INTERVIEW WITH DR. WOLFRAM VÖLCKER

Art journalist Claudia Herstatt in conversation with Dr. Wolfram Völcker.

There are now numerous guides on collecting art. What makes your handbook "What Does Art Cost?" so special?

I describe my collection of texts as a kind of consumer protection primer. It is aimed at occasional buyers, serious collectors, but also gallerists and artists. There's nothing else like it.

How did you structure it?

The authors describe tangible and understandable criteria that help to better assess the value of a work of art. There are many theories and expert opinions, but why a work of art might be too cheap, too expensive, or even junk – that's something that hasn't really been covered yet. The concluding chapter by auctioneer Henrik Hanstein from Kunsthaus Lempertz brings all these aspects into focus and then also gives prices. For example, why a good Picasso can be so much more expensive than a weak one.

Your own contribution seems to advocate for intuitive decisions, quite contrary to Goethe's famous quote, "One sees only what one knows"...

I think that when evaluating art, you also have to rely on the fact that you can only see what you feel. The artwork must "speak" to you. All authors recommend that you constantly look and learn. Even if you sometimes can't see the forest for the trees, that subsides with time, and you see more clearly.

Nevertheless, you are now presenting a book that deals with legal aspects, statistics, questions of provenance, and art-historical classification. So, you can't completely rely on intuition after all?

Not entirely, of course. But I think that alongside cognitive art reception, one must leave plenty of room for intuitive experience. Only in this combination can the work-specific components of a piece be grasped, and ultimately its value assessed. To do this, you need to know what an original is, what might have been executed by an assistant, what the provenance is, what the condition of preservation is, its position within the oeuvre and art history. These are factors that significantly determine the value of a work.

You are knowledgeable about drawings and deal with them in your gallery. When you assess the quality of a sheet, what goes on in your mind, apart from spontaneous feeling?

I act as I recommend to readers: by examining a work for honesty and credibility, originality and innovation, intensity and evidence, and above all, by letting it affect me. Usually, if I'm unsure about a sheet, I'll hang it in a quiet corner of the gallery and keep looking at it. If it meets all criteria and still radiates its magic, its sensation, then it has won me over.

But that sounds complicated...

No, no. Let me give you an example. I've experienced an occasional buyer, who just wanted to buy a few drawings, selecting the best sheets with the exact same certainty an expert would have. I would claim that this happens in eight out of ten cases if you open your mind and let all your knowledge and learned information take a break.

Can your book prevent you from falling for the wrong thing?

Not at all. However, know-how makes you more cautious. The "consumer" can expect little help from art criticism. Because in the interconnected art world, public discussion is determined by those who also finance it. So, the appreciation of artworks and their pricing often remain – and not just for the layman – a mystery.

How do you shed light on this thicket?

My handbook functions like a spotlight. The authors, mostly practitioners such as lawyer Florian Merker, Christie's Zurich Managing Director Dirk Boll, Sotheby's Frankfurt provenance researcher Isabel von Klitzing, and Berlin conservator Daniela Baumbach, illuminate all essential value-relevant aspects that ultimately determine the market value of a work of art.

That sounds as if determining the value of a work of art is a lot of work...

It's practically a round-the-clock job. To make it easier, I published this book. I think it can be very helpful.

01.07.2011