Curate passionately, collect artfully: The Inciting Passion Line-up of VIENNA ART WEEK 2023

On a multifaceted afternoon, protagonists from the international art world gave insights into their working methods for the VIENNA ART WEEK and shared their knowledge and enthusiasm in line with this year’s motto “Inciting Passion”. Moderated by Robert Punkenhofer, Artistic Director of VIENNA ART WEEK, two panel discussions offered an exciting look behind the scenes of the art world and made the passion for art of all the speakers tangible.

First, the panel “The passion of curating” dealt with the curatorial practice, which as a creative act is closely intertwined with the creation and mediation of art and culture. Soyeon Ahn, Artistic Director of Atelier Hermès in Seoul/Korea, presented her curatorial practice with a focus on young Korean artists and spoke about past projects close to her heart, such as the first Korean pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The independent curator from Paris Valentina Peri presented her curatorial work in the context of digital art, with a special focus on love and dating in the digital age, and confessed her personal passion – the opening of a “Museum of Dating”. Noam Segal, who works as LG Electronics Associate Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in NYC/US, focuses her curatorial work on the interaction between human and machine and the associated ethical, political and artistic challenges. With different emphases and backgrounds, all three curators ultimately focus on communicating with society through art.

The second panel entitled “The passion of collecting” provided different perspectives on collecting and the art market. The Austrian gallery owner Ursula Krinzinger gave personal insights into her own passion for art and her wealth of experience as the founder of one of the country’s most renowned galleries. She spoke about the changing reception of feminist art in the art market and the importance of international art fairs, especially in the context of Austrian galleries. Konrad Breznik, COO of the Swiss gallery Hauser + Wirth, shared his experience of the necessity of an analog art experience – the digital viewing of artworks cannot replace the experience in the gallery. For this reason, his gallery is focusing on its presence in many new locations, particularly after the pandemic, such as the USA, the UK, Switzerland, Spain, France and Hong Kong. In her overview of current trends, Lindsay Dewar, Head of Analytics at London-based ArtTactic, noted that the sales figures for works by female artists have risen sharply since 2019. One example of this would be the US painter Julie Mehretu. Large collections in particular seem to want to set an example in terms of equality and diversity. Lukas Amacher, artistic director of the 1OF1 Collection, one of the world’s leading NFT-supported collections for digital art, explained that collecting however is no longer a purely analog activity and that digital works are finding their way into collections.

A blog entry in collaboration with Paula Marschalek – Marschalek Art Management