Beyond the Global Boom: Private Art Museums in the 21st Century

The aim of the report is to present a first systematic overview of the global rise in private art museums which we have seen in the first two decades of the 21st century. While this private museum boom has been the subject of heated debates in the art world, scholarship on the phenomenon has so far been mostly anecdotal. By establishing an overarching database that maps and collects data on today’s private museums of modern and contemporary art, our report lays a more robust basis on which future research into such institutions, their founders, and their consequences for the art world and society more widely may build. The report presents key numbers of private museums worldwide: their founding dates, and geographical distribution across the globe, their size, collection focus, social media presence. The report also presents data on the main characteristics of the founders of museums (e.g. gender, age, business background, etc.) as well as data on museums which have closed and on the reasons for their closure.