Director of the Albertina in Vienna in Austria (the Albertina should we now say, since the opening in a building close to a space devoted to modern art), Klaus Albrecht Schröder has accustomed his public to prestigious exhibitions.
Currently, there are two: one is dedicated to Jean-Michel Basquiat, fifty works, paintings and drawings, which revisit the meteoric career of the American artist, who died of an overdose at the age of 27, through themes very specific: racism and discrimination, drawing as performance, music and New York nightlife, his friendship with Andy Warhol, and his artistic posterity.
The other deals with abstract expressionism after the Second World War, not only in the United States, with paintings by Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, but also elsewhere in Europe, in France with Georges Mathieu and Pierre Soulages, in Germany with Ernst Wilhelm Nay, in Austria with Maria Lassnig and Arnulf Rainer.
Both are well hung, intelligently designed, and have everything to be among what are now called ” blockbusters », these exhibitions with big names likely to attract crowds, which is also the case here. Except that for the Albertina, and no doubt for many other public museums around the world, as Klaus Albrecht Schröder explains, it’s over.
Pollock, Rothko, Basquiat… With names like that, aren’t you impressed by insurance premiums?
I would have been very concerned if we had to organize these exhibitions now: the incredible results of the sale of the collection of Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft [1,62 milliard de dollars, soit 1,59 milliard d’euros, au terme de deux jours d’enchères chez Christie’s à New York, les 9 et 10 novembre] will change a lot of things for museums. I shouldn’t say that but, to me, what’s happening on the art market right now is completely obscene. People have lost their minds.
Prices today have nothing to do with the quality of the works or their importance from the point of view of art history. This has an impact on all segments, including the most contemporary ones. I recently visited the studio of a young Ghanaian artist established in Vienna, and I asked him the price of a work. He said to me, “20,000, no 40,000, no 200,000…” I thought, “My God, next month it will be auctioned off for 700,000! Because it ticks all the boxes of what is currently expected in terms of diversity.
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