A Conversation with Werner Kramarsky

WK: No, they don’t get anything. As a matter of fact, most of the people who buy that stuff take a tax deduction, which they shouldn’t do.

CR: Right, right. That’s tax law that artists only get the value of the material for the work.

WK: Well, we hope that’ll change soon.

CR: Yes. We hope. Well, that’s one of the reasons Artists Space, which is my former employer, adamantly refuses to do auctions because they don’t want to take work from artists.

WK: In all the times that I’ve done exhibitions, when I did exhibitions, we never got between the artist and the collector. If somebody wanted to buy something that was in the show, we sent them to the artist and let them make their own deal or sent them to the dealer that at that point represented the artist because sometimes that happened. I, much to the chagrin of many of my friends, also have good words for the dealers, because without them how would the artist’s get their work into the world?

CR: I’m interested in that notion of how things are made. I’m coming back to this point because one of the credos I grew up, something that was sort of said around the kitchen table growing up, was what Franz Meyer, the former director of the Kunstmuseum Basel said, who claimed that you always only really understand the artists of your generation. Which, in his case, was already somewhat wrong because most of the artists that he claimed to be his generation were about twenty years his junior. But it just happened to be because he came to the art world a little later being a lawyer by training. I guess my question goes to understanding the social circumstances out of which you came to collect art. What exactly was it about the processes, about the working methods, that drew you to this kind of material? Was there something about that relationship between a proclaimed rationality and irrationality? Or do you have a sense of what it is about the making of these works that sort of immediately draws you in?