Zilkens' News Blog

Zilkens' News Blog 46 2023

Two more issues and then Kobel's Kunstwoche will have been around for 10 years. Today marks the 518th issue of all. Carnival - the festival of Rhenish cheerfulness - has been around for much longer, but in Cologne it has mutated into a marvellous excuse for Deutsche Bahn to be late. The carnival revellers overcrowded the main station to such an extent that it had to be closed by the police. Does the railway company now possibly have recourse against the city because (once again) it was unable to present an adequate concept for controlling the alcohol-fuelled mass frenzy? Could insurers perhaps be held liable for a loss? Can people who missed their train because of the crowds now claim consequential damages? That would be something - but certainly no business for the risk carriers.

ART WEEK came to an end in Luxembourg at the weekend - a fair that is increasingly working its way into the centre of Europe. In any case, it has big plans for the future. ART COLOGNE - Europe's oldest fair for contemporary art - starts on Thursday with the preview. Over 170 galleries will be showcasing their capabilities and hoping to attract positive collectors. Unfortunately, Harald Falckenberg is no longer among them. He is sadly missed by all those who care about independence and going against the grain. The Kunstsammler e.V. has lost its founder, who also courageously stood up to overbearing politics.

But there are also collectors for whom it is astonishing that their heirs have to deal with their legacy. Silvio Berlusconi was probably one of them, who left around 25,000 works of art in a hangar, which his heirs do not know whether they should scrap straight away, as the Journal des Arts reports. This is probably a classic case of money alone not being enough to ensure quality.

Next week, fair tourism will head to Abu Dhabi before reaching its peak in Miami at the beginning of December with around 15 contemporary art fairs in one place at the same time.

Almost everyone knows the price of Leonardo's Salvator Mundi, which can now be admired in the Louvre Abu Dhabi: USD 151,515.16 per cm². Now a stamp has been auctioned in the USA - the inverted Jenny - for USD 2 million or converted to cm² = USD 666,666.67, which leads to the conclusion that stamps have the greater potential in terms of value concentration per cm². Insurers have great respect for stamps - in their normal state they are like cash, but as a collector's item no one is allowed to lick them. This applies at least to the inverted Jenny from 1918, which still has its gum coating intact and shows no traces of stamp albums. If an untouched Blue Mauritius now turns up ...

The insurance industry is in the middle of the renewal period and many industrial policies have a shorter right of cancellation until 15 December. Reinsurers no longer consider the prices for certain lines of business to be adequate and risk carriers are trying to pass this on to their customers to keep their own balance sheets in order. The market is so tough that the really big premium payers (more than EUR 3 million in insurance premiums) are thinking about alternatives, in which they are then again supported by the industrial insurers. Hard markets are the birth of captives, i.e. self-insurance by the companies themselves. On the other hand, in risk management, "nothing beats cheap insurance".

Have a catastrophe-free week and enjoy the art.

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