The Crimes That Fueled a Fantastic Brazilian Museum

In the hours after the twin towers fell in Lower Manhattan, Bernardo Paz had a flash of inspiration. He called up his curator, Ricardo Sardenberg, who was helping him create a private museum in the hills of southeastern Brazil. Paz had become rich by taking over bankrupt mining companies, and he sensed an historic opportunity to build a world-class art collection. “If there’s a time to go to New York, it’s right now,” Sardenberg remembers Paz saying even as they watched the televised loop of the towers collapsing. As soon as flights to New York resumed, they went.

The galleries in Chelsea were quiet, but dealers were relieved to entertain a buyer, and Paz scooped up sculptures and installations by top contemporary artists “for the price of a banana,” in Sardenberg’s words. He favored pieces too unwieldy for most private collections, such as The Forty Part Motet by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, in which 40 loudspeakers play 40 individually recorded voices singing an English Renaissance choral composition. No matter that Paz didn’t have a place to display it. He’d have a structure built, large enough for someone to stroll by each speaker and make out a single voice with one ear while hearing the whole chorus with the other, as the artists had intended.