In the heart of Berlin stands a
windowless concrete bunker so awesomely ugly that, when you see it, you
instinctively avert your gaze. It is heavy, gray, and shrapnel-pocked,
and has no signage to explain its protean history. Designed by the Nazi
architect Karl Bonatz, under the direction of Albert Speer, the bunker
was built in 1942 as an air-raid shelter for German citizens. In 1945,
it became a Red Army P.O.W. camp. Later, its cool, sunless chambers
served as an East German warehouse for fruit imported from Cuba, which
is how it picked up an early nickname: the banana bunker. After the fall
of the Berlin Wall, the building was appropriated for use first as an
avant-garde performance space, and later as a techno club whose low
ceilings, dark rooms, and frequent fetish parties led to its designation
as “the hardest club in the world.”
In 2003, a
few years after authorities shuttered the night club, Christian and
Karen Boros bought the building to display a portion of their sizable
collection of contemporary art. They reconfigured its hundred and twenty
cramped rooms into eighty larger ones, and added an astonishing
window-lined penthouse,
where the couple lives with their ten-year-old son. Between 2008 and
2012, more than a hundred and twenty thousand visitors navigated through
the bunker’s intricate passageways to see the début exhibition, which
focussed on the theme of light. The bunker’s current show, consisting of
work from the early nineteen-nineties alongside recent acquisitions,
opened in 2012; the couple plans to mount an entirely new show every
four years, drawn from their still-growing collection of around seven
hundred pieces by eighty artists. “A private collection is not a better
model than a museum, but it’s an important add-on,” Christian, who is a
publisher and a founder of an ad agency, told me. “You need a museum for
historical purposes—to show the best art of the decade, for example.
Then you have private collections, with their mistakes, their subjective
tastes.”
I
visited Christian and Karen in their penthouse, where we sat at a
dining table near a large painting
by Elizabeth Peyton, surrounded by
views of the city. “This building isn’t meant for art,” Christian said.
He was wearing gold cufflinks and smoking a Lucky Strike. “How the art
fights against the ugly building is very interesting to me.” Karen, who
works in V.I.P. relations for Art Basel, guessed that perhaps half of
their visitors were more interested in the bunker itself than the art.
“We have a lot of artists who people don’t really talk about,” she said.
“They may not become part of art history, but they are important to
us.”
The bunker is emphatically not a museum. In February, I’d signed up for a ninety-minute group tour on the
Web site,
which is the only way for a member of the public to gain admittance. I
entered the building through a discouragingly heavy, unmarked metal
door. During the tour, I marvelled at the diversity of the art on
display, from Tomás Saraceno’s delicate floating architectures to an
impressive hunk of “We the People,” Danh Vo’s sectile replica of the
Statue of Liberty. The modified bunker is perfectly sized to accommodate
the large-scale works favored by many contemporary artists—the largest
piece, a driftwood sculpture by Ai Weiwei called “Tree,” just barely
fits inside the tallest room—and the private tours provide a more
intimate experience than what is possible in a museum’s crowded
contemporary wing. The quiet setting has also made the collection
popular among celebrities. My tour guide confided that when Tom Hanks
visited in January, he’d been granted the opportunity to jump into a
pile of stale popcorn that is part of an installation. “He is allowed,
we are not,” she said.
In part, what makes the
Boros Collection so much fun is that it is tailored to the personal and
sometimes whimsical aesthetic of its owners. Some of my favorite pieces
on display would have been unlikely to survive a museum’s acquisitions
committee. The couple has a clear affinity for kinetic sculptures that
self-destruct—for example, a slowly disintegrating spinning rubber tire
by Michael Sailstorfer. Many of the pieces live outside the realm of
art-historical importance or market drama. (“We would never sell a work
of art,” Christian told me.) To visit the collection is therefore to
invest in a private fantasy of fabulous wealth and confident tastes. At
no point can you forget that the patrons who own this building and
everything in it are walking around in their penthouse, just above your
head.
The Boros Collection is one of three
significant, privately owned collections of contemporary art open to the
public in Berlin, along with the Haubrok and Hoffman Collections.
(There are also private corporate collections, such as the Daimler
Collection and the Kunsthalle Deutsche Bank.) Private collections have
long existed in the public sphere—the Frick Collection, once a family
affair, is a world-famous New York institution—but, in recent years,
such collections have increased in size, influence, and renown,
particularly in markets, such as China’s, that have a dearth of institutional art spaces and a surfeit of would-be Medicis.
At the same time, the future of the art museum has again become the subject of spirited public debate. In an
essay for
New York
magazine on the renovated Whitney, Jerry Saltz pines for “the museum’s
Platonic ideal: a communal effort, conducted over centuries, to
preserve, interpret, and commune with artistic ancestors, archetypes,
traditions, genres, and methods.” Today’s museum, he writes, is often a
“fun-house” of spectacle, more interested in long entrance lines,
celebrity, and elegant galas than in the hard work of cultural
custodianship. Among some fans of contemporary art, the private
collection has emerged
as an alternative model to the mega-museum, one that function
simultaneously as cultural institution, status symbol, and philanthropic
outlet. Yet these spaces have their critics, too. In a recent article for the
London Review of Books,
Hal Foster writes skeptically of the appeal of contemporary-art
acquisitions for neoliberal billionaires. Their collections, he writes,
are “auratic as an object yet fungible as an asset. Although they get
tax breaks (because they are nominally open to visitors who can book the
pilgrimage), these neo-aristocratic institutions don’t pretend to have
any real connection to the public sphere. Usually at a remove from urban
centres, they are museums of equity display, equal parts prestige and
portfolio, and they compete for artwork with institutions that are at
least semi-public.”
Foster is probably right to
question the motivations of super-rich collectors who claim to act in
service of the public good. But the Boroses, at least, had me convinced
that their love was pure. They lamented the shallow glamour of the
Venice Biennale, whence they’d just returned (Christian: “Is it about
art, or is it about watches, luxury bags, and crowds?”), and criticized
amateur collectors who do not buy for keeps (Karen: “Some people buy and
sell art like shares”). My tour through the bunker was unlike anything
I’d experienced in a museum, but, far from bearing out Foster’s
critique, the private setting made me all the more enthusiastic and
curious about the artists themselves. In part, this was due to the fact
that I was able to glimpse the world of private patronage that is so
vital to working artists yet rarely addressed in a museum space. “In a
private collection, you feel the passion,” Christian said. “We are
living with the art.”
Would the bunker and its
equivalents be somehow improved by public (or semi-public) ownership, as
Foster seems to suggest? The question would not have made much sense
before this century. Throughout history, private ownership of art has
been the norm, public display the rare exception.
Wunderkammern,
the cabinets of curiosity considered to be an ancestor to the modern
museum, were popularized in Europe in the seventeenth century as a
diversion for wealthy enthusiasts. Museums devoted to modern or
contemporary art are newer still: the Guggenheim, which was founded as
the world’s first Museum of Non-Objective Painting, opened in 1939.
Today,
however, museums are the province of curators and boards of trustees,
who often work to dampen the effects of market forces and idiosyncratic
taste, even as they depend upon private philanthropy and corporate
sponsorship to survive. Their stated goals tend to be egalitarian by
design: mass edification and education rather than passion project or
investment. This week, in the magazine,
Adam Gopnik writes about the “intrusion of oligarchy” into the art
market, a phenomenon fuelled by decades of rising inequality and
globalization, with the consequence that we might come to view works of
art as little more than the ritualistic money totems of the extremely
wealthy. Whatever their imperfections, museums are the means by which a
liberal civilization demonstrates its lasting commitment to the values
of artistic expression.
There’s no denying that
the Boros Collection, with its bizarre setting and its uncommon
assortment of interests, is a unique asset to Berlin’s art scene, even
if the collection’s public availability amounts to a form of
trickle-down charity. Yet, were private collections to discourage the
growth of, or even to displace, public art museums (as seems to be happening in China), we could lose the only buffer that still exists between contemporary art and its tulipomaniacal market.
Berlin
is a strange and fertile city for art lovers. Formerly the ideological
shop windows of two opposing empires, it is home to some of the
country’s best-funded public museums and arts programs. Although rents
are rising, it remains a cheap, bohemian destination for young artists
and gallerists. For now, Berlin’s private collections merely complement
its existing museums, galleries, noncommercial collectives, improvised
performance spaces, and artists’ squats, which together form the local
art industry. It’s hard to imagine a truly privatized landscape, no
matter how much money descends upon the Berlin scene, or those in New
York, London, Basel, or Miami. Yet the fall of the Wall also took
everyone by surprise. (courtesy
The New Yorker) (Photos
The Seen Journal)
For a tour of the Boros family apartment that sits on top the bunker click and read below.
