Chair

Georgina S. Walker (University of Melbourne)

Panellists

Fiona Menzies (Former CEO of Creative Partnerships Australia), Shireen Atassi (Atassi Foundation, Dubai), Bianca Tinoco (University of Brasília), Jarrod Haberfield (University of Melbourne), Johannes Aengenheyster (University of Amsterdam)

Trends in Australian arts philanthropy and their relationship to collecting

Fiona Menzies (Former CEO of Creative Partnerships Australia)

There is a decline in the growth of philanthropy in Australia, but it is not affecting all cause areas equally.  While mass market giving is slowing, mainly due to ongoing cost-of-living pressures, giving by high net worth individuals, families and foundations is not.

The result of this is that those cause areas who rely more on mass market giving, such as religion, health and welfare charities, are seeing a decline in donations which is not being experienced by cause areas favoured by higher level donors, such as education and medical research.

The arts and cultural sector’s experience is mixed, with ongoing support from donors, while some foundations are moving away from funding arts and culture to areas such as climate change, the environment and international aid.  At the same time, the way in which donors are giving to the arts has been changing, especially in relation to the visual arts where donors are often also collectors.

Over the last twenty years we have seen the emergence of not-for-profit galleries and art museums being established by collectors, such as TarraWarra Museum of Art, White Rabbit Gallery, the Lyon House Museum and the David Roche House Museum, rather than donating their collections to existing public collecting institutions.

In addition, while donations of works of art and objects have long been made to galleries and museums, these institutions are increasingly in need of cash donations to supplement the government funding they receive for operations so are also now looking for funding as well.

This paper will:

• provide some key statistics on philanthropy in Australia and arts philanthropy more specifically;

• look at what is motivating donors and influencing donor behaviour;

• examine differences between individuals & family foundations and foundations governed by trustees more distanced from their founders;

• consider how the operations and risk appetite of public institutions may affect donations;

• consider what institutions need to do to attract donations – whether cash or works of art – from collectors; and

• consider whether or not art market professionals, such as gallerists, dealers and advisers, have a role to play in advising their clients on their giving as well as their collecting.

Reflections on art collecting and patronage: a family affair

Shireen Atassi (Atassi Foundation, Dubai)

Presented by Shireen Atassi, this paper traces a particular story of art collecting and patronage from Syria. The story started more than 40 years ago and continues its course till present day.

In the early 1980s and in the small city of Homs, there lived two sisters with a lot of unrealized dreams. In search of life’s purpose, they founded a bookshop that metamorphosed into an art gallery that then moved to Damascus and became a beacon in the art and culture milieu of the city. Years later, the Atassi Gallery in Damascus closed at the onset of the uprising and its founder- Mouna Atassi- moved her private art collection to Dubai in 2012. In 2015, Mouna and her husband Sadek Atassi, founded the Atassi Foundation which is today managed by their daughter- Shireen.

Following decades of intellectual isolation and lack of recognition, it took a war to bring Syria (and Syrian art) to the attention of the world. Syrian art had not featured on the radar of art enthusiasts or academics. Lack of visibility on the regional and international fronts has its roots in the absence of materials, and of institutional support and patronage. Atassi Foundation was founded to address these concerns. It sits in the middle between art collecting and art patronage and therefore oscillates between the private and the public realms.

This paper presents a pictorial narration of the stories of a country’s art heritage on one hand, and a family’s long contribution to the art scene, in an endearing chronicle that demonstrates the need for art and culture to act as the glue that counters cultural and heritage loss. The story tells the family’s perspective on art collecting, patronage and philanthropy, as recounted by a member of its second generation.

From the collection to the museum: private contemporary art institutions founded by collectors in Brazil

Bianca Tinoco (University of Brasília)

Since the 2000s, Brazil has seen an increase in the number of private museums open to the public, especially those focused on contemporary art. Following a movement observed on a global scale, these museums, run under different management formats, prominently feature works of art and other materials (documents, clothing, etc.) owned by their founders or site- specific works commissioned by them for the space.

We propose to present an overview of private contemporary art museums in Brazil, focusing on three of them: the Moraes-Barbosa Institute, run by collectors Patricia Moraes and Pedro Barbosa in São Paulo; the Marcos Amaro Art Factory (FAMA), created by collector Marcos Amaro in Itu, in the interior of the state of São Paulo; and Usina de Arte, run by collector Ricardo Pessoa de Queiroz in Água Preta, Pernambuco. Although all three spaces specialize in contemporary art, they have different profiles. The Moraes-Barbosa Institute highlights the international conceptual production brought together by the couple of collectors. FAMA exhibits installations and large-format works by Brazilian artists. And Usina de Arte, housed in a former sugar cane plantation and processing estate, is an open-air museum, largely made up of site-specific works and works that are close to land art.

Another Brazilian case known to international art circles, the Inhotim museum in the city of Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, will be presented as an example of the instability that threatens the existence of private museums. Inhotim has more than 1,800 works by almost 300 artists from 43 countries, which are exhibited outdoors and in galleries amidst a Botanical Garden with more than 4,300 rare botanical species. However, the museum's founder, businessman Bernardo Paz, was convicted of tax evasion and other financial offenses and paid part of his debt by donating 20 works belonging to the museum to the state government. The move shows how exposed even large private museums are to the financial situation of the founding collectors, a weakness that has already led to the closure of other institutions.

Finally, we will analyze how initiatives such as endowments, the establishment of partnerships, access to sponsorship and the creation of patron groups can offer more stability for the long-term maintenance of these museums, reducing dependence on the capital of their founders.

Rachofsky: The collector’s house as quasi institution

Jarrod Haberfield (University of Melbourne)

The name Rachofsky operates as something of a metonym in the art world; it stands for a collector, a collection, and a well-known house that is the focus of this paper. Commissioned in the early 1990s by collector Howard Rachofsky, the house by architect Richard Meier features in every survey of last century’s best buildings. The cult status of the Dallas home stems partly from the eccentricity of its program: the very large building features a single, monastic bedroom amidst three levels of gallery space for art. Domestic tropes are scant, while museological tropes abound. Structured around the themes of site, architecture, and armature, this paper will consider the Rachofsky House as a case study example of the collector’s house as a quasi-institution.

From the Joel Shapiro sculpture on the street to the Dan Graham pavilion aside the vegetable patch, the Rachofsky House unsettles our assumptions of residential art display to expand the curatorial agenda beyond the building interior to the site’s edges. The distribution of key artworks throughout the landscape endows a public sensibility to a private collection on private land, recalling the typology of sculpture parks like Storm King or the sculpture gardens of public museums like Louisiana. This recruitment of site as a curatorial setting upends the benign conception of the domestic garden and, in the process, incites institutionality.

The architecture of the Rachofsky House is almost performative – certainly operative – in its evocation of museological tropes. The prioritisation of display and human movement together create a building that while officially a house offers the empirical experience of an institutional museum. The approach to the building, threshold experience at the entry, passage through the entry sequence, ascent to the piano nobile of the main entertaining space, and carefully-wrought circuit all recall public building types. Institutionality is further evoked by the unusually clear demarcation of public and private; programmatic functions like the kitchen and living room that typically provide the spatial fulcrum of residential buildings are here cloistered from view. And the cloister analogy holds when we encounter that famously solo bedroom.

Beyond the physical and empirical effects of site and architecture, the role of the Rachofsky House as civic armature further advances the conception of the quasi-institution. While commissioned as a bachelor pad, early in the life of the building Howard met his wife Cindy, who already had young children, and a decision was taken to raise the family elsewhere. Freed of residents, the Rachofsky House was opened for two decades for public tours wherein visitors could experience the hand-and- glove phenomenon of the house and its collection. Today, with the children grown, the Rachofskys have returned to the house and the tours have ceased, yet it still hosts annually the largest fundraising event of the Dallas calendar: TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art. Its public life lives on.

In considering the Rachofsky House through the lenses of site, architecture, and armature, we will come to understand how the acts of displaying and sharing a collection can reframe the private house as a quasi-institution. 

Private museum closures: a short lived fad or robust institutions?

Johannes Aengenheyster (University of Amsterdam)

Private museums have emerged in recent decades at astounding rates in the art world. These institutions, controlled and financed by wealthy art collectors, have been hypothesized to upend established models of art provision and consecration. At the same time, questions have been raised about the longevity of these institutions whose continued operations are dependent on continuous support by their founders. To elucidate the longevity of these institutions, we analyze the process of private museum closure. Approaching the question from the perspective of organizational sociology and nonprofit management, we investigate the relationship between survival and resource endowment, revenue diversification, organizational transformation and perception by third parties.

Employing a newly constructed database of over 500 open and closed private museums, we use Cox proportional hazard models to study the impact of key variables on the level of the museum, the founder, the art field as well as the wider environment on the museum's likelihood to close.

Preliminary results indicate lower likelihoods of closure for museums included in the museum directory “Museums of the World” (MOW), and higher likelihoods of closure for museums with unconventional names (i.e. their name does not include the term “museum”, “foundation” or “collection”).

At the current stage it cannot be stated finally which processes are captured by these measures. The MOW effect might reflect that larger and richer institutions are both more likely to be noticed by the MOW and more likely to survive (MOW inclusion would then be a proxy for resources). Yet inclusion in the MOW might also reflect adherence to museum standards which makes museums more understandable and familiar to third parties (e.g. audiences, other museums, companies or the government) and thereby facilitates interactions which are beneficial for long-term survival (e.g. attracting visitors, cooperations, sponsorships or subsidies).

Using unconventional names could similarly increase the unfamiliarity of the museum vis-a-vis third parties, reducing the chance of survival-enhancing interactions. However, as founders can choose their museum’s name arbitrarily, they might choose a name without reference to organizational forms associated with perpetuity precisely because their intention is not an institution enduring in perpetuity but rather a more temporally bounded project.

We do not find a significant association between other museum or founder characteristics. For instance, museums founded by men are not more likely to close than those founded by women; surprisingly, it is also not the case that private museums are more likely to close once the founder has died - there seems to be sufficient commitment of the founders’ descendants to keep it open. Similarly, beyond ten years increases in age do not increase the risk of closing, which indicates that private museums have no natural “expiration date”. Also, private museums don’t seem to be more likely to close if they operate in a competitive environment of many other private museums.

Subsequent analyses will further disentangle these associations to identify more precisely the sources of vulnerability, which in turn will allow a more encompassing prediction of the future of this new organizational form.