Zilkens' News Blog

Zilkens' News Blog 2 2022

Dear readers of Kobel's Art Week and our news blog,

The year is only 10 days old and hardly anyone has really achieved anything yet, but the feeling of thick soup and lack of clarity, also called future fog, cannot be banished. Art and other fairs are being postponed, museums are struggling to stay open, employees who had just got used to the better flow of information in the office are now to return to the home office, even if it is slowly becoming clear that this is not really better for creativity. Art Geneva almost became the first international art fair this year - but only almost. Instead, Russia and the USA are already meeting there today to negotiate peace in Europe - interestingly, the whole thing is taking place without Europe in Europe.

TEFAF in Maastricht will not take place on the usual date either, but Galerie Utermann is inviting visitors to TEFAF at Home. In terms of art, at least Walter Smerling's Foundation for Art and Culture is holding on to Bernar Venet's solo show in Hangars 2 and 3 at Tempelhof Airport, which is scheduled to open on January 28.

NFTs are now said to make half the turnover of the global art market worldwide. Following Claire Mac Andrew, art is selling at a turnover of 50 - 60 billion dollars a year. NFTs already bring in more than 20 billion USD in sales - and that is in addition to art sales, which ultimately means that the art trade and NFTs do not really have anything to do with each other. NFTs achieve these sales in less than 5 years. The art trade has been struggling to maintain a place in the economy for more than 2000 years. It has always been less digital, if only because of the objects of its core competence, which have to meet a certain quality standard in the long run. The latter can be excluded for NFTs - it's all about money and, as with the cryptocurrencies of this world, about increasing their value to exorbitant levels. Many cultural workers, to use a term from East German socialisation, are jumping on the bandwagon in order not to feel disconnected. The gallery owner Tedd Kramer from New York has now discovered that gambling can sometimes go wrong. His wallet was hacked by a phishing attack. The new form of pickpockets - and they are commonly warned about at every train station. Cyber insurance might have covered part of the damage - but who in the NFT world deals with such things when those who have been trading art for centuries don't?

Everybody who uses electrical appliances knows that the plug goes out - and that's that. In the meantime, even the last managers of all sexes should have got the message that computer systems are susceptible to all kinds of unpleasant mischief. One can take precautions against this: organisationally and financially through insurance. As long as you own the company 100%, it's no problem, you just have to have enough capital to get out of the mess. Employees and part-owners with entrepreneurial responsibility can be held liable by the shareholders in the event of a loss if they do not pay attention to the issue. This is another reason why D&O insurers fear an increasing claims burden in 2022. Let's see if it benefits cyber insurance. NFTs are not (yet) insurable via classic art insurance or covered via cyber exclusion clauses.

This year there are (hopefully) biennials, triennials and the Dokumenta again. You could put together a nice travel programme starting in February: Kathmandu, Hawaii, Sydney, Toronto, Venice, Bucharest, Berlin, Kassel, Riga, Tallinn, Bergen, Lyon, Istanbul, Casablanca, Singapore and Mali and be through in October.

Iwona Blazwick is leaving the Whitechapel Gallery in London in April 2022 after 20 years to pursue new opportunities.

In Melbourne, negotiations are underway over the entry visa of a felt ball knocker - a tennis player by name - to Australia, and Serbia is turning it into a demonstration of nationalism of the most unpleasant kind. One can only hope that Australians, some of whom were not allowed to return to their own country for 18 months, will be able to understand the verdict - but there too, as in the USA, case law prevails ...

I wish you a creative and constructive week full of inner strength.

Stephan Zilkens and the team of Zilkens Fine Art Insurance Broker GmbH in Cologne and Solothurn