by Don Thompson
In a museum setting, this is exacerbated by the perceived (and probably real) system of individual reward and punishment. Championing an initiative that produces a large gain will lead to modest recognition. If an action leads to a loss of equal size, the curator may get fired or at least suffer a blow to his or her personal brand and museum-world reputation.
In economics this is known as a principal-agent problem. Assume that an innovative but expensive art exhibit offers a 50-percent chance of $2 million in profit and publicity for the museum, and a 50-percent chance of a $1-million loss. The expected payoff of doing the exhibition is $500,000 (0.5 × $2 million + 0.5 × minus $1 million). This is a great gamble for the museum; if every exhibition had this payoff, there would be a high probability of profit for the institution at the end of a year. It would also offer the public a chance to see new and innovative art. But it is not a great gamble for the curator or museum director, for whom incurring a large loss, even after a long run of modest profits, has a large potential downside.
CHAPTER TWENTY
PRIVATE MUSEUMS
“You … hear about billionaires [opening museums] who’ve otherwise been discreet during their decades of wealth accumulation.”
—Nick Paumgarten, art journalist99
“What is the difference between a theme park, a museum and a tourist attraction, especially when the design of new museums has become increasingly sensationalistic?”
—Jonathan Glancey, architectural critic
MORE EVIDENCE OF THE ROLE OF WEALTHY COLLECTORS IN THE CONTEMPORARY art environment comes with the proliferation of private art museums. A highly publicized recent example is The Broad, a 120,000-square-foot Los Angeles museum that opened in September 2015. Dedicated to the 1960s-and-onward collection of Eli and Edythe Broad, the spectacular $140-million building across from Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (LAMOCA) is a step in what Eli Broad says is his mission to turn Los Angeles into a hub of the contemporary art world.
An interesting commentary on the publicity contemporary art receives is that Eli and Edythe Broad are better known in their role as art patrons than for their donation over twenty-five years of $800 million to Los Angeles charities, or their 2003 founding of the Broad Institute at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gene-therapy technology arising from this grant offers the promise of cures for diseases as diverse as diabetes, autism, Alzheimer’s and cancer. The art component of their philanthropy gets far more media coverage. A cover story in Los Angeles Magazine described Eli Broad’s primary significance as having “more art than the Getty” museum (which is factually incorrect).
Eli Broad originally intended to donate his collection to LAMOCA, where he had both funded a building that carries his name and rescued the museum from a financial crisis. A dispute with the then director of the museum over how many of his works would be displayed at any one time caused him to drop the idea of a donation in favour of constructing his own museum.
The Broad opened with two thousand works, among them thirty-four by Jeff Koons, thirty-nine by Roy Lichtenstein and a Takashi Murakami painting that is 82 feet (25 metres) long. The Broads also provided a $200-million endowment plus funding for new acquisitions. That is a larger endowment than any museum in Los Angeles other than the J. Paul Getty Museum.
The major media criticism of The Broad has been that the collection features the same artists and art schools that commercial galleries are showing. That is true. The collection is primarily work first shown in New York in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. Most artists represented are white, male and from New York or Los Angeles. The works are painting and sculpture rather than film or performance art. The collection is not European or Asian, not Black or Latino. But the “narrowness” criticism is unfair. The Broad, like other private museums, reflects what the donors collected and wanted to have shown.
The concept of private museums is not new. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, collectors Andrew Carnegie, John Pierpont Morgan, Henry Clay Frick and Huntington Hartford created world-class art collections intended to be shared with the public. In the twentieth century, personal collections were the basis of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Whitney and Frick collections in New York, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. After the death of J. Paul Getty, his home near Malibu and his collection became the Getty museum.
The Getty is an extreme example of what a private museum can become. The philanthropist left the museum four million shares of Getty oil stock, worth $1.2 billion at the time the legacy was disbursed. Getty put few restrictions on the institution he was funding; its purpose was simply “the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge.”100
More recently, a number of art foundations have been established with galleries open to the public—the Italian Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin in 1995; Ron Lauder’s Neue Galerie of German and Austrian Art in Manhattan in 2001; Guy and Myriam Ullens’ Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in 2007; Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR, in 2011; and Bernard Arnault’s Fondation Louis Vuitton museum in a spectacular Frank Gehry building in Paris in 2014 (see photo insert). There is also Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei’s Long Museum in Shanghai; Dasha Zhukova’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Gorky Park, Moscow (2015); and Tony and Elham Salamé’s Aïshti Foundation (Aïshti being a contraction of “I love you” in Japanese) in Beirut (2015).
The Broad, Getty, Walton and Louis Vuitton spaces are custom-built. Some of the others, like the Fondazione in Turin, are in converted factories. Garage is in a prefabricated restaurant pavilion that dates to 1968. Aïshti is in a shopping mall. At one extreme, there are fabulous collections being shown. At the other, there are small local vanity projects that reflect the founders’ wealth while providing tax shelters.
Several artists have also opened private museums to show collections of other artists’ work. The best known is probably Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in London, which has shown work by Jeff Koons, including one of the Play-Doh series.
The most common criticism of private museums is their tax status. This has come under particular scrutiny in the US with concerns about income inequality and policies that favour the rich. Donors can deduct the fair market value of art to reduce taxable income by as much as 50 percent each year.
In May 2016, US Senate finance chairman Orrin Hatch reported on what might be the first stage of future rule changes for these not-for-profit institutions. He wrote to eleven museums asking for information on opening hours, attendance and grant activities. One private museum that was mentioned as benefiting from tax treatment lies only 24 kilometres from Hatch’s office in Washington, DC; Glenstone, in Potomac, MD.
It is the creation of industrialist Mitchell P. Rales and his wife, Emily Wei Rales. She is a former curator and dealer. Glenstone is a contemporary art museum showing works by Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. It is set in a 200-acre estate with sculptures by Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra and Jeff Koons. The museum name derives from the location—Glen Road, with stone quarries nearby. When Glenstone completes an expansion in 2018 it will have 60,000 square feet of display space, more than the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Glenstone has always required reservations, because the Rales are concerned about overcrowding. They commissioned studies on the amount of room needed to display art comfortably. The answer was 30 square feet per visitor: a third for personal space, a third for the artwork and a third for the viewing area. No public museum has restricted admission to this extent. A popular exhibition at a museum like the MOMA may leave each visitor with less than half that viewing area.
The Rubell Family Collection in Miami’s art district opened in 1996. It is well known to visitors to the Basel Miami art fair each December. Another private museum is The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, located in a converted 1902 stone barn in Greenwich, CT, near
the estate of founders Peter Brant and his wife, Stephanie Seymour.
Glenstone and the Rubell and Brant museums are nonprofit, tax-exempt charitable foundations. Their founders (and other donors) can deduct the market value of art, cash and stocks they donate. The tax status of the foundations has created debate on what form public benefit should take in order to qualify for a tax exemption. US tax guidelines are unclear. Benefits can be public access, educational outreach or loaning works. Brant’s foundation organizes travelling exhibitions and sponsors children’s workshops.
Then there are the mini-museums, which are open only occasionally to friends of the founders and for charity events, and generally (but not always) are without tax-exempt status. Steve Tisch, owner of the New York Giants Football Club and a movie producer, has a backyard museum behind his Benedict Canyon home in Los Angeles. The collection includes works by Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha.
A strong motive for establishing a private museum is that public museums are selective about what they accept. The issue is not just quality or authenticity, but whether the work fills a gap in the museum’s collection. Many art museums won’t accept cutting-edge contemporary art; several have rejected significant works by Jean-Michel Basquiat. An advantage of a private museum is that the donor retains control of the collection and can show it all at one time. The donor gets to curate how the art is exhibited, and what to add or deaccession.
This idea of wealthy founders of private museums using tax-deductible money to improve the relative importance of artists they favour in art history produces criticism. A frequently cited example is the new fame of Gustav Klimt, seen as one among many Austrian symbolist artists until Ron Lauder paid a then-record $135 million in 2006 to acquire Adele Bloch Bauer I (1907) as “Our Mona Lisa” for his Neue Galerie in New York.
The concern about influencing taste is puzzling. Private museums are a minuscule part of a much larger phenomenon, the size and power of American social and charitable foundations. These have a combined endowment of about $740 billion and dispense $70 billion a year. The foundations are conduits for the rich to spend tax-free money to attempt to convert societies in the US and abroad to what donors think they should be. The Gates Foundation has an endowment of $40 billion. Over an eight-year period it spent $1 billion in twelve states to fund charter schools to replace public ones. Over the same period it spent $2 billion in forty-five US states to subsidize replacement of large public high schools with small ones. Both initiatives were aimed at improving accountability for teaching and learning. Diane Ravitch, a former US assistant secretary of education, said the foundation had self-declared itself America’s national school superintendent. Almost no one paid much attention to the criticism, perhaps because many Americans saw any change in ossified school structures as desirable. More Americans seem to care about the display of private art collections that have not been professionally curated.
There is one great private museum in the world that is virtually unknown. It has what is almost certainly the best collection of twentieth-century Western art outside the United States and Europe. There are fifteen hundred works, including Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh, Rothko, Frank Stella, Wassily Kandinsky and Motherwell. There are twelve Jasper Johns and fifteen Warhols, alongside what some consider the best work produced by Jackson Pollock, Mural on Indian Red Ground (1950). This museum has no issues of tax avoidance, or founder meddling, or acquisition policy. There are no plans for a stunning new building. It also offers no reference to the benefactors who assembled the collection.
The collection is in an unimposing building in central Tehran. The building title in Farsi translates as “Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art”—although few of the works would today be considered contemporary. It was assembled in the early and mid-1970s by Empress Farah Diba Pahlavi, the third wife of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi; her cousin, the museum’s architect and director Kamran Diba; and curators Fereshteh Daftari and Donna Stein.
Andrew Scott Cooper, who authored a biography of the shah, described Farah Diba as “the most accomplished female sovereign of the 20th century.” She spent a decade turning Tehran into a centre of artistic and cultural life. The cost of the art collection to the empress and the state treasury at the time is hard to estimate because many works were acquired through private American and French dealers, and by purchasing entire collections. It was certainly in excess of $100 million, the equivalent of more than $2 billion today.
The collection opened to the public—at least to foreign residents of Tehran—in 1978. Empress Farah fled to the United States at the beginning of the 1979 revolution, which created the new Islamic Republic. The art remained in the current building, unseen for twenty years except for brief showings as part of political events. Empress Farah is now in her late seventies and lives in Paris and Washington, DC.
The museum reopened in 1999, displaying pop and Impressionist art but no nudes or art suggestive of homosexuality. Notably, Francis Bacon’s great triptych Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendants (1968) is not displayed. It is in storage but available for viewing by non-Muslim foreigners who go through an informal request process. Admission to the museum itself costs the equivalent of less than one American dollar. A portion of the collection, but not Two Figures, was scheduled to travel to Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie and to Rome’s MAXXI Museum in 2017.
There is a great backstory to the stored collection. As might be imagined, during the twenty years the museum was closed and the work stored, government officials received many offers to purchase its masterpieces. Only one work was ever deaccessioned. The Iranian government wanted to repatriate the Shahnama (“Book of Kings”) of Shah Tahmasp, a set of four-hundred-year-old miniatures owned by the Houghton family, founders of Corning Glass in New York. After long and secretive negotiations, the miniatures were traded for Woman III (1952–53), an unwanted Willem de Kooning nude mentioned earlier in the book (Chapter 10). Zurich dealer Doris Ammann negotiated the exchange, which took place on the runway of the Vienna airport. Houghton sold the de Kooning to David Geffen. In 2006, Geffen sold it to Steven Cohen for $137.5 million. At the time of the Vienna airport exchange the Shahnama was valued at $6 million.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BUYER
“In 40 or 50 years’ time … will Doha be as important in global art and culture as London, New York and Paris? It’s possible. Why not? Let’s talk again in ten years.”
—Sheikha al-Mayassa al-Thani of Qatar in an interview with the London Evening Standard101
“I am highly moved by [Sheikha al-Mayassa’s] vision and strong passion for art.”
—Takashi Murakami, artist102
IN MAY 2015, I ATTENDED IN A DINNER IN TURIN, ITALY, HELD TO HONOUR Her Excellency Sheikha al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani of Qatar. It was sponsored by art patron Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, whose foundation awarded the Sheikha the StellaRe Prize. The award is an ornate ring designed by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. It celebrates women who “through their work, dedication, and innovative vision, have opened up new perspectives across a diversity of fields.”103
Sheikha al-Mayassa is the chairperson of the Qatar Museums Authority (QM). Born in 1983, she is the sister of the Emir of Qatar. Her father is the former emir. In 2015, and almost certainly in years prior, she managed the largest art acquisition budget in the world. Many consider that she—rather than an artist, dealer, auction house executive or museum director—is the most important person in the world of contemporary art. She has been called a desert Catherine de Medici. She is certainly the most influential buyer; she reflects the internationalization of Western art better than any other individual I can think of.
Others agree with her importance. In 2013, the magazine ArtReview rated the Sheikha the most influential person in art. In 2014, Time magazine named her one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. Also in 2014, the Economist called her “the art world’s most powerful woman.” Forbes named her one
of the world’s one hundred most powerful women.
To put the rankings in context, the next three people in the ArtReview power list were American dealers David Zwirner, Iwan Wirth and Larry Gagosian. They were followed by curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones of the Serpentine gallery in London, and Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Modern in London.
Qatar is 300 kilometres across the Persian Gulf from Abu Dhabi. A little larger than Connecticut, the country is best known as the home of TV network al-Jazeera, and for winning the competition to stage the 2022 football World Cup. The emirate has 1.8 million residents, of whom only 280,000 are citizens. Until the 1980s, Qatar exported little except pearls, and that industry was in decline. The discovery of oil and, later, the third-largest gas reserves in the world means Qatari citizens now have the world’s highest per-capital incomes.