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Money meets art: the rise of the private galleries By Edwin Heathcote Published: March 24 2011 16:09 | Last updated: March 24 2011 16:09

On display: visitors are reflected in ’ ‘Cracked Egg’ at the opening in 2008 of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, part of the County Museum of Art

The Wunderkammer, the fabled “cabinet of curiosities”, has, over the past half a millennium, gone from a private amusement for the wealthy to the hub around which every post-industrial, secular city now seems to revolve. Huge, expensive museums, from London’s Tate Modern to Bilbao’s Guggenheim, are trumpeted as vehicles for regeneration, as contemporary cathedrals where modern art has replaced the objects of pilgrimage.

But, after two centuries of seemingly unstoppable expansion, the publicly funded mega-museum has begun to fade. The era of huge new structures to display both art and architecture is coming to an end.

It might be down to oversupply, a squeeze on public funds or ennui, but there is another reason, too. The roots of the museum have been rediscovered in the eponymous, privately funded collection, the plaything of the wealthy. A tranche of new galleries is opening across the world, each displaying the insatiable appetite of the wealthy for art.

The vast prices commanded by the best pieces from the most desirable modern artists have left public museums behind. Both the big-ticket names – Mark Rothko, , Wassily Kandinsky, even the prolific – and the highly prized (and priced) darlings of the contemporary scene, from Jean-Michel Basquiat to , to Jeff Koons, are now accessible only to oligarchs.

Roman Abramovich, the Russian businessman and owner of Chelsea football club, has bought works by Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, reportedly spending an eye-watering $120m in one 24-hour period. Viktor Pinchuk, the Ukrainian , was revealed as the mystery buyer behind substantial purchases of works by Hirst, Koons and Andreas Gursky, one of the world’s most expensive photographers.

Meanwhile, two Frenchmen from empires – Bernard Arnault, founder, chairman and chief executive of LVMH, and François Pinault, founder of PPR – have been building comprehensive collections of contemporary art for years.

In the US, this is nothing new. Business dynasties from the Fricks to the Morgans have been making the art markets for generations, and there are still dozens of wealthy collectors there. But the fervour once displayed by the Hearst family, J. Paul Getty and others has been overtaken by Chinese and Middle Eastern buyers determined to build world-class collections at any price.

Until recently, these collections were seen by few, the buyers often unwilling to reveal their identities. Now, the private museum, bearing the name of the collector but open to the public, has become the latest accessory of the super-rich. These buildings are starting to have a real impact on the city, often coming with generous programmes of education and outreach, and tightly focused and intriguing collections. Pinault has been responsible for the most visible example so far. He commissioned TadaoSlideshow Ando, the Japanese architect, to reconfigure the dark, proto-industrial interiors of the old Dogana da View a slideshow of images Mar (customs ) in Venice. The Punta della Dogana is now a dark, of some of the world’s most brooding space that exudes a characteristically Venetian blend of decadence striking private galleries and and decay. museums

Across the Atlantic, Miami has been marketing itself as the winter home of the art market with its thriving edition of Art Basel, the contemporary art fair, and its status has been shored up by a rash of superb private galleries. The Rubell Family Collection, for example, draws on wealth from the hotel business. Situated in a former contraband warehouse, it was pivotal in establishing the city’s scene in the 1980s.

More recently, Martin Margulies, the art collector, and Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, the philanthropist and entrepreneur, have opened galleries in old buildings, and Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, Cuban émigrés, have opened an outstanding collection focused on Latin American artists, situated on the fragile physical boundary between the arts world and the ghetto, maximising their presence with superb outreach programmes.

On the US west coast, , a philanthropist and property billionaire who has done much to expand the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is establishing his own museum in Bunker Hill, the city’s old downtown. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the New York architects, it looks to be an adventurous structure to house a stupendous collection.

South of the border, Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man according to Forbes magazine, is building his second museum in Mexico. The telecoms billionaire commissioned Fernando Romero, his son-in-law, to design the oddly shaped, aluminium-clad structure. It will house Slim’s Rodin collection as well as Impressionist and Surrealist works, and entry will be free.

Across the Pacific, David Walsh, the Australian mogul, is trying to establish his Museum of Old and New Art on a riverside site just outside Hobart, Tasmania, as a groundbreaking venue.

Unlike Slim, who is attempting to anchor a new district, Walsh, when asked whether the museum would be good for local business, admitted in plain-speaking Oz style to “not giving a shit”. But he is also the most perceptive in acknowledging the museum’s usurpation of the cathedral, saying he intends the building to be a “temple to secularism”. Housed in an underground, disorientating bunker of a building will be some genuinely controversial and radical art, including Wim Delvoye’s “Cloaca”, a contraption that “digests” organic material and turns it into excrement.

The biggest investment, though, and the most highly anticipated privately funded gallery, is Abramovich’s St Petersburg venture. He is investing $400m to build a complex of museums on the city’s 18-acre New Holland Island, a former shipbuilding site. The scheme is provoking interest not just due to Abramovich’s wealth, but also because of the supposed involvement of Dasha Zhukova, his girlfriend.

Zhukova has made her Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in into one of the contemporary art world’s most interesting venues. Housed in a former bus station that was designed by Konstantin Melnikov, the radical Constructivist architect, and converted by London-based Jamie Fobert Architects, the centre has showcased contemporary Russian work as well as Modernist masterpieces. Details, as usual with Abramovich, remain sketchy, which is only adding to the speculation.

The UK, with its rich heritage of public museums, has seen less of an explosion in private museums, but there have been remarkable efforts. At one end of the spectrum is Frank Cohen’s big-box gallery on an unpromising industrial estate near Wolverhampton. Cohen, founder of a chain of do-it-yourself stores, claims to be completely uninterested in the architecture, and the crinkly tin shed of his Initial Access gallery proves it, but his is a fine collection and there is a no-nonsense lack of ego in the utilitarian setting – he would rather spend money on more art.

By contrast, , arguably the most important collector on the British scene, has moved into plush surroundings near London’s mega-rich Sloane Square (conveniently near his Belgravia apartment).

Saatchi’s original gallery, in a converted milk depot in north London, was popular with artists, setting the scene for the minimal industrial chic that has since become de rigueur. After a temporary interlude in the former Greater London Council building on the River Thames’ south , the new gallery is luxuriously spacious, a sign that the irreverent rebels of contemporary art have become the new establishment.

The kind of budgets the world’s wealthy can conjure up are beyond the dreams of public institutions. The age of grand public buildings has ended, and the future of art has been privatised; the big commercial galleries and the ’ buildings now lead the way. The rest of us must be thankful for their perennial urge to acquire and to show off.

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