Director of Vienna’s Albertina Museum: ‘What is happening right now in the art market is completely obscene’

Klaus Albrecht Schröder, director of the Albertina in Vienna, on August 30, 2017, in Vienna. CHRISTOPHER MAVRIC

Klaus Albrecht Schröder, director of the Albertina in Vienna, Austria (or should we say the Albertinas, ever since the opening of a space devoted to modern art in a nearby building?), has made his visitors accustomed to prestigious exhibitions.

Currently, there are two: One is devoted to Jean-Michel Basquiat, with 50 works, paintings and drawings revisiting the dazzling career of the American artist, who died of an overdose at the age of 27, through specific themes: racism and discrimination, drawing as performance, music and New York nightlife, his friendship with Andy Warhol and his artistic posterity.

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The other deals with abstract expressionism following the Second World War, not only in the United States, with paintings by Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, but also elsewhere in Europe, in France with Georges Mathieu and Pierre Soulages, in Germany with Ernst Wilhelm Nay and in Austria with Maria Lassnig and Arnulf Rainer.

Both exhibitions are well presented, intelligently designed and have all the makings of what are now called blockbusters, exhibitions with big names likely to draw crowds, which is in fact the case here. Except that for the Albertina, and no doubt for many other public museums around the world, as Mr. Schröder explained, this is the end.

With names like Pollock, Rothko and Basquiat, are you not worried about the insurance premiums?

I would have been very worried if we had to organize these exhibitions now: The incredible results of the sale of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s collection [$1.62 billion, or €1.59 billion, at the end of two days of auctions at Christie’s in New York, on November 9 and 10] will change a lot of things for museums. I shouldn’t say this, but to me, what’s happening right now in the art market is completely obscene. People have lost their minds.

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Prices today have nothing to do with the quality of the works or their importance from an art history perspective. It has an impact on all segments, including the most contemporary. I recently visited the studio of a young Ghanaian artist based in Vienna, and I asked him the price of a work. He said, “20,000, no 40,000, no 200,000.” I thought, “My God, next month it will be auctioned for 700,000!” Because it ticks all the boxes of what is currently expected in terms of diversity.

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Send feedback Is this also the case for female artists?

In our abstract expressionism show, we have paintings by Jackson Pollock that are estimated at over $100 million. Those of his widow, Lee Krasner, which I think are of the same quality, are at much more reasonable insurance values because she is a woman and art history has long been male dominated. But this is also becoming a criterion of value today: 10 years ago, you could buy a Joan Mitchell masterpiece for $500,000. Today, it is more like $5 to 15 million.

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