A New Status Symbol for Billionaires: Art Museum

Featured on nytime.com

What does it take to become a world-class art collector? These days, you need to build not only a great collection, but a great museum to house it in. Over the past few years, a rash of art-loving billionaires have dedicated themselves, or their foundations, to the construction of spectacular new venues to show off their finest acquisitions.

The trend began in earnest in 2006, when the French billionaire François Pinault, the primary shareholder of the luxury conglomerate now called Kering, converted an 18th-century Venetian palace, the Palazzo Grassi, into a showplace for contemporary art. The site has since added two other structures, Punta della Dogana and the Teatrino, both designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. Meanwhile, Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France and the chairman of the luxury conglomerate LVMH, was busy developing his own idea for a museum, which finally arrived last month, in Paris, in the form of Frank Gehry’s glass-paneled Fondation Louis Vuitton.

While Mr. Pinault’s and Mr. Arnault’s contemporary art centers are often mentioned together — a result, perhaps, of their longstanding business rivalry — the two Frenchmen are by no means the only billionaires to recently bankroll a new museum.

In 2011, Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecom magnate who is among the richest men in the world, opened the Museo Soumaya, named after his late wife and designed by his son-in-law, Fernando Romero. Last year, more than 1.1 million people visited the museum — nearly as many as visited New York’s Guggenheim (1.2 million).

Whereas Mr. Slim’s museum includes 70,000 works spanning 10 centuries, the Russian billionaire industrialist Viktor Vekselberg’s museum, opened in 2013, is dedicated to a much more specific subject: Fabergé eggs. Housed in the Rococo Shuvalovsky Palace on the banks of the Fontanka River in Saint Petersberg, Russia, it contains an estimated $850 million worth of decorative art designed by Peter Carl Fabergé, including nine of his famous jeweled eggs, the greatest number outside the Kremlin.

More magnates have museums on the way. Planned for next year in Los Angeles is The Broad Museum, which will show off Eli and Edythe Broad’s extensive contemporary art collection, including 2,000 works of art by artists like Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman. Also coming in 2015 is the Centro Botín, in Santander, Spain, a bayfront contemporary arts center designed by Renzo Piano that was the passion project of the Santander Bank chairman Emilio Botín III, who died in September.

One of the most idiosyncratic billionaire-financed museums, planned for Chicago in 2016, belongs to the filmmaker George Lucas, and will house his collection of Norman Rockwell paintings and “Star Wars” memorabilia, among other items. Renderings for the design of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — showing a mountain of smooth metallic stone topped by a floating disc — were released this month. Mr. Lucas’s architect, Ma Yansong, said he was inspired by the work of Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, although many Chicagoans were critical of the proposed design. “It looks like a palace for Jabba the Hutt,” a local politician, Bob Fioretti, told the Chicago Sun-Times.