Zilkens' News Blog

Zilkens' News Blog 25 2024

Stefan Kobel will be talking a lot about Art Basel, which ended yesterday. The fair also marks the turning point of the year – until the beginning of September, activities in galleries and art dealers slow down – a kind of creative break or the opportunity to recharge your batteries by visiting exhibitions – or is there even a holiday? However, the weather is not behaving like it should.

At some fairs, juries go through the booths and convince themselves of the authenticity of the works on offer. Nevertheless, art forgers are still up to their tricks, as a case currently being heard in Innsbruck shows. It is interesting to see the crude defence speeches that some lawyers come up with when they want to get those convicted of forgery off scot-free. It is the greed of the art market that is to blame, half of all prints would be forgeries and the buyers were in good faith, especially since the forgers would have represented a certain prosperity with their Porsche. How stupid is that? Leasing is a well-known phenomenon and the dealers of graphics should sue the lawyer for defamation. After all, many people start collecting prints when they start collecting, because they are usually more affordable for a small budget.

Unfortunately, there is no insurance against forgeries, even though some people believe that AI could be of great help here. In art insurance, some companies are now having valuations checked by AI. Unfortunately, this does not create any clarity, because the concept of quality, which ultimately determines the price, is subjective - just like art itself. The danger for the insured person comes from two directions: purchase price decisions that were made wholeheartedly and with consideration are made to look bad to him or her in a pseudo-objective way, because the object of joy does not fit into the mediatising algorithms of egalitarianism and then there are the top managers of all genders, who rarely stay in one position for more than 3-4 years, whose desire to reduce costs makes them question the annoying assessments by actually cost-effective art historians. As a result, no one comes to look at the things anymore, but lists are read out and sprinkled with artificial intelligence and, perhaps with a little human experience added here and there, the truths are announced to the astonished collector. It's nice when you've bought a Koons for 38 million euros and the machine only knows sales up to 2 million euros, which in the event of a claim then leads to a collector's disaster at the latest. Not everything that is adorned with AI is progressive and desirable. Ask us – we are happy to help.

The territorial integrity of a state should actually be a no-brainer, because theoretically anyone can find themselves in a situation where a neighbour (strangely, they are always male in this case) is tempted to expand their territory by force. At the closing communiqué on the Bürgenstock, Saudi Arabia, among others, did not join the call for territorial integrity. One can speculate why – perhaps a few more countries are needed that accept Putin as a dialogue partner in order to keep the dialogue open?

Have a great week

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