Art Market in Germany

Max Hollein

Max Hollein is director of the Schirn Kunsthalle, the Städel Museum and the Sculpture Collection at the Liebighaus in Frankfurt. He has discussed the relation between art and the market in several books.

Daniela Gregori: A heated-up market, mad prices, ever younger talent – what actually distinguishes the current art market boom from that of the 1980s?

Max Hollein: There hardly is a difference. There are the same symptoms, there is the same system, and there are the same media reactions. If you read articles from the 1980s, you will come across nearly the same comments about the enormous hype, the great interest on the part of the buyers, and also the reproach that art has degenerated into a commodity. By the way, these were exactly the same reactions to the boom of the 1970s. The great difference is that the prices today are still higher.

Two factors are important for such a boom: high liquidity in those already taking part in the market, and a group of interested people who ensure an additional demand. Currently one notices high liquidity and a great demand on the part of new collectors in Asia, Russia and India. Otherwise the same mechanism is at work here as in the previous booms: it is a young, contemporary art, mainly painting, that is the recipient of this hype.

How much does an artist’s participation in exhibitions influence his market presence?

Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

Our function at the Schirn and the Städel is different one: we aren’t after all a civic art association. Still, an exhibition at the Schirn assuredly has an certain influence on the price trends of an artist’s work, if only because an exhibition catalogue is produced and so the works are placed quite differently before the eye of the public. Participation in exhibitions naturally enhances the overall public attention given the artist. Often the interest of the market follows on the heels of the media’s interest in the exhibitions of the younger and youngest generations. The Städel, with the exception of the annual exhibition of the graduates of the Städel School, has no contemporary programme. For the graduates of the school the annual exhibition is their first contact with a broader public, and if the mood is correspondingly heated up it can certainly happen that some of the public, who enjoy an above average salary, think they ought to buy some very new art.

Is that because it has become chic to collect art?

Sotheby's auction

That too is connected to the boom, exactly as is the attention of certain media for contemporary art that is no longer discussed in professional journals and on the features page, but in fashion and life style magazines. Even very young artists find entrée here and become more or less acceptable. An access has been developed here to a public that would otherwise not have got such information so quickly.

Isn’t this respectability the same as levelling art down to the rank of design, interior decoration and life style?

Yes; the question is only who the target public is. It may be that for these people an article in a glossy helps them to decide whether they will buy a piece of furniture or an art work. Ever more people see hanging the drawing of a young artist rather than a van Gogh print on the wall as a statement of their own culture. It may be that this is a superficial access, yet it creates a general resonance for contemporary art. And an active art market is, in spite of its pitfalls and problems, fertile ground for the general reception of contemporary art.

What role does art criticism play?

Book cover

In this case it no longer plays any role. Of course art criticism is taken seriously as an expression of opinion and as an intellectual challenge, yet for what happens on the market, for whether an artist is successful or not, it plays no role whatsoever. In boom times participants in the market have decided long beforehand what they think is good. Pop art, for example, was torn to pieces by the critics at the beginning, yet the art galleries and the collectors responded to it euphorically, long before it found its way into museums.

How will the art market boom end?

Exactly as it ended the last two times. In the hangover that will occur after the boom, the art critics will again appear on the scene and suddenly they will be listened to again. Then a series of painters – for the focus of the boom has been on painting – will dethroned. Once the hype has settled, attention will fall on different tendencies in art and it will be noticed that they have been there all along in recent years as parallel phenomena.

An art market boom is always the result of something. This time it is the result of a good business cycle and a more intensely globalised economy that have generated high liquidity and an increased demand for luxury goods. When this cycle collapses, money will be quickly invested in commodities less susceptible to inflation. It then takes about a year until the art market also collapses. It’s all quite simple.

Max Hollein completed his study of art history and business administration in Vienna with a work on Aktuelle Vertriebsformen im Handel mit zeitgenössischer bildender Kunst (i.e., Current Marketing Forms in Business with the Contemporary Fine Arts), and worked afterwards for five years at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He has been Director of the Schirn Kunsthalle since 2001 and also, since 2006, of the Städelmuseum and the Sculpture Collection of the Liebighaus in Frankfurt am Main. In 2000 Hollein was curator of the American entry to the Venice Biennale for Architecture, and in 2005 of the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale for Art. His book about the art market boom appeared in 1999. Max Hollein: Zeitgenössische Kunst und der Kunstmarktboom; Böhlau Verlag, Wien, 1999, ISBN: 978-3-205-99133-5.