Zilkens' News Blog

Zilkens's News Blog 26 2022

Dear readers of Kobel's Kunstwoche,

last week I had a rant about visitors to Art Basel not being able to visit TEFAF due to Covid - and now I've been hit myself. I've been tested positive for a week and am waiting for my release ... which is expected sometime this week - and then Maastricht, here I come. The experiences around it are interesting. Friends help, bring food to the door and support. Many thanks for that. The sympthoms are annoying to superfluous and the ability to concentrate seems to suffer. It will all come back. As a dutiful citizen, however, one would like to use the spurned Corona app to warn people one remembers on the road, but not in person. It's a shame that the PCR test doesn't provide a corresponding code - but there is a hotline with which you can get a TAN to register the result. - Give it a try: After the call, you are told for about 90 seconds who is entitled to a TAN and who should hang up the phone immediately again. Once you've got through this, you're put on hold: "We'll be right with you, all our staff are currently on the line...". - After 44 minutes, there is still no employee to relieve the delinquent from his addiction to being useful via the Warn app! Also a form of combating addiction - refusal to offer, but expensively financed by the taxpayer and the cogendering taxpayers.

It culminates in Elmau and Putin has bombs dropped on Kyiv in defiance. The German Left continues to pass absurd resolutions, as if one could stop a despot, who is completely free of ideology and is nursing his fantasies of power, with mere talk. By the way, 7 howitzers are also not enough ... . There is an enormous amount of artistic quality arising from this pressure. Some of it will be on display at Galerie Parrotta in Cologne on 9 July, when Ukrainian artists will show their current works there.

We are also trying to organise a pop-up exhibition during Art Cologne. The title is "Worth fighting for" and we hope that Cologne's urban society is willing and able to support the idea. In November, we fear that the gas shortage will fuel another debate and we hope to develop a remedy for it with the power of art.

Europe is now slowly going on holiday - we will be around, also in the coming weeks and months.

A good start to what we hope will be a week full of art and without catastrophes.

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