The privately-owned Wurth Museum in Germany holds over 18,000 items. Photo: AFP
In recent decades, many wealthy collectors have opened their own museums to display their art collections. Most of these are in Europe, particularly Germany, although more and more are being opened in Asia.
The specialist data company Larry's List examined these private institutions in a study, in which it counted 446 worldwide. While the vast majority of these art establishments have been founded since 2000, the pandemic considerably slowed their expansion.
As a result, only 21 private museums opened between 2020 and 2022.
Germany is the country with the highest number of venues opened by art collectors, just ahead of the United States.
The authors of the Larry’s List report see them as a resurgence of the "Wunderkammer" concept, the 18th-century cabinets of curiosities where aristocrats and scholars exhibited unusual objects brought back from distant lands.
While Europe is home to most of the world's private museums, it's in Asia that they are expanding rapidly.
South Korea is home to no fewer than 50 such institutions, compared with 30 in mainland China. Three quarters of these art spaces have been created in the last two decades, including the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, Art Retreat in Singapore, the Devi Art Foundation in Delhi and the SAN Museum in Oak Valley, South Korea.
Since 2016, the number of private museums has increased by 40% in China and by 12% in Korea.
Competing with public museums
Although the South Korean art market has yet to rival that of North America, Seoul has become a leading art hub thanks to its many public and private art establishments.
Larry's List counts 17, making the South Korean capital the city with the most private museums in the world, ahead of Berlin (14) and Beijing (11). Only two American cities - New York and Miami - feature in the list, compared with four Asian cities.
Private museums are increasingly rivalling public art institutions in terms of the number of works of art in their collections, with 29% of them holding more than 1,500 pieces.
The prize goes to Germany's Wurth Museum, with over 18,000 items in its possession, including works by Georg Baselitz, David Hockney, Alex Katz and Fernando Botero.
This figure is all the more impressive considering that the James Turrell Museum in Argentina houses just nine artworks, two of which were specially commissioned for the institution.
While these private museums are very popular on social networks, especially Instagram, they still struggle to attract as many visitors as their public counterparts, although the Larry's List report points out that these venues don't often communicate their attendance figures.
According to the report, the most-visited private museums are The Broad in the USA, the Saatchi Gallery in Britain, Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands, Museum Frieder Burda in Germany, Museum SAN in South Korea and the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in South Africa, all of which receive more than 100,000 visitors a year, it says.
All of which pales in comparison to the Louvre and its 7.8 million visitors in 2022. - AFP
