Or: Brains and Testicles

I attended the Collectors’ Talk at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin on Friday. The German collector Ivo Wessel kindly pointed me in that directon.

So what is the Collector’s Talk? It’s a meeting of art collectors, arranged by the Art Forum Berlin (link), where, on this occasion, two German collectors talked about their collections and their way of collecting.

The place was pretty packed and I could sense a very relaxed mood. The audience ranged from guys in shorts to ladies in full attire. Hah, the art world.

The two “keynote speakers” of the evening were both doctors. One in neurology, one in urology. Thus the moderator, Jörg Heiser from Frieze Magazine, had thought about calling the evening “Brains and Testicles”. But he didn’t and saved the joke for the evening.

Dr. Jan Mackert talked openly about his collection of room-spanning installations and sculptures, yet we never saw how he is actually storing his collection at home. To believe that he has them all installed in the way they’re meant to be would mean to believe that he owns an otherwise empty castle with at least a hundred rooms. And I, honestly speaking, don’t believe that. It would have been great if we could have seen the boxes or shelves he maybe stores them in. Especially since he said a coupld of times that he likes art that is challenging to own …

It was very interesting to see how he fought for the right words to explain the artworks and the reason why he bought them. Somehow I thought it would be something any collector could do asleep. Wondering, whether the words come to him easier when he talks to fewer people, I realized: Collectors are people, too. How comforting!

Dr. Albrecht Kastein really drew me in. I sat way in the back and from my point of view it looked like he was looking down on his hands most of the times, more talking to himself than to the audience. He spoke in a calm voice, thus giving his stories and puns even more weight. The audience chuckled more than once at his fresh wording: “I saw a small black object and I liked it. So it went in the bag.” So far so good. But he also put “in the bag” a large scale painting on another occasion. I’d like to see his bags at some point.

He showed us one photograph of one of the paintings on his walls. But even that looked clean and clinical, not like a home. Maybe it’s the way he lives (which is ok, then) or it’s the way urologists take photographs.

The announced Q&A session at the end didn’t take lace really, because no one had questions. I hadn’t and I thought I would. But their talks left almost no room for discussion. There simply wasn’t anything to argue about.

After the talk I chatted briefly to Ivo Wessel who also missed the “live shots” from art in collectors homes but agreed that you usually have the “clean shots” on file, so you end up using those.

I was introduced to other collectors who then asked me: “What are you collecting?” To which I responded: “I don’t know, yet. I’m just starting.” Which didn’t end the conversation but resulted in a lot of encouragement and a few recommendations, I had heard before: “Go see stuff. Go see A LOT of stuff.”

Which is what I’m going to do.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 10:17 am and is filed under Event Report.