Businesses

As Dealers Look to Reinvent Their Businesses, German Gallerist Johann König Is Hiring an Auctions Expert to Steer His In-House Fair Model


In a sign of further hybridization of the art market, Galerie König in Berlin has announced a revamped 2021 edition of the in-house art fair that it piloted last year. To oversee the weeklong sale of primary and secondary market works, the gallery has appointed an auctions expert to the helm.

Lena Winter has now joined the gallery as the director of the event, dubbed Messe in St. Agnes (“messe” is both the word for fair and church service in German). Her expertise flows from the German auction world, where she served as head of the contemporary art department at Ketterer Kunst in Munich, one of Germany’s leading auction houses. She previously worked at Lempertz and Grisebach auction houses.

The 2021 fair will run May 2 through 9 this spring at a converted brutalist church that the gallery operates as an exhibition space (hence the pun). The dates overlap with Gallery Weekend Berlin, which takes place as a two-part even this year, with its first chapter running from April 29 to May 2 this year (the second event will take place in September focused on more emerging and underrepresented positions).

Messe in St. Agnes. by Roman Maerz.

2020 Messe in St. Agnes. by Roman Maerz.

“In auction houses, prices are more transparent and so there is less anxiety around for new clients entering the art market,” Winter told Midnight Publishing Group News. “We want to take this approach, and have transparency be one of the main aspects of the fair in St. Agnes. We want things to be democratic.”

This year’s edition of the fair will be a tidied up version of the salon-style concept that it debuted last year, in May and September. This time around, works will be curated into different thematic sections: abstract expressionism, figuration, and “young contemporary” are a few placeholder ideas that are in the making. Winter said the gallery is creating a specialized architecture to better accommodate the viewing experience.

When Messe St. Agnes was first launched last spring, it was met was a mix of both gratitude by some and friction with other dealers in the city. “It’s always difficult for people to adapt to new formats and the mix of primary and secondary markets,” said König. “But we need to all find new niches in our own regions.”

Both Winter and König share the conviction that the art market needs to hybridize its various sectors, the gallery and auction worlds, and continue to innovate. “You have to open the borders between the primary and secondary market, because they need each other,” said Winter. “The one market is not anything without the other.”

She adds that the relationship between the primary and secondary markets was marked by “misunderstanding” for a long time, as well as a fear of that primary dealers had of auctions due to the transparency of sales.

The gallery may be the first in Germany to fully embrace such a path. Still, this blurring of categories is also occurring online this month with VEZA, an online selling event organized by Goodman Gallery that focuses on highlighting selected works by dealers in the Global South. And auction houses, for their part, have been leaning more on private sales, while also trying out new concepts, such as Christie’s primary market sale “Say It Out Loud,” which was organized by dynamo curator Destinee Ross-Sutton.

“The pandemic sped up a process that was already necessarily transforming,” said Winter. “It is not possible for a gallery to simply grow by only having their 20 or so artists anymore.”

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UK Galleries Will Benefit From a Court Ruling Forcing Insurers to Pay Businesses for Losses Incurred During Lockdown


Art galleries are among the hundreds of thousands of UK businesses that are celebrating after the country’s highest court ruled that insurers must pay out to policyholders for coronavirus-related losses.

The country’s Supreme Court ruled that “business interruption” insurance policies should cover financial setbacks incurred during the ongoing pandemic and enforced lockdowns. 

The ruling was handed down on Friday, January 15, when Supreme Court judges dismissed appeals from insurance companies arguing against an earlier court decision that they should honor most claims for losses caused by business interruptions, including clauses for “disease” and “prevention of access.”

The case, which was first brought before the High Court by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, and its verdict, will affect some 370,000 businesses, including those from the arts sector, holding 700 types of policies issued by 60 insurers.

“Coronavirus is causing substantial loss and distress to businesses and many are under immense financial strain to stay afloat,” the executive director for Consumers and Competition at the FCA, Sheldon Mills, said in a statement, adding that the judgment “decisively removes many of the roadblocks to claims by policyholders.” 

The government body will now be working with insurers to see that they move quickly to pay what is due.

“The ruling means that a number of museums, galleries, dealers, and other art market professionals that have had their business-interruption insurance coverage refused to date, can now progress their claim,” Rudy Capildeo, partner at the law firm Charles Russell Speechlys LLP, tells Midnight Publishing Group News. Capildeo’s firm is currently working on insurance issues with more than 50 organizations in the arts sector on a no win/no fee basis.

But the expert warns that arts businesses are not out of the woods yet, as the ruling did not comment on how the losses suffered should be calculated. “Clients should be very careful when submitting their losses to their brokers or insurers,” Capildeo advises, adding that he has seen insurers behave “incredibly aggressively” towards clients in an effort to reduce the payments they are required to make. 

Capildeo, who says his firm is happy to provide some initial free advice to clients, predicts that insurers will “redraw the battle lines” around the losses businesses have suffered and attempt to argue that they are not directly attributable to Covid-19.

“The unfortunate truth is that insurers have not supported museums and arts businesses through this pandemic,” Capildeo says, adding that the ten month delay in reaching the decision has come too late for a number of organizations.

None of the firm’s gallery and museum clients wanted to speak to Midnight Publishing Group News about their insurers out of fear that it might impact the progress of their claims or reveal to the market their need to rely on insurance cover to keep their business going. Capildeo did say, however, that the clients that have already received payouts have commented that they have been a “critical lifeline” during this period.

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