Zilkens' News Blog

Zilkens‘ News Blog 36 2022

It is worth fighting for our freedom and Ukraine! For the exhibition project Worth Fighting For, almost 3,000 EUR have already been collected via Betterplace (and every EUR helps), rent and insurance have already been paid and are more than 10,000 EUR. The government of NRW wants to support massively, people from Switzerland have contacted us and want to help and also insurers offer 5-digit amounts as support. Nevertheless, we still have to close a gap that is very challenging. Next week we will know if there is still 180,000 EUR or 280,000 EUR. In the middle of winter we could bring Venice, Davos and Kyiv to Cologne in a location that has not been used for art before and present them on an exhibition space of over 3,000m2. If it works out, it will be a huge project - if it fails, it will cast a gray shadow on our rulers. Why? The federal ministers who could help: Claudia Roth and Annalena Baerbock are unavailable to mere mortals. Attempts to reach them through our local Green MP Lehmann ended after the 4th time in a return email reporting that the MP's office was on a company outing and would not be reachable again until 6/26. The only embarrassing thing is that the attempts to reach the people's representative all date back to August. One visits Odessa, gives pithy (and good) statements about the situation but in the end one communicates in a one-way street: the court apologists report and the people hope for a blessing - Maybe something will happen so that we at home herds do not have to give in to the demands for negotiations with war criminals. As I said, any help is welcome.

Since Saturday, about 200 descendants of Moses Mendelssohn have been meeting in Berlin and will stay there until Wednesday. "we dream of nothing but enlightenment" is the name of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum there, which shows how important openness and tolerance are for the development of freedom. In times of gender and cancel culture, one gets the impression that this is exactly what we need to learn again.

Good journalism is hard: sow-hating seems to be much more profitable, even if in this case the sow is a boar. Die Zeit" also seems to have lost its appetite for patient and well-researched reporting. If one has success and in addition still the wrong sex the former must not have been produced with right things. If he is even younger and employs people of the opposite sex, it is easy to find something that can be interpreted as sexual assault. Nothing has been proven - but some things have scratched the reputation. The circulation is saved and the advertising customers are satisfied. Ugh - I don't like this smoke and mirrors journalism. If you want to know more - just read Stefan Kobel's article.

On Thursday, the Vienna Contemporary opens its doors - let's see what the mood is like in beleaguered Europe? How is the offer, will people buy? The big galleries are trying their luck right now in Seoul at a Frieze there and satellites. Will the move of the Asian market to Seoul work? Can Chinese collectors buy there with USD? At any rate, there was buying at the local DC Open and the mood at the collectors' party at the Museum für angewandte Kunst in Cologne was good.

By the way, the reinsurers will soon be meeting again in Monte Carlo to talk about more than just the proverbial weather - because in the meantime even the last of them should have realized that climate change can have a negative impact on the balance sheet. It remains to be seen whether the courageous among the primary insurers will also be rewarded with capacities for insurance in Ukraine. At the moment, many insurers (and the London market is not exempt from this) are making themselves the executors of Russian big power fantasies, because they are not making capacity available for industrial risks, but also for transport and exhibition insurance.

We wish you an optimistic week

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