Zilkens' News Blog

Zilkens'News Blog 13 2024

We all know that bureaucracy paralyses us, which is why we have happily voted for every party that has written bureaucracy reduction on its banner. In Germany, a coalition of do-gooders with little economic expertise is now working on making things leaner - with the interesting aspect that the number of people employed in the public sector is constantly increasing and further restricting the room for manoeuvre for what is necessary. Some of these staffing requirements are also a consequence of decisions made in Brussels, which are not exactly geared towards practical but rather moral standards. In addition to a bureaucracy reduction regulation, which is intended to reduce the burden on German industry by EUR 800 million, the legalisation of cannabis has also been decided with retroactive effect, which may result in the reassessment of 225,000 completed court judgements. There is no better way to paralyse the Third Power. The Greens and parts of the SPD can be thanked for this. On the other hand, rumour has it that the art market, which is rather neglected in the DACH region, is thinking about how to document the trade in works of art without any gaps. One of the considerations: Every person and every institution that sells a work of art in the future must document the complete chain of previous owners and disclose it to the new acquirer, of all genders of course. Apart from the fact that this is not even possible with regard to many publicly and privately owned works, because in the 16th and 17th centuries St. Bürocratius still used materials that did not include an eternity guarantee, this documentation would have to be incorporated into the work and physically linked to it. Otherwise, it might be possible to use increasingly intelligent reproduction techniques to create originals that are not original at all. A Mr Banksy from somewhere is currently demonstrating how this works. And what do you do with all the attributions that only exist because artists like to be creative and are not accountants of their work?

Motor vehicle liability insurers can breathe a sigh of relief - they don't have to develop new products for work machines with a maximum design speed of 6 - 20 km/h, although the EU would have liked to see this. The public liability insurers can continue to take care of this.

Art Basel opens its doors in Hong Kong on Tuesday and it will probably be as full as it was before corona and before China stretched out its regulatory hand over the former British crown colony. It will be interesting to see how free the art is that is traded there.

Russia will not be represented at the Venice Biennale this year either - at least there is unanimity in the international art world on this point. But the Russian pavilion in the Giardini will be featured. A country on Lake Titicaca has been given the keys to the pavilion by Russia, probably also because it has large resources of lithium, which is known to be an important raw material for batteries. A rogue who thinks anything of it. And what's the saying in South America? "Titi is in Peru and caca is in Bolivia".

With this in mind, have a good pre-Easter week, which began yesterday with Palm Sunday and ends on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday with the resurrection on Easter Sunday according to Christian teaching. As Monday is a public holiday in many parts of the country, we will not appear again until Tuesday after Easter.

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