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By Nathalie Okpu A Report of the International Symposium “The Global Power of Private Museums: Arts and Publics – States and Markets”, at the TU Berlin and the Forum Transregionale Studien on 16–18 November 2017. The conference was organized by the Centre for Art Market Studies (TU Berlin) and Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices (Forum Transregionale Studien). A full program of the event can be found here.From 16 to 18 November 2017, art historians and humanities scholars gathered at the Technische Universität (TU) and the Forum Transregionale Studien (both Berlin) for the international symposium “The Global Power of Private Museums. Arts and Publics – States and Markets.” Convened by Julia Voss, Dorothee Wimmer, Hannah Baader, and Georges Khalil, in collaboration between the Center for Art Market Studies and the Forum Transregionale Studien, the symposium discussed the backgrounds, mechanisms and impacts of privately-funded art museums in diverse countries and world regions, run by individuals, private foundations, associations or companies, and with publicly-accessible collections. Based on the observation that the number ofprivate museums has risen dramatically over the past two decades, with moreprivate than public museum spaces existing today, the symposium foregroundedthe multiplicity of these actors that now powerfully orchestrate global andlocal art markets and of museum visitors. Alongside the spectacularly-designedvenues (like the Louis Vuitton Museum in Paris or the Zeiss Museum in Cape Town)that draw frequent international attention with their exhibition openings,events and acquisition politics, there are also museum complexes that have amore regional focus, or operate with limited economic power. Others bridgeregional and global concerns, needs and ambitions. The majority of newly-foundedprivate museums are located in China, South Korea, the US, and Germany. Others havebeen established in Argentina, Benin, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, India, Japan,Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Palestine, the Russian Federation, and SouthAfrica, among other countries. The symposium’s discussions, papers, andkeynote lectures tackled multiple aspects in the specific systematics of such privateart actors. Theycontrasted&#160;the range of characteristics of privatemuseums, from those with colonial histories on the one hand, to others with thecapacity to resist authoritarian regimes on the other. They debated thespecific power that private museums &#160;incorporate, including their economic or capitalistambitions, their authority in defining art, and their practices ofrepresentation and misrepresentation. &#160;&#160;Thediscussion problematized the institutional, political, and PR agendas betweenstrengthening democratic processes, destroying and looting cultural heritage,and moving professionally into global economies of mediatized attention, includingthe commercializingof urban spaces as well as the ability to foster national(ist) collectiveimaginations.The international perspectives from variousdisciplines and professional backgrounds including art historians, curators,and art collectors, accounted for the multi-faceted spectrum of subjects,problems, and questions regarding the role of private museums in global powerdynamics. Under the umbrella terms of “private museum” and “global power,” thecontributions assessed the diverse reasons for the emergence of such museumsand their regional, national, and country-specific differences. The museum’s history as an institutiondeeply invested in techniques of appropriating and categorizing culture, of purchasingand trading antiquities, linked to the looting and destruction of localheritage, was highlighted through various post-colonial approaches towardsthe question of how the term of “global power” is to be conceptualized. Takingthe whole spectrum of contributions into account, the symposium worked towardsa problematization of the institution of private museums, revealing thecomplicated dynamics in which such actors are implicated – importantly, thisalso included the claim for a balanced view of their contemporary social andcultural effects, which are not always solely negative but can for example alsoserve the consolidation of cultural identity in post-conflict regions. The symposium was opened by a panel discussion with Hannah Baader (Forum Transregionale Studien), Axel Haubrok (Haubrok Stiftung, Berlin), Christiane Lange (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart), and Sonja Mejcher-Atassi (American University of Beirut) discussing the challenges and dynamics of stately, “public” and private museums in a global art world. Moderated by Julia Voss, the panelists revealed pluralistic takes on the meanings of “private museum” and “global power.” Early on, Julia Voss attempted to render the abstract term of “power” more concrete, noting that "we have to talk about money” and pointed to recent examples, such as the sale of the Leonardo DaVinci painting at a record price of 450 million dollars or the opening of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi – an institution that, as Laura Weißmüller wrote, marked a one-billion-dollar death sentence for the public museum.[1] However, the Louvre in Abu Dhabi represented no exception when it came to borrowing works of art, as Christiane Lange mentioned during the discussion. According to her, there were numerous state museums in Berlin consisting almost completely of loans by private art owners. This raised questions about what should happen to private – or public – art collections if their owners passed away. Lange, speaking in her capacity as Director of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, proposed the idea that borrowed private collections should in certain cases then become the property of public museums. When panelist Hannah Baader, head of the program Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices, stated how the discussion and understandings of public or private museums as well as their functions and responsibilities have a largely Eurocentric epistemology, the conceptualization of “global power” shifted towards a more post-colonial framework. At the same time, Baader also emphasized the need for examining the opportunities  that private museums offer, given the multitude of social contexts in which they have more or less recently evolved. In her view, this includes the ability to work against authoritarian policy or to help to restore or create cultural identity in post-conflict regions. From left to right: Julia Voss, Axel Haubrok, Hannah Baader, Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and Christiane Lange. First panel discussion, “The Global Power of Private Museums: Arts and Publics – States and Markets”, TU Berlin, 16 November 2017.Thefollowing discussions were structured into three different sections: sectionone “Old Fashion – New Branding? The ‘Privatization’ of Art Museums in Europe,”section two&#160;“Public-Private Partnerships? Global/ Local Museum Centres,”and section three&#160;“Politics and Cultural Properties: Private Museums inContext,” with the final day of the conference taking place at the ForumTransregionale Studien. Sectionone was introduced by Julia Voss, who highlighted the panel discussion’s multi-facetedapproaches, manifested through the numerous definitions of the notion of“private museum”, and pointed to the key ambivalences that needed to betackled, e.g. the function of private museums between being a “money makingmachine” and a possibility of expressing cultural identity and individuality. Theorizingthe term “global power” as a concept, Voss suggested towards its potential toredefine both the canon of modernism as well as the writing of art historythrough museums. She ended her introduction highlighting again the crucialquestions of who the audience is and what the obligations of public and privatemuseums in contemporary European societies are.AnjaGrebe (Donau Universität Krems) subsequently presented two museum case studiesfrom Germany and Austria, discussing the “Politics of Public-PrivatePartnerships.” She put the spotlight on Austrian private art collectorKarlheinz Essl and illustrated how his love for contemporary art and his agendaof acting on behalf of artists resulted in the opening of his private museumnear Vienna in 1990. The fate of this museum, closed after the owner’sbankruptcy, foregrounded the problematics of privately owned institutions beingdependent on their owners’ economic situation while simultaneously benefitingfrom the state by tax money financing.Turningto the notion of branding, Ronit Milanos’ (Ben-GurionUniversity of the Negev) paper on “The Power of the Brand: The EconomicInstrumentality of Private Museums in France and Ukraine,” provided a telling exampleon the transformational power of money and marketing strategies in museums.Milano stressed that apart from money, art had always carried the allure ofintellectualism, a claim which she underlined using the example of the fashionindustry, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in specific. She discussed the roleof famous artists such as Jeff Koons, Olafur Eliasson and Takeshi Murakami as brandingtools, suggesting the transformation of the artist into a creative businessmanon the one hand, and a shift of the commercial space into a museum on the other.Equivalently, the commercial enterprise transformed into a creative enterprisewith contemporary architecture and redesigned stores insinuating semi-art galleries,giving the notion of philanthropy an alleged new twist.Waltraud M. Bayer’s (Otto-Friedrich-UniversitätBamberg) paper on “Private Art Museums in Post-Soviet Russia” and &#160;Kathryn Brown’s (Loughborough University) talkabout “The Privatization of Public Museum Culture and the Future of ArtHistory” discussed the power of private collectors in the making of culture.While Bayer explained how the rise of art foundations and private museums inMoscow &#160;led to success stories such asthe Garage Museum, opened in 2015, and the first Triennial of Contemporary Artin 2017, Brown elaborated on the question of what kind and extent of power couldbe granted to private collectors. Recent controversies regarding the VeniceBiennale, and how the Galeries Lafayettes, as a private company, invested inthe Venetian art show became a subject of discussion. As a patron providingsignificant funds, the company took part in choosing the nations represented atthe Biennale, and thus reveals how financial power is directly transformed intocurating power, deciding over the presence and absence of cultural entities ininternational art discourses. Brown then shifted from underlining how thefinancial power of private institutions resulted in influencing the writing ofart history to describing the risks this holds for society: Whilst publicmuseums connected to the state had, in her view, accepted the responsibility toaddress problematic topics, this was not true for private museums – a problemthat could result in private voices marginalizing, if not erasing, non-commercialnarratives.This set of problems was further elaborated insections two and three, which shifted the focus beyond Europe, to China, India,Palestine, and Syria. In section two, Oscar Salemink’s (University ofCopenhagen) paper “City of Art: State, Market, Museums and the UrbanReinvention of Shanghai” examined how a “romanticized colonial nostalgia”influenced the development of the city of Shanghai. Turning it from a city withno major art academy into a city that focused “so much on filling itself upwith art work,” it became the “power station of art”, as Salemink put it. Theaspired transformation into a global city of transnational capital was flanked byinstitutions such as the West Bund Art Centre and Culture &#38; Art Pilot Zone.These processes of commercialization, based on a dichotomy of nostalgia andimagination of the future nation, enabled the local public to access andappreciate art, and at the same time communicated to the non-local public that,as Salemink noted, "Chinese art is just as good as all the other art.” Thepeak of that transition, according to him, was marked by the latest ShanghaiBiennale in 2016.Asimilar tension in regard to the relationship between local public andpost-independence established state or private institutions for art wasillustrated in Deepti Mulgund’s (JawaharlalNehru University, New Delhi) highlyrevealing paper “To the Nation, to the World? Two Moments of Museum-Making inIndia.” Emphasizing the emergence of the museum in India as a part of Britishcolonialism, Mulgund referred to Hannah Baader’s introductory comment totheorize the term and institution of the museum critically. Based on apost-colonial approach, Mulgund provided significant insights into whystate-funded institutions in India, such as the National Gallery of Modern Art(1954), were not perceived well by the local public. According to her, this problemrepresented an opportunity for private collectors to convince a passive public toget involved in art institutions by creating strategies of resurrecting theseempty “art mausoleums”. Mulgund’s substantial considerations revealed that thecolonial connotations of museums do not always allow a non-conflicted access toand encounter with the art works that are being presented in its exhibition spaces.“The Global Power of Private Museums: Arts and Publics – States and Markets”, Forum Transregionale Studien, 18 November 2017.Sectionthree of the conference, “Politics and Cultural Properties: Private Museums inContext,” further problematized the notion of the museum as being a Europeanconcept. Analyzing the visibility and the actual audience of the PalestinianMuseum opened in 2016, Reema Salha Fadda’s (University of Oxford) talk,“Negotiating the Political Economy of Cultural Production in Palestine,” raisedthe question of how effectively a nation can narrate its cultural identity athome or abroad. Fadda focused on the problem of the political arena in failingto mobilize enough funding for the Palestinian Museum, and thus making its commercializationa necessity. Innovative branding became the strategy to frame the museum as a “world-classPalestinian museum” in order to receive broad attention from the media and theart world – and to establish incoming resources through it. Fadda ended herpresentation by questioning the role of the political in contemporary art todayand by offering the proposition of a unified cultural policy to makeinstitutions accessible to those who have less, and thus help fill the“cultural identity void” in all sectors instead of creating “processes oftransnational culture brokering.” This seemed specifically urgent in regard tothe situation of the local public of the Palestinian Museum who, due to Israelicheck points, were rarely able to access the newly-built cultural platform tosee works from within their own culture on display.StephennieMulder’s (University of Texas, Austin) paper, “Some Remarks on Private andPublic Art Crime and Trade in Times of War,” examined a different notion of“global power.” She shifted the discussion to Syria and its countlessarchaeological sites. The country reveals a long history of continuousoccupation, representing a unique place within the repertoire of globalheritage. Given that objects from Syria have been collected globally by bothprivate collectors and public museums, the spotlight was put on the problem oftrade and purchase of antiquities, which is closely linked to the looting anddestruction of cultural heritage. Mulder problematized the prominent role ofauction houses in the trade of looted objects as they easily accept falsifiedprovenance documents and rarely face prosecution. She stressed thatsafeguarding heritage locally through different programs such as SHOSI isbeneficial for the respective countries. At the same time, Mulder proposed severalopportunities for the public museum to act in this realm, e.g. by offering afull record of the conservation of objects, embracing open provenancestrategies, tracking the movement of artworks across the globe over time, andteaching that provenance matters as well as that cultural objects are part ofidentity. With this, she criticized &#160;the tendencyof private museums to avoid difficult but relevant activities and topics, suchas provenance research, the proper conservation of objects and education forthe public. Eventually,Wendy Shaw’s (Freie Universität Berlin) keynote lecture, “Privatizing theRepublic: Museums, Markets, and Global Ambitions in Contemporary Turkey,” turnedtowards the essential problem of representation and misrepresentation in museums.Shaw presented a case study in which she examined the history of exhibiting Islamicart in the context of colonial settings and of national power in Turkey.Looking at different exhibition practices and their uncritical display ofIslamic art, she assessed the role of museums in reproducing stereotypicalnotions of Islamic art perpetuating the separation between an “Islamic world”and the so-called “West.”The organizers’endeavor toassess private museums through the lens of their global power highlightedthe very ambivalent histories and current dynamics of such actors for theirlocal, regional, and international socio-cultural environments. The symposiumworked towards a substantial problematization of a multi-faceted globalphenomenon through local case studies. It accounted for the question of how toreconcile commercialized systems of private-museum-making as a global trendwith the heterogeneous phenomena on the ground in locally specific-contexts, andthus framing a combined, yet uneven, dynamic, incorporating both new chances and problems for local and global publics.The accepted definition of what “global power” appeared to materialize was commonlyfound in the capacity of private museums as money-making and branding machines,slowly but steadily shifting the global art world to a global art market, inwhich branding and financial potentials turn private businessmen intoartist-like figures. Inline with this tendency are Angela M. H. Schuster’s remarks in her “Letter fromParis - A Mercurial Market,” in which she reports about a symposium that tookplace in Paris in June 2017. It was convened by Suzanne Pagé, the curator ofthe very same Louis Vuitton Foundation that was critically examined during thissymposium,&#160; five months later in Berlin.This very fact shows that the private sector itself might be one step ahead inexamining the relationship between private and public museums, using this toits own advantage. Schuster notes: “Capitalizing on the intellectual horsepowerpassing through the city en route to Art Basel, FLV curator Suzanne Pagéorganized a trio of panel discussions that focused on the philosophicaldifferences between public and private museums; the players shaping the futureof art history; and the disruptive effect of the white-hot market for postwarand contemporary art. It was clear from the varied presentations and therepartee they prompted that the current machinations of the postwar andcontemporary art market have come to pervade nearly every aspect of the art world.”[2] Through itstransregional approach, Berlin has revealed to what extent this tendency hasbecome an encompassing reality, and where and how it encounters negotiation,challenge, and resistance.[1] Weißmüller, Laura. “Der Louvre Abu Dhabi wäscht die Kunst rein”, sueddeutsche.de, November 11, 2017.  [http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/louvre-abu-dhabi-das-weltmuseum-als-gebautes-moralisches-fragezeichen-1.3743862#redirectedFromLandingpage] Accessed 02/10/2018.[2] Schuster, Angela M.H. “Letter from Paris - A Mercurial Market”, BLOUIN ARTINFO, January 02, 2018. [http://ende.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/2750945/letter-from-paris-a-mercurial-market] Accessed 02/08/18.Nathalie Okpu studies art history, cultural studies, and sociology at the Technische Universität Berlin and holds a degree in communications design.  Since Fall 2017, she has been a student assistant for the research cluster, “Translocations: Historical Enquiries into the Displacement of Cultural Assets”, at the Technische Universität Berlin.Citation: Nathalie Okpu, Conference Report: “The Global Power of Private Museums. Arts and Publics – States and Markets”, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 11.04.2019, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/18362.