In the past ten years museums of modern and contemporary art have proliferated around the world. New institutions have appeared in Los Angeles, Venice, Doha and Beijing. Even Camden has seen a burst of activity — the Dairy Art Centre opened in April of this year, spread over the 12,500 sq ft of a former milk depot, with an exhibition of the Swiss artist John Armleder. A similar size space, The David Roberts Art Foundation (Draf), opened last year in a mews near the Mornington Crescent end of Camden High Street. They joined the Zabludowicz Collection, which has been housed in a former Methodist chapel on Prince of Wales Road since 2007.
All three are private museums that display the wares of high-powered British collectors: Frank Cohen, Nicolai Frahm (whose collections are housed in the Dairy), David Roberts and Anita Zabludowicz respectively. Each is free from state control, with no role for DCMS directives or Arts Council hand-outs, and are answerable only to the collectors who have founded them.
The private museum model is behind the recent boom in museum-building around the world.
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