Others, like Bank of America, take a very different approach—unlike most of its peers, it hasn’t added to its collection in more than 20 years.
“I’m always kind of amused that various of our competitors, if you will, that have large collections are interested in talking about: ‘We have the biggest collection, we have the best collection,’ ” says Bank of America’s De Sisto. “To me the question is what do you do with it, and how do you make it work for the biggest number of people?”
De Sisto’s solution was to create a program where the bank curated standalone exhibitions, then lent them to smaller arts organizations free of charge. (And in fact, paid for insurance, shipping, and handling.)
The Art in Our Communities program, which has currently facilitated more than 130 exhibitions of Bank of America’s art globally, is probably the most extreme example of a bank lending its art to not-for-profit institutions. But almost every bank does it, and increasingly these loans have become a key component of museum exhibitions around the world.
UBS, for instance, has recently lent works to the Royal Academy in London for its show of Lucian Freud self-portraits and the Met Breuer, for its Vija Celmins retrospective; the Banco de España lent Goyas to a show of the artist’s portraits at the National Gallery London in 2015.
“There is that relationship to our community,” says Jackson, of the RBC. “We honor loan requests.”
And that, University of Amsterdam’s Witte says, is key to understanding how banks’ art collections have evolved into bulwarks of the international art world. Corporate collections may have been conceived of as prestige-builders, but they’ve become something larger than that.
“It’s a means to an end,” he says of corporate collecting, “but still, it has positive effects on artistic appreciation and cultural consumption.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.