On the occasion of its third annual members’ meeting, the Kunstverein soft power invited its members to make objects from their private collections available as loans for an exhibition. The invitation to the members illustrates how soft power aimed to approach this project: “What you consider a “work of art”, a part of your “collection” and “worthy of being exhibited” is entirely up to you.” The gesture of jointly compiling and presenting an, in its entirety fictitious, Private Collection, connects to discourses on value, interpretative authority, and canon formation in contemporary art. The tension between the art object as a calculable category of value on the one hand, and the subjectivity of its viewers on the other, reveals that any formation of a concept of art is inevitably a question of taste. In playful reference to – and in dissociation from – the profoundly bourgeois history of the organisational form “Kunstverein”, soft power gives its members the interpretive sovereignty to decide what the public, which an exhibition space produces as an institutionally legitimising framework, should get to see. Anonymized as a “collective collection”, the Private Collection reveals individual, rational as well as sentimental, often affectionate and sometimes complicated relationships to art and its (market) values. What is put on a pedestal, protected in a display vitrine, or framed, and by whom? To what extent does this gesture itself generate the value of the “art object”? 

Artists: Aline Lacroix & Yves Itzek, anonymous, Anthea Hamilton, Barbara Lenartz, Carolin Schnurrer, Charlotte Rohde (with trademarks designed by Tatjana Stürmer), Daniele Posinanti, Donna Volta Newmen, Edgar Calel, Eldad Arnon, Eva Rogmark Frostbrant, Hannah Kuhlmann, Hannah Sophie Dunkelberg, Hugo Bussi, Janna Ullrich, Frédéric Renner, Maximilian Rest, Laura Welker, Lena Platonos, Lisa Franz, Lukas Städler, Malte Mäsgen, Maria Knabe, Markus Jännti, Mirta Ángela Perdomini, Moritz, Olafur Eliasson, Osías Yanov, ravage ceramics, Sangun Ho, TDD, Tenki Hiramatsu, Thomas Merkel