The New Yorker’s Ben Mauk has a surprisingly honest and fair-minded take on the private museum trend by simply visiting Berlin’s Boros collection owned and displayed by Christian and Karen Boros:

“A private collection is not a better model than a museum, but it’s an important add-on,” Christian, who is a publisher and a founder of an ad agency, told me. “You need a museum for historical purposes—to show the best art of the decade, for example. Then you have private collections, with their mistakes, their subjective tastes.”

I visited Christian and Karen in their penthouse, where we sat at a dining table near a large painting by Elizabeth Peyton, surrounded by views of the city. “This building isn’t meant for art,” Christian said. He was wearing gold cufflinks and smoking a Lucky Strike. “How the art fights against the ugly building is very interesting to me.” Karen, who works in V.I.P. relations for Art Basel, guessed that perhaps half of their visitors were more interested in the bunker itself than the art. “We have a lot of artists who people don’t really talk about,” she said. “They may not become part of art history, but they are important to us.”  […]

“In a private collection, you feel the passion,” Christian said. “We are living with the art.”

The Rise of the Private Art “Museum”  (The New Yorker)