An article in this week’s edition of Spiegel, my weekly dose of mainstream german news discourse, brought me to the website of art matters, a company that offers art consulting mostly for institutions. The founder of the company is Dr. Stefan Shaw, a guy with a BCG background whose business seems to be the “decorative concept”: art has to operate as a “catalyst” instead of being an “end in itself”.

The first thing I came across on their home page was of course a counter-statement to the article I had just read. The article deals with Ekkeland Götze’s project of collecting soil from territories of concentration camps and other holocaust sites and use it for producing soil prints. 26 “Terragrafien” will be permanently exhibited in the new synagog / parish hall of the jewish community in Munich. Critical Spiegel articles and counter-statements were probably exactly the kind of publicity they wanted to avoid by hiring an art consultant. Bien joué!

How come nobody saw the explosive mix an esoteric artist and a sleazy BCG veteran form when they team up? A competent consultant should have told them that Götze’s premier degré use of the “aura” of soil reveals a complete lack of consciousness of 20th century art discourse and is certainly not an adequate memorial installation in a synagog or a parish hall, nor anywhere else. One should also think that the parish would take a decision like that in a democratic process instead of hiring some obscure expert to tell them what the appropriate way to remember is.