With ArtHK13 opening today, it is worth focusing on some of the names behind Asia’s private museum movement. Collector Richard Chang sums it up nicely in the Financial Times when he says liquidity is key and “you have to be willing to allocate a great deal of it to your museum. You won’t get it back. Opening a museum is a good deed, an act of generosity, and comes with huge responsibility to the artists you are showing. You need the right mindset to make it meaningful: the danger is you become cheap on the good deed side if you’re worrying about the real estate.”

Here’s a list of the private museum builders included in the FT’s article:

• Richard Chang, owner of the Domus Collection of contemporary art based in New York and Beijing, and board member of the Royal Academy, The Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1 and Tate

• Budi Tek shows his collection at his Indonesian museum, the Yuz Foundation, and is set to open an 8,000 sq ft museum in Shanghai next year.

• Nanjing Sifang Art Museum, a $2bn project owned by the Sifang Culture Group, launching in October in Jiangsu province.

• Dai Zhikang, who opened the Zendai Art Museum in Shanghai in 2005, donating the space and funds for conceptual art within a Pudong shopping mall. Dai has since moved his museum to a new, grander development of shopping mall, theatre and hotel, and re-named it the Himalayas Art Museum

• Thomas Ou’s Rockbund Museum, part of a property development on Shanghai’s riverfront, says: “We don’t hide the link but the branding of the area will not come inside the museum; there is interaction, not confusion.” The Rockbund is not based on a collection but collaborates with the world’s top museums and focuses on relationships between artists and curators.

• Li Bing, owner of the Beijing He Jing Yuan Art Museum, says he began collecting 20 years ago. Li founded the Collectors’ Club in Beijing with the aim of “speeding up the learning process in China, where contemporary art developed late and people still don’t understand the international scene”

• Wang Wei, owner of the Long Museum, which is due to open in Shanghai in October, Dr Oei Hong Djin, owner of OHD Museum in Indonesia

Georgina Adam, who has just touched down in Hong Kong for ArtHK, surveys the gallery scene for the Financial Times, including checking in with Pearl Lam:

“Art HK has done for the territory what Frieze did for London: it made people much more aware of art.” Her neighbour, Simon Lee, sees his gallery as “building bridges” to local collectors. “We had 20 Chinese for lunch recently and three were founding museums on the mainland,” he says. He is opening with a show by Sherrie Levine but comments: “I’m not expecting a bonanza of sales, this is a long-term project for me.”

“Over the past five years, we have been in touch with about 300 art-related businesses … and some 20 galleries have subsequently set up here,” says Andrew Davies, associate director-general of the government-funded InvestHK, which created a dedicated creative industries team two years ago. “There are more than 3m high net worth individuals in Asia with wealth totalling $10.8 trillion,” says Davies, who adds that the rapidly growing number of wealthy Asian and Chinese collectors “has added to the buoyancy of Hong Kong’s art market”.

The real controversy surrounding the Barnes Collection should not be the move to central Philadelphia but whether Barnes has done violence to the works of art he briefly owned or has enhanced them. Jerry Saltz tackles that question:

 As much as I love the Barnes, I don’t want any other museum on Earth installed this way. No matter how greatly you admire it, you have to admit that the artists who made this art might be horrified by how their works have been used. I imagine the ghost of Georges Seurat trying to remove his giant masterpiece series “Models” from its spot eight feet above the floor. (I picture Renoir’s ghost hovering nearby, gloating, and I flinch a little.)

Yet the madman was onto something. In one gallery I boggled at a Ptolemaic-period Egyptian bas-relief of a woman squatting with her knees facing one direction, her trunk seen full on, her head facing another. Then I saw the Egyptian pose in Matisse’s monumentally powerful 1907 Red Madras Headdress, picturing a woman in the richest blue-and-maroon dress ever. Then it recurred in several Modigliani portraits, then abstractly in a Cézanne still life seen simultaneously from left, right, above, below, and straight on. Then it all exploded in Picasso’s 1907 proto-Cubist portrait of a woman whose presence would end up squatting like the Egyptian figure in his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. That never would have happened anywhere but here.

The Philadelphia Story (New York Magazine)

Confusion and dismay broke out in the Canadian press yesterday as the nation’s foreign minister was chastised for considering a sale of a few pieces of his department’s art work to museums or other agencies as a cost-cutting measure. The minister now says there are no plans for a sale:

Among the paintings identified in the documents are:

• A Jean Paul Riopelle oil painting valued at $300,000. It has apparently hung in Washington, D.C. since the 1950s.
• Two works by Paul-Emile Borduas, an untitled piece and a 1953 work entitled “La Cathedral enguirlandee,” which hung in the embassy in Tunisia.
• A painting by landscape artist Clarence Alphonse Gagnon, valued at $500,000.

The documents show that 494 so-called “high value” pieces owned by the department have a market value of about $18.7 million. The entire collection, which includes donated pieces that will not be sold, has a value of about $35 million.

Foreign Affairs says no art sale in the works (CTV)

Reuters focuses on Teddy Forstmann as a collector and investor in art.

It is surprising that the sale of Jan Cowles’s Warhol portrait has generated so little attention when the recent sales of her Mark Tansey and Roy Lichtenstein works have been the occasion for so much media speculation. From the lawsuits surrounding the other two sales, we know that Cowles is no longer making her own decisions. We also know that there has been a great deal of friction between her lawyers and her son, Charles Cowles.

So this sale comes more as a coda to the ill-fated sales than a culmination of those other sales. Or so it might seem.

Milton Glaser, the man who created the I Love New York campaign, is a ground-breaking graphic artist. He also happens to have studied with Giorgio Morandi early in his career, according to an interview in New York Magazine. Even Glaser measures the importance of his keepsake by its market value:

What’s hanging above your sofa? 
I have three sofas in the house, and two of them are in the middle of the floor. The other sofa has two things above it: an etching by Georgio Morandi who is — if you don’t know — a great twentieth century Italian painter, perhaps the best etcher and painter in Italy of the period, and now extremely cherished there. I studied with him for a couple years in Bologna when I had a Fulbright. At his first show in New York, I bought an etching of his for $60, which is now worth about $35,000. It’s a small etching of shells, and above that is a colored engraving by Villon, who is another artist that I admire very much.

Milton Glaser’s Hands Have Literally Never Touched a Keyboard (New York)

Bloomberg has a profile of star emerging markets fund manager Justin Leverenz. Unfortunately, the  43-year-old can find no better analogy for his stunning 42% five-year returns than to compare them to art:

“Investors in businesses are positioned to do well in the next decade,” said Leverenz, who has overseen a 133 percent increase in the Oppenheimer fund’s assets since he took the helm in May 2007, making it the world’s biggest actively-managed equity mutual fund focused on developing nations, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. “A few companies enjoy such extraordinary benefits that no one can replace them for a long, long period of time.”

Leverenz, an art enthusiast who buys paintings from China, Russia and India, compares the companies in his fund to artists such as Andy Warhol who consistently generate higher returns than their peers. A Warhol self-portrait sold for $38.4 million at Christie’s International in New York last May.

“If you look at the price distribution of paintings or sculptures, very few people command the economics,” said Leverenz, a father of three who lives in New York’s Westchester County. “When I look at the companies, it’s the same observation.”

Leverenz Collects Warhol Returns With Ctrip in Top Emerging Fund (Bloomberg)