Marcel Broodthaers, Décor: A Conquest, 1975. Photograph: C. Clinckx. Exhibited at M HKA as part of the retrospective “Soleil Politique,” October 4, 2019–January 19, 2020.
Continued from Part 1
4. Sham Philanthropy and the False Solace of Private Museums
The fact that the parameters for assessing public institutions are so easily reduced to questions of efficiency reflects a broader cultural shift. As in many Western countries, institutions in Flanders find themselves caught between nationalization and privatization. On the one hand, museums are being compelled to represent national pride while applying managerial logic to their collection “assets”; on the other hand, other cultural symbols are outsourced to private partners without any legal obligation to be publicly accountable. One example of this is the Phoebus Foundation, which is based on the profits of Katoen Natie, a logistics company that earns its income in part from public resources such as renting out storage facilities. Indeed, the main depot of the M HKA collection itself is in the hands of Katoen Natie, because the Flemish government and Flemish museums seem to be unable to set up professional art storage facilities.
The Phoebus Foundation in turn owns a large art collection extending from the fifteenth century to today and is in the process of restoring and transforming the art deco high-rise tower Boerentoren in Antwerp into an event location where it will display part of its holdings. This prestigious project in the center of the city is presented as a gift and seen by many as proof of the value of cultural entrepreneurship. However, as the M HKA depot demonstrates, the line between private initiative and public support is razor thin. The Boerentoren project certainly benefits from (in)direct forms of state aid such as permits, heritage advice, public infrastructure works, and political goodwill. While the exact extent of the value of this support is unclear, it is also undeniable.1
The resulting contrast is sharp. Where public institutions have to “rationalize,” private ambition is given an aura of innovation. The message is clearly that space should be given to those who bring their own money, while those who rely on public support must be punished.
The fact that public institutions suffer cutbacks while private initiatives receive political backing raises a fundamental question about the role of government: Should it finance projects that already enjoy robust private protection, or should it fund initiatives that are unlikely to receive market support to keep the cultural landscape diverse and pluralistic? Public funds should not be used to subsidize commercial success in culture but rather to maintain a field that encompasses the vulnerable and unprofitable. The task of public subsidy is to archive histories that can serve as cultural touchstones for society in the future, and to support the places where experiments arise. When the government withdraws from this role, the cultural landscape inevitably narrows: from diverse and critical to uniform and predictable.
In this respect, Flanders, unlike its European neighbors, remains an amateurish bureaucracy that is all too happy to allow public money to flow into the private pockets of its local barons. Although compulsory government support for private initiatives in exchange for tax reductions has its own problematic aspects, our neighboring countries do provide a legal framework for such activities.
In France, the Loi Aillagon (2003) was intended to ensure that private foundations enjoying tax benefits would have to collaborate structurally with public institutions. Billionaire Bernard Arnault, for example, received tax benefits only on condition that his organization contributed to public institutions such as the Musée d’Orsay and the Centre Pompidou. In principle, patronage should function to strengthen public infrastructure. However, private initiatives have been able to opportunistically bend the law to their will, such that prestigious projects by Fondation Vuitton, Fondation Cartier, or the Bourse de Commerce of billionaire François Pinault (with, in a painful reversal, Aillagon as director) risk overshadowing or even humiliating public institutions. It is therefore time for France to revise the law to bring it back to its original intent.
In the UK, the Cultural Gifts Scheme links tax relief to the actual transfer of works of art or long-term loans to public museums. Unlike in France, philanthropy is less of an individual prestige project and more of a social contract. Arts Council England oversees the integrity of the process, evaluates the “quality” of the donations, and advises on their acceptance. HM Revenue & Customs oversees compliance with tax laws. However, there are reasons to be cautious. The success or failure of these gifts and loans largely depends on the agreed upon value between the expert panel and the donor’s valuations. In Germany, the public-private Stiftung system guarantees that when private art initiatives receive public support, government representatives also sit on the board. In this way, public responsibility remains fundamentally anchored in private initiatives. Even the Netherlands imposes strict criteria through its use of ANBI status (Algemeen Nut Beogende Instelling, or Public Benefit Organization). In order to receive tax mitigations, institutions must apply for ANBI status, and by doing so they ensure their contribution to the public interest through transparent governance, cooperation with the public sector, and demonstrable social relevance.
Flanders and Belgium, on the other hand, partly thanks to confusing levels of administration, have created a parallel world in which private collectors enjoy public recognition without democratic scrutiny. “Philanthropy” thus becomes part reputation management, part real estate strategy, but rarely community care. It is crucial that a legislative framework is drawn up in such a way as to prevent culture washing by patrons. In the United States and the UK, some public museums have ceased cooperation with donors even when they are more or less dependent on private income. Examples include the Sacklers and British Petroleum, donors whose profits are generated by environmentally dubious or even criminal actions.
It is sometimes argued that in authoritarian contexts, private institutions offer more freedom than state museums. They are thought to accommodate dissent, support young artists, and protect critical voices where public institutions are muzzled by antidemocratic laws or bureaucratic (self-)censorship. But whenever freedom is privatized it is also precarious: the right to dissent becomes dependent on well-intentioned patrons. The question is not only whether art can breathe, but who decides when the oxygen is cut off. Private museums may be necessary, but they are never sufficient. They offer shelter, not community. They create hospitality only as long as the host desires it. They are pavilions of self-importance, not rumah adat. So the real question is not whether private museums can offer freedom, but why public museums are losing their liberty and financial capacity, and furthermore what structures are needed to protect and restore what is being lost.
5. The Fifth Estate
Public museums, we have tried to argue, are not neutral repositories but instruments of collective reflection. They belong to what, in an extension of Montesquieu’s Trias Politica, could be called a “fifth estate.” Traditionally, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government (the first, second, and third estates) are supplemented by the press and media (the fourth estate) as a watchdog alert to the abuse of power. The effectiveness of the fourth estate today is questionable. Even if it did function well, universities and museums embody a different domain of public knowledge and imagination that must remain beyond the direct reach of politics and must not be surrendered to the free market. They form the intellectual infrastructure of democracy: places where thinking about values, representation, and community can take place. A civilization that considers itself democratic has a duty to maintain such places—not because they are economically profitable, but because they enable members of society to question what others might take for granted.
In their acclaimed book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write that our institutions—such as universities and, by extension, museums—should be places of the commons: places where knowledge, imagination, and research are removed from the regime of efficiency, productivity, and measurability. At the same time, they describe how that space of collective imagination—that domain of thought outside the logic of state control and market value—is under threat. As in Moten and Harney’s account of the university, the museum under current conditions has already lost its role as the obvious guardian of the public domain. Instead, it can only play a role as a refuge for things outside itself and on the margins of its policy brief. What remains is a paradox: the museum is, like the university, an institution from which one can only steal for the undercommons, as Moten and Harney suggest.2 That is to say, it can only be reinvented underground and parasitically by those who still dare to believe in the public sphere as a shared space of dissent and imagination.
6. Epilogue: The Disappearing House of the Community
The rumah adat of artistic Antwerp had for some time been located both inside and outside the actual museum. Now that the inside is in danger of disappearing, the question becomes: What remains of and for the community that both cared for and criticized it? Without a voice in the polyphony, there is only an imposed consensus. Without multiple specific places that mobilize imagination and contestation out of historically grounded heritage, all that remains is propaganda that must convince us in Flanders of the wonders of our “Flemish Collection.” Museums that only serve efficiency, ticket sales, and branding are sites without a soul. M HKA may have been dysfunctional in terms of its governance, but an artistic community found itself in the undercommons, impelled to “steal” meaning, artistic memory, experimentation, hospitality, and imagination, and in doing so to embody the real museum. That is why the public institution that was M HKA was embraced. It served as an unlikely refuge that understood that public museums should be criticized, because critique is the crucial foundation on which public institutions in a democracy should ultimately be built. This is also why, despite all their dysfunctionalities, we must defend our public universities, our public institutions, our public museums, as the embodiment of our sorely needed fifth estate.
This essay was originally published in Dutch and English by L’Internationale Online, December 2025. Dutch-to-English translation by Charles Esche, copyedited by Rebecca Bligh and Nick Aikens.
The Phoebus Foundation was granted the status of “Stichting van Openbaar Nut” (SON), or “public benefit foundation,” on October 15, 2023. See →.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), 25.
