Niru Ratnam

The boom in private museums

On show in a private museum: Jason Brinkerhoff’s ‘Untitled’, 2011, in the Saatchi Gallery’s ‘Paper’ exhibition. Credit: © Jason Brinkerhoff, 2011 Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery

In the past ten years museums of modern and contemporary art have proliferated around the world. New institutions have appeared in Los Angeles, Venice, Doha and Beijing. Even Camden has seen a burst of activity — the Dairy Art Centre opened in April of this year, spread over the 12,500 sq ft of a former milk depot, with an exhibition of the Swiss artist John Armleder. A similar size space, The David Roberts Art Foundation (Draf), opened last year in a mews near the Mornington Crescent end of Camden High Street. They joined the Zabludowicz Collection, which has been housed in a former Methodist chapel on Prince of Wales Road since 2007.

All three are private museums that display the wares of high-powered British collectors: Frank Cohen, Nicolai Frahm (whose collections are housed in the Dairy), David Roberts and Anita Zabludowicz respectively. Each is free from state control, with no role for DCMS directives or Arts Council hand-outs, and are answerable only to the collectors who have founded them.

The private museum model is behind the recent boom in museum-building around the world. A significant number of these are larger than Camden’s trio. The Broad, slated to open in Los Angeles in late 2014, is a 120,000 sq ft building designed by the architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro that will showcase the collection of the billionaire Eli Broad. The Mexican collector (and richest man in the world) Carlos Slim opened the Soumaya Museum in 2011, which has Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ perched in its lobby. The trend has also taken off in a significant way in Asia. Museums such as Budi Tek’s Yuz Foundation in Indonesia and the Chinese collector Li Bing’s Beijing He Jing Yuan Art Museum are just two of a number that have opened or are under construction.

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