A Microsoft billionaire gives the public a rare view of his art; Washington Post, 2/11/16

Philip Kennicott, Washington Post; A Microsoft billionaire gives the public a rare view of his art:

"What have we learned? That a man who scored big with Microsoft more than a quarter century ago loves classic paintings of places he has visited. He can’t really say why, or even why it should matter, but he has enough money to pursue his passion on a grand scale. It’s good that he’s sharing it with us, but it comes packaged with a theme so transparently factitious that one can’t take it seriously. Curating and scholarship have been reduced to putting a sprig of parsley on the plate.

In the end, we’re supposed to feel grateful. But I don’t feel grateful. I resent the fact that when this show is over (it will travel to Minneapolis, New Orleans and Seattle through 2017), all of the art will remain in the private collection of Paul G. Allen. And I can hear the retort: That’s life, that’s capitalism, and get over it because at least it’s not in Qatar.

But the problem with collecting masterworks of great artists is that the act of ownership is in itself a kind of theft, stealing from the public commons of genius. Put another way, once a work of art is important enough to be of interest to a man like Allen, it belongs to all of us. He may not know that, but we do. And so when the show is over and the art is subsumed back into the private palaces of plutocracy, one feels its loss more keenly than any fleeting gratitude to the person who made it temporarily accessible."