Interview with Andreas E. Lohaus, co-director of “art.fair – International Fair for Twenty-first Century Art” in Cologne, Germany. In the year 2003 art.fair started as a complementary art fair parallel to, and in cooperation with Art Cologne. The fair has been initiated by Walter M. Gehlen and Andreas E. Lohaus. Interview: Patricia Blasco for Artfacts.Net and Vernissage TV. Art.fair, Cologne, November 1, 2006. Interview and impressions from the opening.
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CreativityTranscript
00:00 This is an interview of Barclays Smith and Berisage TV with Andreas Lohaus, director of Artworld.
00:07 How did you come to the Artworld?
00:10 It was a great ambition to go to the Artworld because we are very much interested in art.
00:16 We are not gallery owners or we are not artists or anything like that.
00:20 We come from the management and we were very open with this.
00:24 We always said yes, we do management, that means we can organize, we can do marketing.
00:31 And what's the thing concerning art, we do have our consultants.
00:37 How was born the idea of Artfair? What was the concept behind it?
00:43 And what has changed from the original premises?
00:47 The idea of the Artfair, the international fair for contemporary art in Cologne was to bring art to the people.
00:54 To bring down the barriers to normal Artfairs with just white walls and paintings on it.
01:00 We said, yeah, let's make an event.
01:02 Of course there must be very good exclusive and quality art in the fair,
01:07 but there must be something around like parties, like performances, like sound art and everything.
01:14 And that was the concept.
01:16 Artfair is one of the two events whose number of visitors grew the most.
01:21 Artfair will be held in spring, Artfair remains at the current date.
01:25 What do you expect to happen then? Do you think you will maintain this growth?
01:30 Actually, we are doing now the interview because this is René Sarstiwau.
01:35 I'm in the situation that we close down the main hall because we do have too much visitors.
01:41 We do have traffic jams which are reaching the main city.
01:46 We are happy about it, on the other hand we are a little bit sorry that a lot of visitors can't visit us.
01:52 And yeah, the Artfair is dynamic from the beginning and we are expecting of course more visitors.
01:58 And we are very happy that very good collectors are coming to the Artfair.
02:02 Because they want to see actual art.
02:05 They want to see really contemporary art on a high exclusive level.
02:10 What are the plans for the future?
02:12 For the time being you organize Artfair and you will organize this year.
02:16 Would you like to have fairs in more cities, in Germany or internationally?
02:20 Our plans for the future is, and this will be a bigger step,
02:24 that next year the Art Cologne will grow into a spring and we will stay in autumn.
02:30 So we will be the main fair here in Cologne.
02:33 And we have the concept to have really artists after the year 1960 born and art in the 21st century.
02:40 And the plan is not to go in other cities.
02:43 No, we concentrate on the German market.
02:45 We are very happy here and we will do one year after another hopefully a better Artfair.
02:51 Are you going to survive with so many fairs for contemporary art nowadays?
02:56 What makes Artfair different?
02:59 We don't think that there is a struggle for Artfairs or collectors or everything.
03:04 We see that there is a big boom for collecting art, for buying art, for buying contemporary art.
03:10 So there will be more space for more Artfairs.
03:13 And we do have a lot of visitors and we are very successful.
03:18 What is the role of internet in the art world?
03:22 Is the transparency provided by internet good for the art market?
03:26 For example with artist rankings or fair rankings?
03:28 I am very happy about this question from Vanessa Stifbau.
03:32 Because we think that the internet is a very important place to show art.
03:36 Sometimes not to buy art but to inform about art.
03:39 And when you go to our website www.rt-frer.de
03:46 you will see that we have an online catalogue, that we have a connection to Artfacts.net
03:51 and that we have even a blog of galleries who write every day what is happening on the Artfair.
03:58 So we think that the internet is a very important thing to inform people about art, to inform people about Artfairs.
04:05 And I am sure that the new generation will use it more and more.
04:09 Do you have a personal motto?
04:11 Yes, we do have. Our motto for this year is "To live art".
04:15 Thank you very much.