BerlinIt was the biggest attack on art in post-war German history. At the beginning of October, one or more perpetrators sprayed at least 63 ancient and other art objects in a total of four museum facilities of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK), including numerous Egyptian statues and sarcophagi as well as images of Greek gods. The weapon: an oily liquid, probably olive oil, as has since been announced.
As emerged from a detailed analysis, which was particularly requested by the Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters, the video recordings of several cameras from the respective houses had not been saved at the time of the crime. So far, so embarrassing. The cameras, so it was said in the report that emerged from the analysis, unfortunately “failed to go unnoticed”. As the Spiegel reported, however, Grütters’ own department had remarkably only rejected an application from the State Museums for infrastructure measures in August of this year.
The application asked for 1.3 million euros to improve security in museums. Grütters again argued that the SPK had not even spent 6.4 million euros in building maintenance funds from 2019. The foundation could not lack money. Observers of the debate suspected that Grütters, who was known to have previously called for the foundation to be broken up, was using the incident to increase pressure on the SPK.
The works owned by the federal government were not insured
A sensitive point in the discussion was the statement by the SPK that many of the damaged plants were not insured. This is generally not usual at the federal level. When asked by the Berliner Zeitung, Michael Kuhn, from the insurance broker group Kuhn & Bülow, which specializes in art, confirmed that in Germany it is normally only the municipalities who insure their holdings, not the federal and state museums. The reason, Kuhn suspects, is that appropriate insurance for such valuable objects is simply too expensive. However, the fact that municipal museums in Germany save on insurance for their permanent holdings can now be observed more and more frequently.
A prominent counterexample is the gold coin in the Bode Museum, which was stolen from the museum under spectacular circumstances in March 2017 and was probably melted down afterwards. “The gold coin was insured through us as a permanent loan,” says Kuhn. Today he is optimistic that his law firm will win the revision in the current proceedings.
In principle, his law firm would insure pretty much any form of art, from archaeological objects to the works of the old masters to contemporary art. “The question is always: who is the freight forwarder? How is it packaged? What is the means of transport? These are criteria that are important to us. ”Although the media usually only talk about the spectacular damage, the problem is usually not the restoration, but the depreciation of the art affected by the damage.
How high the damage will ultimately be in the event of the attack on Museum Island, and whether it will spark a discussion about the insurance practice in the art world, cannot yet be said.
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