MUSEUM DIRECTORS ORGANIZE EXHIBITIONS FOR PRIVATE COLLECTORS TO REINFORCE THEIR REDUCED INSTITUTIONAL BUDGETS
Cristina Ruiz of the Art Newspaper writes that a number of high-profile museum directors are organizing exhibitions for wealthy collectors with private museums to reinforce their institutional budgets and programming, as many public and nonprofit spaces are receiving little in the way of government funding to keep them properly afloat.
Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern, curated an exhibition of postwar art from Asia and Europe for George Economou’s private museum in Athens, Greece. (Earlier in 2016, Tate curator Mark Godfrey put together a Minimalism survey for Economou as well.) Economou, who is a trustee at the Tate Foundation, a fund-raising and advisory board, made a large donation to Tate Modern around the time of these exhibitions. Though the exact amount has not been officially disclosed, the donation was large enough that one of the galleries in the Herzog & de Meuron–designed expansion was named in his honor.
Iwona Blazwick, director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery, entered into a three-year agreement with the Anglo-Canadian Weston family in 2011. In exchange for funds to support Whitechapel’s education and programming fund, Blazwick curated three exhibitions for the family’s space in Windsor, a gated community near Orlando, Florida. LACMA’s director, Michael Govan, worked with François Pinault, a major art collector and primary shareholder in the French luxury goods company Kering, to acquire Bruce Nauman’s 2010 installation For Beginners. Pinault purchased the work and, in 2011, donated a fifty-percent stake to LACMA. Just a couple of years later, Govan cocurated an exhibition of Arte Povera and Mono-ha at Punta della Dogana, Pinault’s private museum in Venice, Italy. “There used to be a dyke between private interest and public purpose and now it’s burst. It’s a complete sea change in how museums operate,” says an anonymous source.
Adrian Ellis, director of the cultural advisory firm AEA Consulting, feels that private collectors could upend the goals of public museums. “Museums are supported by public money, either through direct funding in Europe or tax benefits in the United States. If the beneficiaries of this are collectors, there is an implicitly regressive element where money is taken away from poorer people and given to rich people.” Even if wealthy collectors have moved the ownership of their art to foundations, “these organizations are often still effectively controlled by the donors and many of them don’t make a hard distinction between their foundation’s assets and what they own privately,” states Ellis.
The director of the George Economou Collection, Skarlet Smatana, said in a statement that the private museum is “a [nonprofit], free admission space which creates exhibitions to aid in expanding the international dialogue as well as inspiring the public,” and that inviting guest curators to create shows only helps in growing the vision of institutions like Economou’s. She also says that she has “not received any comments related to a conflict of interest with museum relationships.” Smatana, however, was not explicit in regards to how private collectors can benefit monetarily when they sell a work from their collection that’s been included in an exhibition by the leader of a major museum.
