Kobel's Art Weekly

Kobel's Art Weekly 9 2024

A prominent art world figure has launched a new art fair in an unusual location. Nicole Scheyerer visited the Stage at the Festspielhaus Bregenz for the FAZ on 24 February: "Behind the premiere is the fair organiser Renger van den Heuvel: in Vienna, the native Dutchman ran the Viennacontemporary before launching his own event in 2021 with the Spark Art Fair. He left after the second edition. Now he is activating his network for the novelty in the border triangle." Michael Huber describes the special nature of the event in the Kurier: "The 'Stage' organiser knows very well that a trade fair is just as much a networking event as a sales event and is focusing on a sequence of meeting zones [...] The impresario is receiving support from politicians: in addition to the city of Bregenz and the state of Vorarlberg, the Ministry of Culture (BMKÖS) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are also among the public sponsors of the event, which was developed in close cooperation with Bregenz City Marketing - the aim is to bring audiences to the lake outside of the festival season, it was said at the press conference. Van den Heuvel puts the public funding that the trade fair receives at around 140,000 euros in total - most of which is channelled into special and educational projects." Christof Habres emphasises in Parnass the willingness of all those involved to cooperate: "What sets the fair apart from the outset is the fact that most of the country's (cultural) leaders have pulled together: Exhibitions in museums, art spaces and galleries throughout Vorarlberg open around the fair." I was in Bregenz for Handelsblatt and Artmagazine.

With its new management, Art Karlsruhe is seeking to connect with the international format without losing its ties to the region. Brita Sachs describes the changes in the FAZ: "The advisory board, which is unchanged in its composition, has taken action and streamlined the fair. Instead of 207 exhibitors as in 2023, this time 177 from 13 nations were accepted, including 27 first-time participants. Wide, unobstructed paths through clearly arranged stands open up the halls, and the visual overload that could be tiring has disappeared over longer distances. Quality is on the rise, and hardly anyone is likely to miss the environmentally unfriendly carpeting that used to end up in the rubbish bin after every trade fair." Hans-Joachim Müller names the fair's hidden strengths and obvious weaknesses in the WeLT: "The special show 'Academy Square', where the country's art academies present their talents, is particularly depressing. Perhaps it is unfair, perhaps one would have to investigate much more deeply, but what can be seen there oscillates so cheerfully between avowed harmlessness and sheer bizarreness that there is no need to worry about the familiar design of future art fairs in Karlsruhe. Now this report would be incomplete and the visit to 'art' would be wasted if we didn't take a look behind the many showcases with proven curiosity. Once again this year, you can make discoveries that often deserve the label 'museum quality'." I visited the fair for Artmagazine.

The British authorities are getting serious about money laundering control, reports Riah Pryor in The Art Newspaper: "'Smaller UK galleries are consistent in their view that HMRC's approach to anti-money laundering interventions lacks proportionality,' says Paul Hewitt, the director general of The Society of London Art Dealers (SLAD). Around 78% of respondents to a recent survey conducted by the organisation expressed concerns over shifts in legislation, specifically the administrative burden of complying with the AML rules. 'Galleries with lower risk profiles feel they are treated no differently to larger, potentially riskier businesses, and the expectation that rigorous due diligence is required, even for customers that dealers have known well for many years, is a real burden and hinders productivity,' Hewitt adds."

Now is finally the time to talk seriously about crypto art, says Annika von Taube at Monopol: "What would artists gain from being on the highest-volume platform if they disappear into the crowd? Exactly. That's why a curatorial approach has now also become established in crypto art, which provides orientation for prospective buyers. The blockchain Tezos, for example, in conjunction with Fxhash, a marketplace for generative art, has done this well. A look at the trading volume on data tracker DappRadar over a period of 30 days shows a turnover volume of a few thousand US dollars for Fxhash and a few million US dollars for Solanart - but anyone who is familiar with generative art will find much better information on Fxhash. Crypto art marketplaces should enjoy every conceivable success, but please stop linking the success of crypto art to trading volume - otherwise the NFTs-are-dead clarifications will never end." To think about the other side of the coin, we recommend taking a look at the Web3 is Going Just Great website, where NFTs are still mentioned with astonishing frequency in a collection of reports on scams in the crypto world.

The Tagesspiegel could rename its page "Art & Market" in "Art & Money", because instead of reporting on trade fairs, auctions, legal or tax issues, the only text deals with the Diriyah Biennale, whose author Bernhard Schulz has the sensitive topic named, but with a positive spin: "Ute Meta Bauer, well remembered in Berlin since the Berlin Biennale 2004, which she directed, sees the Biennale as part of the 'transformation' that has gripped Saudi Arabia - and she says it into every microphone. 'The country invests a lot of money in culture,' she anticipates the expected question, 'but the decisive factor is what you do with it. The money, she says, is 'the elephant in the room', alluding to the Saudi policy of simply buying prestige, whether in sport or culture. And of course Diriyah is a kind of island of the blessed, far removed from the everyday life of the country and its inhabitants. But you can take it from Ute Meta Bauer that she was able to organise her biennial without political influence." Not only Saudi Arabia, but also other questionable regimes, often seem to have their own rules when it comes to the judgement of journalists (and artists) when it comes to lavishly endowed cultural projects.

It is sometimes astonishing what you have to explain to the tax authorities yourself. The fact that prize money associated with an art award is not taxable as income first had to be explained to the Leipzig tax office by the court, reports dpa. The legal situation is clear: if prize money does not reward a specific achievement, it does not count as income (BMF circular dated 5 September 1996 (BStBl 1996 I p. 1150) and 23 December 2002 (BStBl 2003 I p. 76). A two-minute internet search is all it takes to find this out.

Research by Olga Kronsteiner for the Standard has revealed that the rediscovered Klimt painting, which will be on sale at the Kinsky in Vienna in April, is quite clearly looted art. This is evident from letters written by Werner Hofmann, the founding director of the later MUMOK, in 1961: "Hoffmann becomes even clearer in a letter addressed to an acquaintance of the Hagenauer family, who was involved in the 'discovery' of the painting at the time. According to the letter, attempts to 'persuade the current 'owner' - or rather: the person in charge of its safekeeping - to lend it to him' had failed. The legal situation is by no means clear, as there is no document 'showing the transfer of ownership rights' to the Hagenauer family. And further: 'The fact that the painting comes from Jewish property and that its owner perished in the gas chambers rules out the possibility for the legally and morally minded of selling the painting or incorporating it into the family's assets. However, the new findings do not change anything about the auction, as a private restitution settlement had already been reached between the consignor and the heirs, meaning that the work can be traded without restrictions.

Colin Moynihan vividly explains in the New York Times how a controversial re-attribution to Rembrandt can catapult the price of a work of art from an expert estimate of 18,000 dollars to a sale price of almost 14 million dollars within two years.

The rise and fall of former media mogul Louise Blouin (Artinfo, among other things) is described by Jacob Bernstein in the New York Times on the occasion of the forced sale of her property: "Louise Blouin Media was the sort of place where employees got locked out of the office for days because of unpaid rent. It was the sort of place where the person whose name was on the door got her own nickname in The New York Post: the Red Queen, after an imperious monarch in Lewis Carroll's 'Through the Looking-Glass. And it was the sort of place, according to Art + Auction's former editor in chief, Sarah P. Hanson, where you found out that a year of your Social Security and Medicare earnings had not made it to the federal government, although they had been withheld from your paychecks. (Ms Hanson was one of four ex-employees who provided tax returns showing that this had occurred). 'There are people who are so rich or think they're so rich that they don't understand the realities of what it's like to actually do the job,' said Ben Davis, ArtInfo's former executive editor. 'Louise believed everything good that happened was because of her, and she thought everything bad that happened was a plot to get her."