New private museum in Amsterdam: a rather brazen action, seemingly fuelled by resentment.

'A beautiful gift to the city'- this is how the Hartwig Art Foundation describes on its website the plan to initiate a new art museum on the Zuidas. It is a private initiative by entrepreneur, art collector and philanthropist Rob Defares. The Amsterdam Arts Council has advised positively on the plan; the municipality will decide soon.

It sounds promising: an art hall - there will be no in-house collection - and hub with studio spaces for artists. This could certainly make Amsterdam more attractive as a city of culture.

But the plan for this Museum for Contemporary Art is going to cost the municipality a lot of money as it stands.

Indeed, the Arts Council advises the Board to give the wealthy initiator a substantial gift: the huge, former courthouse on Parnassusweg. The Hartwig Foundation will not own it, but only temporarily rent it. Given the extreme property prices in Amsterdam, that building will certainly not be a bargain. But is it the job of a municipality to purchase a building for a private initiative? Public-private partnerships sound nice, but often private parties skillfully manage to place the risks with governments.

Councillors have apparently forgotten an earlier, failed project in the Zuidas: the Design Museum that ING Vastgoed was to build there. The municipality gave the developer a steep discount on a lot of expensive land where offices and housing were developed. But the museum did not come: the 2008 banking crisis threw a spanner in the works.

Never heard anything more about a Design Museum. That the municipality did not hold ING to the agreements was probably because the developer was smart enough to include dissolving conditions - such as force majeure - that relieved it of its responsibilities. Officials prove time and again to be too naive in public-private projects.

Another big objection, of course, is that we already have a museum for modern and contemporary art in the capital: the Stedelijk. That is also struggling with a budget that is far too tight. So why give money to a new initiative, instead of properly funding the existing one?

Because aldermen - and ministers - love to build. They want to leave something lasting behind when their term of office is over. The same applies to wealthy collectors: see the many private museums founded, also recently, by collecting entrepreneurs in Wassenaar, Delden and Gorssel.

But in this case, it is not just a collector with an ambitious plan.

This initiator was a member of the supervisory board of the same Stedelijk for many years. Moreover, the Foundation's website lists former Stedelijk director Beatrix Ruf as the only board member besides Defares: Beatrix Ruf. She was appointed under Defares' co-responsibility at the time, but had to leave because of conflicts of interest.

So here we have former directors of that municipal museum who now want to start a private museum with the support of the municipality that will compete with the Stedelijk. A rather brazen action, which seems fuelled by resentment.

Because even the art purchases made by the Foundation are not donated to the Stedelijk and the municipality, but to the State.

And what if the Hartwig Foundation has had enough of the project after 10 or 20 years? Then the municipality will be saddled with an expensive building that is unrentable for other uses. That scenario is by no means imaginary: private initiative is fickle and often not meant to last forever. Many private museums disappear when the collector-initiator dies-or when the costs become too much for the founder.

The latter happened recently at the HEM in Amsterdam, a huge exhibition space from which initiator Amerborgh -from collector Alex Mulder - partially withdrew within a year.

Yet the Amsterdam Arts Council gives a positive opinion. This is where a lack of knowledge of what patronage is wreaks havoc. Art collector Rattan Chadha rightly said in an interview with this newspaper(*): 'starting your own museum is not an act of philanthropy'. True patronage means that private initiative is actually privately funded. It does not mean: using public money and putting the risks with governments.

Incidentally, the Hartwig Foundation does support altruistic projects, such as annual support to De Appel Foundation, for young artists and curators. Strangely, De Appel is not mentioned as a partner of the new initiative, even though it desperately needs a permanent location.

For the public, meanwhile, what is important is that private initiatives cannot make good money thanks to public money. The financing of public institutions must be crystal clear. This is a duty of governments to their citizens: openness, so that residents can trust that administrators do not use general funds as subsidies to private projects.

That money could be much better spent on an urgent problem: widening cultural budgets, which have shrunk significantly over the past decade. In fact, the Arts Council itself calculated that the capital is 40 million short annually to maintain its deteriorating cultural infrastructure.

This month, the city council will decide on the arrival of the MCA. Let him then realise that this "gift to the city" is more like a gift to a stone-rich entrepreneur who is perfectly capable of financing his ambitions himself.