. Amid a global surge in collecting, and a diminishing flow of government funding, entrepreneurs and collectors are stepping up, both in the West and in the East.
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 more than 5,000 today. By comparison, the US has over 35,000 museums.
“Many of these museums are privately funded by newly minted billionaires,” says Hu. “For someone who has everything, it’s the ultimate ego project. Many museums have been criticised for being merely vanity projects and that there’s more emphasis on the architecture of the museum than the content.” Red Brick Art Museum on the outskirts of Beijing was founded in 2012 by property developer and art collector Yan Shijie. With its monolithic brick walls dramatically slashed by narrow windows and skylights, it’s an astonishingly beautiful structure that’s largely devoid of art — though its website ambitiously states that the space is dedicated to boosting the development of Chinese contemporary art through artist programmes and academic research, offering a feasible reference for the operation and development of private museums.
In 2006, Palazzo Grassi, an 18th-century building on Venice’s Grand Canal, was bought by French billionaire François Pinault, whose holdings include Gucci, Christie’s and the Château Latour vineyard. With the help of Japanese architect Tadao Ando, it’s been converted into a showcase for Pinault’s private art collection. Soon after, LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault implemented his own idea for a museum, which took the form of the Frank Gehry-designed glass sailboatshaped Fondation Louis Vuitton. Planted in the middle of Paris’s Bois de Boulogne, it’s believed to house works of art owned by both Arnault and LVMH. Another example is the Collezione Maramotti, the private contemporary art collection of Max Mara founder Achille
Maramotti, located in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia in a building that previously served as the brand’s warehouse.
Yet, says Hu, the motivation for opening a museum varies. “Some are driven by vanity, while others want to share their newly acquired culture with the masses. Others want more control and to 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 art 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 that she’s enriching her country’s prolific art scene. “I think I’m a discerning person in selecting good artists and art works,” says the founder of Savina Museum, one of more than a dozen such establishments in Seoul, the city with the highest concentration of privately founded contemporary-art museums in the world, according to a study on the subject in 2016 by Larry’s List. “I wanted to share my ability with everybody,” Lee continues. “The museum is a good medium for connection and communication between the artists and the public too.”
Lee is not alone in her contention that the main beneficiary of private collecting should be the public. “Art should be exposed, especially contemporary art, which needs an ongoing dialogue with its audience,” say the husband-and-wife art-collecting couple Can and Sevda Elgiz, who set up Turkey’s first private contemporaryart 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 became wider, we felt responsible to share these pieces with art lovers; and to make these 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 measurement. As a new museum, for example, Jakarta’s Museum Macan (the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara) measures its significance by the number of visitors, the number of public programmes produced and the number of people who have attended them. Opened in November 2017, it draws entirely from the private collection of billionaire Haryanto Adikoesoemo, a chemicals and petroleum mogul. His 26-year-old daughter Fenessa chairs the Museum Macan Foundation, which runs the museum as a non-profit organisation, working with partners to ensure the sustainability of its programmes.
Asked if there are any hurdles to be faced when trying to improve operations and development of the museum, she admits, “As one of the first cultural institutions that focuses on modern and contemporary art in Indonesia, 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.”
The ethos of making access to private art museums and their collections free of charge is one shared by Finnish-born British business magnate Poju Zabludowicz and his art-collecting partner Anita Zabludowicz. Tamares, the family’s holding company, bought 176 Prince of Wales Road in London, a former Methodist chapel and acting school, and leased 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,” says Anita Zabludowicz. “We don’t collect fiscal objects, we collect art works 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.”
Other collectors prefer sticking to a theme. Singaporean Dr 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,” he says. The painter-turned-plastic-surgeon has collected various items since he was a child, 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
“EXHIBITING AND WORKING WITH ARTISTS IS NATURAL FOR US. WE DON’T COLLECT FISCAL OBJECTS, WE COLLECT ART WORKS THAT ARE STORIES AND PARTS OF PEOPLE’S LIVES” — ANITA ZABLUDOWICZ
Singapore, 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 will be a museum of Chinese contemporary art because it had a finite beginning, which started around 1989 at Tiananmen. What fascinated me about [Chinese contemporary art] was that it mirrored the social changes that were going on in China since that time. It was initially used as a message to the West about helping them to liberalise China.”
Whatever the ethos behind the creation of a private art museum, does having art in a museum raise its value for resale? “It normally does help a piece to have been displayed in a public institution,” says Edie Hu. “If anything, it helps raise the confidence in a piece of art that it has been vetted by the museum and by the public and therefore people are willing to pay more.”
But, he adds, “If it’s a piece in your own museum, who cares? Or if it’s in the National Gallery, who cares? At the end of the day, you’ve got to find a buyer and the buyer is going to want the piece for what it is and not for the fact that it’s been in a museum.”