Conversations: Joachim Pissarro
Camille Pissarro, Fishmarket (1902 ), Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art
Joachim Pissarro - art historian, author, museum strategy consultant, (among other institutions former MoMA) curator, founder of Global Museum Strategies Group and, yes, great-grandson of Camille Pissarro - was kind enough to speak with me about private museums, their impact on the art world, what motivates the private collector turned founder and why we shouldn’t be too worried about them leaving their mark on our institutional landscape. Our conversation was part of a series of interviews in the context of a research project exploring the dynamics of (private) museum interaction with the art market and contemporary iterations of arts patronage.
LW: With the more recent – and I’m referring to the last 20 years or so – proliferation of private art museums cropping up around the globe, some have characterized this development as a “refeudalization” of the institutional sector, especially in countries where there is a strong tradition of predominantly public funding for the arts. The term describes a dynamic where arts funding is not only relying more strongly on private funding but now fully transitioning back to somewhat of a cultural “oligarchy”, reminiscent of more traditional forms of arts patronage we have seen throughout history. I think we are seeing a return to form of sorts, with corporate entities or wealthy private individuals – especially in contexts where public funds are running low – are taking on the role of what used to be the church, aristocracy and later wealthy industrialists – so not an unprecedented development. Would you say that we are in the midst of such a shift and could this be a repetition of a historical pattern?
Joachim: I personally do not – and this is a brief philosophical preamble – believe in the Nietzschean eternal return of history. It doesn’t make much sense to me. And I certainly do not believe that we are coming anywhere close to a feudal economy of culture. If anything, it’s the absolute opposite. Nonetheless, I also do not believe that things are stagnant. I don’t think we’re experiencing anything that could be described as a circular return and neither do I believe what is happening resembles a straight line. So in between we kind of have a rollercoaster of sorts paired with unpredictability.
At the same time, there definitely has been a boom, but maybe not predominantly in the countries with a strong museum tradition. At GMSG we work with statistics a lot. If we look at museums in North America and Western Europe, originating from more or less the same system and around a similar time - the Louvre in 1795, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1817 for example, within years of each other – we can see that the 19th century marks the birth of or rather the Golden Age of the museum institution within a (Western) American/European cultural context. In 2010 China decided to launch a massive private museum campaign: within 10 years China saw the creation of 2000 new museums, 6 ½ times the level of proliferation seen in America and Western Europe over the span of 100 years. These are absolutely baffling figures. So, I see what you’re referring to here.
The Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Fondation Beyeler…these are big billionaire institutions that indeed take up a lot of space and also occupy a significant amount of social media territory. They are extremely important. But they are not the be and end all, the alpha and omega of the contemporary museum world in the 21st century. I think things are way more complicated. And we haven’t even begun to talk about the Middle East for example or several other regions.
So to summarize: I wouldn’t use the term feudalization, because that carries a historical connotation that is not relevant here. But I do think the private (financial) influence within the museum sector has an enormous impact.
LW: How do you think museums - private and public but more so private museums - interact with the art market and prices? Depending on who you talk to, acknowledging that museums and the art market have a symbiotic relationship can feel a little bit risky. But we can all agree that whatever makes in into a museum collection or even just exhibition is relevant – it becomes part of art history. And what is relevant is often reflected in market prices and demand. We also that this was not always the case historically (museums were not always the primary context of reception for art) but this is very much what it has become. Public museums don’t necessarily get a lot of criticism for their impact on the market, private museums however do: they are accused of building collections following a primarily commercially driven imperative, resulting in a global standardization of artworks, of inflating prices and even pricing public museums out of the market, making acquisitions too competitive. How would you describe the relationship between the private museum and the art market or by extension the public museum?
Joachim: Let’s look at what happened when Bernard Arnault and his team decided to hire Frank Ghery and create the first major league private museum in France, which was not used to such museums at the time. I mean, there were a few small private museums here and there but nothing of that caliber and size and nothing created by the richest person on earth…he was not then but he is now. The creation of the museum caused a lot of concern. At the time I was working on a private contract deal with a prominent museum in Paris and several well-known public museum directors were extremely worried. about the fact that audiences would just flood into the FLV and obviously there are only so many Euros that any given family – and we’re talking mostly middle-class families – can afford to spend on a visit to any given museum. Two visits in a year to the FLV happen at the expense of visits to the Musee Picasso or the Musee d’Orsay, draining individual cultural budgets. However it seems these fears were unfounded since nobody is complaining about the FLV today. The new addition benefitted everybody. And I am not saying it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’m just purely talking about internal discussions that I am privy to. There were definitely serious concerns to begin with. And today you have none of those concerns. For one, Arnault is a very savvy guy and he is now on the board of trustees of the Musee Picasso and I’m assuming he is on others as well. He donates money right, left and center to all these public institutions.
Again, this notion of feudalization is not exactly true. They know that they need each other and so it’s not that one replaces the other - this was the initial concern - but I think today it is proving to be a different kind of dynamic. The question everyone is asking now is “How can we work with each other” and “How can we benefit each other?” The FLV cannot function well without the support of the major national institutions that have been around for two and a half centuries and vice versa, the national institutions badly need the influx of fresh blood, meaning fresh capital. All the public institutions certainly in Western Europe and in America to a degree need support from sponsors, trustees, private individuals etc. Where do you find that? Obviously in the private museum.
Pinault started sooner than anyone else and he has done very well – that’s another model to look at. I remember Sarkozy – one of the most unpopular presidents of France - maybe 15 or 20 years ago, wanted to bring in the American model of arts funding to France. The American model being private individuals supporting their national institutions. The culture in Western Europe, in Germany as well - less so in England because England is culturally more adjacent to the US in this respect due to historical links - is absolutely not used to that. So Sarkozy was met with a lot of resistance. I think now, some 20 years later, things are beginning to look very different. Is it an ideal world? Absolutely not. But there is a kind of understanding of where everyone stands, of how they can complement each other.
LW: Do you think that the support provided by private entities to a public museum can cancel out some of the effects that a private institution’s buying behaviour might have on the market? Do you think private museum acquisitions impact art market prices given they work with a different budget?
Joachim: If you look at the top institutions in Western Europe and the US: The Louvre, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, these are all three institutions with totally different systems but functioning according to – broadly speaking – the same rules. All have managed 8 and 9 figure acquisitions by the dozens among them in the past 10-20 years. I don’t have the exact statistics, but I am prepared to bet that those national institutions have actually spent a greater amount than any of the private institutions you’re thinking about. My first acquisition at a very well-known institution in New York City was a drawing by one of the world’s most prominent artists. We’re talking a jaw-dropping eight figures. And that was just the beginning, this was in the early 2000s. The difference between the private and public museum is that the public ones are extraordinarily discreet about their acquisitions. Private museums, being private, might be more transparent here.
Public institutions cannot all be viewed as a monolith. You have small provincial museums - with a few hundred thousand of budget per year - that can barely pay their own staff and then you have a museum like MoMA with a board made up of about 80 or 90 people of which a third are multi-billionaires.
LW: What do you think motivates the private collector turned museum founder?
Joachim: The Museum Berggruen in Berlin is an extraordinary example. A small private museum, founded by a German Jew, who houses his collection in the institution. I don’t know the exact agreement between Berlin and Heinz Berggruen. One of the incentives was that there is often a lot of disillusionment or disappointment among private collectors who like good citizens want to gift their collection. Berggruen and the MET had a very good relationship except that he felt that his Klee collection – possibly the best out there - was barely on display. Private collectors give their collection to such huge institutions that then end up in the best-case scenario barely manage to show 10% of their own collection. When you decide to gift your collection to this sort of institution, what is the likelihood that the works will be shown or more precisely what percentage will be shown, ever? So, there are a lot of collectors who out of this endemic, systematic unfulfillment decide that “I had the money to build this collection. I also have the money to maybe not create the MET but I can create myself a Mini-MET.” That is the (initial) impetus for a lot the private museums that have been or are being founded.
LW: It’s true, there is a certain level of control that comes with being able to build your own museum and to show your collection the way you want it to be shown, rather than donating it to a public institution and having it rotate – if at all – within their collection. On the subject of collection presentation but also curation: do you think that curatorial practice and acquisitions but also programming decisions are more audience or even market focused, less academic..some would say less balanced (Nizan Shaked) in private institutions vs. public ones? I personally don’t think so. There is some pretty solid programming going on but often times this is one the main criticisms levelled at private institutions.
Joachim: I absolutely agree with you. Again, big generalization here but I believe – trying to consider as broad a spectrum as possible – if you look at the Beyeler foundation or the FLV, they’re not the most scholarly institutions but they try their best to inflect their own program with a very strong dose of educational interest to make sure that they give back. If you want to be more cynical: to appear to give back. I would say that … we tend to only focus on what we know best and what we see often. That is Western Modern and Contemporary art. But what about the 5 millennia of art history outside that? There are private museums we don’t talk about. If I for example tell you about the Khalili Research Centre in Oxford – you might tell me you’ve never heard about it. Sir David Khalil has one of the largest and most respected collections of Islamic art in the world and around that collection he created an institution the likes of which doesn’t exist, that engages scholarship, awards student grants, offers residencies, fully operating within the Oxford context, centered around Islamic art. That example doesn’t exist in the western modern and contemporary context. It’s a great shame. I want to point this out. There’s another example in Britain, of someone who is creating his own institute with a collection of objects from antiquity. He’s on the Board of the British Museum. These things exist. And they are the result of private initiatives.
LW: You mean those that truly centre scholarship and the collection within a private institution, maybe more so than curators in a public institution that maybe has to rely on drawing in large audience numbers.
Joachim: The difference is that in Modern and Contemporary art, scholarship it is almost baked in because the sums spent are so much greater than if you buy a piece of Islamic art or Medieval art, Chinese art, you name it. You know what you’re dealing with because you’re also spending twenty times more than what you would for those buying Islamic art for example. The lower upfront cost is instead invested into research. There’s simply less of a vacuum to fill in Modern and Contemporary art. But we tend to be overly focused on just a tiny fraction – around 200 years – of art history.
LW: I also believe that being less worried about funding can open up curatorial opportunities. One last unorthodox question: there’s certainly a lot of talk and angst within our Zeitgeist surrounding the predatory billionaire collector threatening the sanctity of the museum space. I don’t think of this as a very real threat. What would you say?
Joachim: Let me put it this way: as you know I worked at MoMA where the proportion of multibillionaires on the board of trustees was probably rather high. I have never met a Wolf of Wallstreet of the artworld type. Quite the contrary. The guy who was the head of the fundraising department said “I am very lucky to have this pool of people that give so lavishly, out of conviction.” These are people who are passionate about sharing with others. No doubt you will also find more predatory types but to my knowledge they would be very much a minority if not an exception.
Statements from this conversation may not be used for any other purpose or by anyone else without the consent of Joachim Pissarro and Louisa Krämer-Weidenhaupt.