Museum of Men

It's raining museums. In places where they are already a-plenty, there are some more planned and in places where none exist, high-profile museums and extensions are sprouting like grass after a summer rain.  Perhaps the most high profile of them all, the NewAcropolisMuseum opening soon in Athens will finally assure a suitable holding place for the Parthenon marbles. But even existing institutions such as the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MaMA) in New York have gotten new extensions and galleries, while the announced addition to the Tate Modern inLondon has been revised but is still on track.  The proliferation of museums has people questioning the value of art collected by state-funded museums, or for that matter, by museums themselves. Voices have been especially strong when communities try to do a "Bilbao" or indulge in "Guggenheim economics," despite there being no long-term measure of success.  Pritzker Prize winning architect Frank Gehry became a cultural icon when his groundbreaking GuggeheimMuseum in Bilbao, Spain, transformed a depressed, industrial city into a magnet for art and design lovers. Since then, the New York-based Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has pursued a global expansion programme that has cities lining up to pay license fees. For cities looking to reinvent themselves, an iconic museum is almost de rigeur these days. Many aim to add on museums - especially brand-name ones - in their quest to be cultural hubs.  Qatar, Dubai and Sharjah will soon have competing museums of Islamic and Arab art. The Middle Eastern emirate of Abu Dhabi has successfully wooed the Guggenheim and the Louvre - the latter costing a reported US$l billion - to set up outposts on the US$27 billion cultural district, spawning a thousand newspaper columns, not to mention a private campaign accusing the Louvre of trading its heritage for profit, or as Le Monde put it, using its "works of art as currency of exchange." The Middle East apart, the buzz seems to especially surround museums of modern art. Kolkata has just announced its own shrine to modern art, the KMoMa, to be designed by Herzog & Meuron of Tate Modern fame for opening by 2013 and paid for in a public-private partnership. And this isn't even the tip of the proverbial iceberg. These buildings don't come cheap and sometimes, the man in the street for whom the museums are planned has something to say. Recent news reports cited how the people of Towada, a post-industrial town of 67,000 people in Japan's main island of Honshu were "befuddled" over the planking of a walled museum of contemporary art costing 2.7 billion yen (US$25.24 million) in the city as part of an urban renewal project, money that residents felt could well be spent on more worthy projects.

Taichung in Taiwan voted down a Guggenheim proposal fearing that the US$250 million museum might put the city in the red, while the Hong Kong government retreated from its plan to build a Norman Foster-designed cultural hub after the developers pulled out citing onerous financial terms and the public complained of being left out of decision making. Hong Kong's grand plan seems to have been resurrected last year though with public engagement being a very significant part of the process.

Singapore, too, is seeing its share of new or refurbished museums. In the past two years, the National Museum of Singapore opened after a facelift and the Singapore Arts Museum (SAM) has just gained a new space nearby, 8Q sam, to showcase cutting edge and contemporary work. Coming up, the Supreme Court and City Hall of yore will morph into the NationalArtGallery by 2012 to handle the SAM's growing collection of Singapore and Southeast- Asian art, not to mention blockbuster exhibitions. The city will also see its third private museum in the first purpose built repository for toys, the Moment of Imagination and Nostalgia (Mint) Museum of Toys. Family favourite the Science Centre is also up for a makeover.

Still, we haven't been spared Bilbao-fever. The bidding process for the integrated resorts threw up a few such plans. Gehry was in fact part of the failed Kerzner bid. Daniel Libeskind's plan for Harrah's included a Centre Georges Pompidou outpost. Early plans for the Marina Bay Sands integrated resort included a Guggenheim satellite as well.

Boston-based Moshe Safdie has unveiled his plans for Marina Bays Sands, a 220,000 sq ft lotus flower shaped and intriguingly named ArtScienceMuseum. According to an interview in The Art Newspaper in 2006, Safdie said that the Sands Corporation didn't want anything "highbrow"; an art museum, theatres, and an aquarium were considered as options before a museum that connects the arts and sciences was settled on.

"I am increasingly aware of a movement in academia and the intellectual world that maintains that the traditional division between art and sciences in museums is artificial and not conducive to showing the connection that is essential between them," he said. "No such division existed in the museums of the 18th century. Everyone said this was the right moment."

The planned temporary exhibitions include, according to The Art Newspaper, one based on the geography of the Silk Roads, with art and music of nomadic peoples, archaeology from China, and the IBM/National Geographic genome project. The permanent displays may include one on the works of Leonardo da Vinci, the best known artist-scientist.

With Safdie's varied experience spanning buildings such as the Habitat '67 housing complex in Canada and the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, we're certain to have a different - dare I say, unique - sort of museum. While on unique museums, Singapore's private museums can definitely stand up among them. Private museums are a-plenty in US, Europe and Japan where individual art collectors abound. The I.M. rei-designed mountainside museum, the Miho, to hold the private collection of the Shinji Shumeiki sect numbering around 1,000 pieces, is one such recent addition.

Art collectors are not in short supply in Singapore but as I'd discussed in an interview a few years back with Dr Geh Min, herself a collector whose sprawling home is a veritable gallery of the art she collects, most prefer to just lock up their art in vaults.

Enter Indonesian businessman Kwie Swee Teng who started Art Retreat in 2003 to showcase his private collection of Western and Asian art. Mr Kwie chooses to display his collection not only in his homes in Jakarta, where he is based, and Singapore, but also in a gallery-like space in the most unlikely location: Ubi Techpark, next to a warehouse where he stores his collection of around 1,500 pieces for safety and conservation reasons.

The latest private museum is the Mint Museum of Toys located in an award-winning glass box-within-another building housing pieces from the 50,000-strong collection of engineering consulting Chang Yang Fa. Many of them are still in their original packaging and sit on specially-designed shelves that do not cast shadows. And did I mention the quirky touches like a custom made carpet with hopscotch squares for little visitors? The collection is valued at over S$5 million. While toys may not be considered highbrow, Mint's demographic certainly doesn't seem to mind. The patrons at its museum café don't look older than 25 and visitors come from over 60 countries.

Both museums say they reach out to a very different set of people from the rest of the art museums. In one case, it is the hardened collector who makes the trek to Ubi and in the other case, it is the vintage toy fan who ferrets out the five-storey building on Seah Street. On a good day Art Retreat can see up to 50 people passing through its doors while Mint saw 30,000 in its first year of operation. As a non-profit enterprise limited by guarantee, Art Retreat is not allowed to trade or sell any of its artwork. So this museum exists for the sole purpose of curating shows and displaying the patron's collection, and he in turn subsidises the entire operating costs. This freedom has led to some critically acclaimed exhibitions such as the ongoing one of Chinese artist Wu

Guangzhong's works in oil and ink.

Art Retreat doesn't have figures - and is not obliged to provide any either - but Mr Chang says that he spent over S$2 million on the museum and that didn't include land. Its owners are continually adding to the collections, so things can only get, as the song goes, better.