Private collectors who set up foundations and open their own museums are “narcissistic” and their galleries are no better than vanity projects. So said the French art historian Patricia Falguières at a conference held in June at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Public institutions may no longer have the spending power of private individuals but the financial resources of collectors do not give them the power to rewrite art history, she said, in what amounted to a scathing attack on collector-run museums. That she was able to deliver this assault in the auditorium of the recently opened, Frank Gehry-designed building in the Bois de Boulogne that houses works of art owned by the Louis Vuitton Foundation (set up by the luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault) is testament to the foresight of the organisation’s director Suzanne Pagé.
First among equals? At the start of the event Pagé explained that in the run-up to the private museum’s opening in October 2014 she had wrestled with many questions that are increasingly relevant in today’s changing art world. Who now writes art history? What role does the market play? And how can public institutions and private museums work together?
The speakers at the conference who believe in the primacy of public museums included Tate Modern’s outgoing director Chris Dercon, who said that the main difference between state-supported museums and those that are privately run is sustainability. “I see very few private museums which are aware of what they’ll be in 50 or 100 years from now,” Dercon said. He also warned that numerous collectors buy pieces by artists whose work is popular on the market but who will always be shunned by public museums and prestigious exhibitions such as Documenta.
“Absurd” acquisition budgets The new president of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Bernard Blistène, said that “much contemporary art has [risen to prominence] despite museums and to the detriment of museums, and we need to recognise this”. Blistène described the difficulties of buying art for a national collection on a budget. “Our [annual government] budget for acquisitions is €1.2m; that’s only enough to buy a watercolour by Elizabeth Peyton; it is an absurd situation, we are not in a position to grow.”
The situation is compounded by the fact that “artists rarely donate their own work to institutions”, said the independent curator Francesco Bonami. Instead, public museums such as the Tate are often offered works by collectors who have been forced into the donation by gallery owners. Some dealers will only sell to collectors if they agree to purchase two editions of any given work: one for themselves, one for a prestigious museum. The problem is “they want to give us the work of artists we do not want at all,” said Dercon.
Despite these challenges, Blistène believes that the problems faced by the numerous private museums opening around the world are even greater. “Private collections are more worried about having something to say than public collections are about having something to buy,” he said.
Power of commerce Commercial galleries have a role to play and it is an important one, argued Mark Francis, a Gagosian Gallery director. Galleries fund the production of new work, subsidise artists and organise important public exhibitions. They also contribute to the writing of art history. “The way a canon is established is by a form of consensus at any given time”, a consensus between commercial galleries, public museums and collectors alike, he said. Of course, the larger the gallery, the greater the power. “At Gagosian, we publish between 40 and 50 major books every year; we are one of the biggest art publishers in world,” he said, adding that respected specialists such as the Picasso biographer John Richardson organise shows for the gallery “and the shows are free to visit and that’s not so bad”.
The Belgian collector Alain Servais acknowledged that many collector-run museums have inauspicious beginnings but said that, in the long run, “we hope that the art will prevail”. He cited Dasha Zhukova’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, which “started off as an appendage to the Gagosian Gallery” but has since evolved into something more interesting. The private museum in Gorky Park reopened in June in a Soviet-era pavilion, which has been upcycled by the architect Rem Koolhaas.