You Can Have Your Art & Lend It Too

NPR has this story by Kate Taylor on the shift in the strategies collectors are using to maintain their collections after they’re gone. Citing the Fishers unusual relationship with SFMoMA and Eli Broad’s plans to take on the insurance, conservation and ownership responsibilities for his foundation’s art with a $200 million endowment, NPR’s story gets at the heart of the way museums are adapting to the the rise of large private art collections:

“You want to show your own art, so what do you do?” asked late Gap founder and art collector Don Fisher in a 2007 online interview with The San Francisco Chronicle. “You gotta sell it, or you give it away and people leave it in the basement. I don’t want our art in the basement.” […] Just two days before Fisher died, the museum announced that he and his wife, Doris, had agreed to lend their collection for 25 years. The museum is going to build a new wing, with the Fisher family making a donation toward both the construction and the museum’s endowment. SFMoMA director Neal Benezra acknowledges that the arrangement is unusual, since the museum won’t own the art outright. […] “We will manage it, we will oversee it, we will conserve it, exhibit it, educate the public about it — in just the same way that we do our collection,” Benezra says. […]

One thing that museums are well-equipped to deal with — and private foundations aren’t necessarily — is changes in taste. Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, says that some contemporary work will probably end up in the basement, and for good reason. “There is a lot of contemporary art in the world,” Govan says. “There is a proliferation of collectors of contemporary art, and there isn’t enough space in the museums we have to show all of it.”

Can Collectors Have Their Art and Lend It Too? (All Things Considered/NPR)