The Financial Times doesn’t have much to say in this story on the plethora of private museums being built around the world. The bulk of the article is a list of collectors who have built or are building museums. But Edwin Heathcote does muster something that might be considered analysis:
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. […] 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, Andy Warhol, Wassily Kandinsky, even the prolific Pablo Picasso – and the highly prized (and priced) darlings of the contemporary scene, from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Damien Hirst, Richard Prince to Jeff Koons, are now accessible only to oligarchs. […] 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 billionaires’ buildings now lead the way. The rest of us must be thankful for their perennial urge to acquire and to show.
Money Meets Art: The Rise of the Private Galleries (Financial Times)
