Zilkens'
News Blog

Zilkens‘ News Blog 27 2025

If you are heading south this week and are still looking for a destination, Bad Gastein could be the place for you. Art:Bad Gastein is taking place in the former Grand Hotel Astoria. Organised by Positions – yes, the people behind the special exhibitions for works on paper and at the old Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, among other places. Nine galleries are exhibiting works by the artists they represent in rooms with a morbid charm. And you don't have to rush to see anything. During the week, it's only open from 4 p.m. onwards.

According to polls, the AfD – a rather troublesome party that only cares about democratic conventions when it suits them – has around 22% of voter support. Now a party that has only managed to secure just over 16% of the vote wants to ban the former. How foolish is that? Do they really believe that the voters of the right-wing nationalist rabble will be deterred by bans? Is democracy so weak that the forces that support it can no longer articulate themselves convincingly and can only maintain their influence through bans? ‘Only what is forbidden makes us hot’ – as Wolf Biermann already knew.

The AfD's proximity to Russia is a sure argument against it! Day after day, Putin and his henchmen attack Ukraine in violation of international law, destroying lives and cultural assets and positioning themselves against the countries in which we live. You cannot negotiate with a war criminal. Negotiations with Hitler were also abandoned after 1942 – but there are many who believe that a reliable outcome can be achieved in negotiations with a notorious liar and falsifier of history. It's like with Trump, where you never know what volte-face is coming next. Aleksandr Denic already made this clear with an installation in the Serbian pavilion at the last Biennale – only I didn't notice it there. Now it could be discovered again at the Volta in Basel and purchased for EUR 38,000 from the Bioskop Balkan gallery in Belgrade.

Ai Wei Wei will erect a sculpture in Kyiv this year, which will be displayed in a former Soviet exhibition hall. Ribbon, a non-profit organisation, is providing the funding.

In fact, Basel is said to have been not so bad for all the trade fairs there: this is what you hear when you talk to the various transport companies that organised and carried out the return transports. There were also some deals worth millions.

Digitalisation is being driven forward eagerly, making manual, simple tasks increasingly rare. They remain in the service sector, e.g. in restaurants or in agriculture as harvest workers. Strawberries from Germany are too expensive because of the minimum wage, we hear. In Indonesia, there are restaurants where you order via a QR code and the food is brought to you by a robot that flashes at you cheerfully – only the encouraging words are missing. Malls and airports are maintained by automatic cleaning machines and look so clean you could eat off the floor. No more chewing gum falls on the floor (because it costs money). Now the party mentioned at the beginning has made the minimum wage an election issue – it wants to take away its clientele's livelihood, packaged as ‘you'll get more money ...’. Fallacious reasoning – they won't get anything at all – the work will go where it is affordable. In Sudan, there are tea plantations where tea pickers receive the equivalent of approximately £2.60 for 120 kg of tea picked per day, or 2 pence per kilo. When the tea finally reaches the shops here, it costs £245 per kilo in Fair Trade shops. The proportion sounds unbalanced. Just like the increase of over 50% in a few years that the minimum wage has reached in Germany.

We will adapt to this and let interfaces for certificate creation be programmed...

A heatwave is sweeping across Europe – will you get through it unscathed?

The team at Zilkens Fine Art Insurance Broker GmbH in Cologne and Solothurn