We planned to spend the day in Rotterdam and Esther suggested we visit the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen. This is the world’s first publicly accessible art storage facility. 173 years of art collecting. More than 152,000 objects housed together, arranged in fourteen storage compartments with five different climates.
This place is amazing and Grubb will talk more about it. Oh yes indeed he will. 6 stories of art storage. Some pieces on display. An ingenious app that even Grubb could navigate. An architecturally clever building. Just wow.
A few years ago I read an article about art depots in many international ports, like Rotterdam. It said that rich investors would buy up art as an asset. Since they didn’t really care about the art itself it was kept in depots where it could be easily shipped to other depots when they were sold. I got the impression they we big, climate-controlled, heavily-guarded warehouses where the art was kept in shipping boxes and was never seen by anyone. Is this an evolution of those changed so that people can actually see the art? Who owns the art in this depot?