NEW ENERGIES – WHAT HOLDS IN THE END

A retrospective on the E.ON Foundation Art Talks & Walks at ART Düsseldorf.

Art fairs are places of encounter. They bring galleries, artists, collectors, and institutions together. At the same time, they are places where the questions of our time come into sharp focus. With the E.ON Foundation Art Talks & Walks, ART Düsseldorf became a platform for exchange, perspectives, and social dialogue for three days.

Under the title New Energies, the programme was dedicated to topics that move art and society alike: the social responsibility of art and culture, Europe as a shared cultural space of experience, and the challenges of transformation and sustainability within the art system.

The three contributions below take up these conversations — not as minutes, but as approaches. They carry forward the central ideas of the discussions and make visible what impulses emerged from the conversations.

The programme was made possible by the E.ON Foundation. Talks and thematically curated Art Walks directly connected social questions with the artistic positions presented at the fair and made dialogue tangible right in front of the works.

Because an art fair is more than a marketplace. It is a place where ideas are born, positions meet, and new perspectives are opened. The E.ON Foundation Art Talks & Walks see themselves as a contribution to this dialogue — beyond the days of the fair as well.

On Sunday, ART Düsseldorf took stock — not of sales, but of what lies behind them: energy, transport, logistics, and the question of what infrastructure makes an art fair possible in the first place.

The room fills slowly at first. It is the last talk of the weekend, and the fact that the rows are not full is itself a finding: people are outside, in the aisles, with the art. Walter Gehlen, director of Art Düsseldorf, sits on the podium and gives the afternoon its motto early on. “Energy,” he says, has very many dimensions. After two days in which the word stood for intellectual and political force, today it means the literal: electricity, heat, emissions, transport kilometres. On its final day, the fair is negotiated as what it also is: a physical body.

Gehlen names the contradiction from which the entire afternoon lives, without preamble: goods hang on the walls — strictly speaking, this is a marketplace. And yet that does not do justice to the subject, because what is at stake is substantive work. Curated themes from “Panic Attack” to “Ojigi,” the Japanese concept for respect and bowing — “highly virulent,” as he puts it, when one looks across the Atlantic, where such values are currently being tweeted away. Goods and discourse, body and mind: the fair is both at once, and the reckoning consists in not resolving that.

The most illuminating moment comes where things get most concrete. Gehlen tells of the halogen lamps from earlier editions, notorious for their efficiency — essentially heaters that produce light as a side effect. The fair switched to LED, saved enormous amounts of electricity, and discovered that the warmth the old lamps had given off now had to be supplied with gas. What was saved on one side reappeared on the other. It is the perfect small parable for the entire sustainability debate: one lever rarely stands alone.

Jacob Bilabel, who heads the federal government’s central Green Culture contact point, looks at exactly such levers professionally. What interests him is not what hangs on the walls — that is a private matter, he says dryly — but the “operating system”: transport, storage, lighting, catering. And he delivers the sentence that sticks. The notorious climatic “corridors” within which artworks must be transported — the narrow tolerances for temperature and humidity that make every transport more expensive — are often not a physical necessity at all. They come from the insurers. And when asked whether they are really needed, the answer is surprisingly often: not for all works. An entire cost block in the industry, the punchline goes, rests on a requirement that nobody has ever challenged.

Thomas G. Schneider, managing director of Hasenkamp and one of Central Europe’s major art logistics companies, can spell this out. He speaks of a crate thirty years old that has “travelled around the globe more” than anyone in the room. Good crates are not sold, he says, but rented. At a unit cost of around 10,000 euros, that pays off over decades, and what travels for thirty years is ultimately more sustainable than any new purchase. His favourite absurdity: museums often order empty crates in advance, a day before the actual transport. A climate-controlled truck drives empty crates through a climate-controlled loading dock into a climate-controlled building, where they wait for 24 hours. It is never necessary; a small Bluetooth tracker proves that the conditions are already fine. It is done anyway, because it has always been done that way.

On one question, however, the paths diverge openly on the podium. Schneider, who at Hasenkamp has operated CO₂-free warehouses with geothermal energy for over twenty years — out of economic conviction, not by instruction — warns uncompromisingly: “I caution against regulating anything through legislation. That is madness.” People have common sense; innovation arises from freedom, not from regulation. Bilabel disagrees just as clearly, and he does so without smoothing over the conflict: “The state must regulate, it must create a framework. I would never sit on a podium and say we are no longer allowed to regulate at all.” Between the entrepreneur defending freedom and the federal commissioner demanding a framework, a genuine difference remains standing — and it speaks well of the talk that nobody forces it into a compromise.

Stephan Muschick of the E.ON Foundation — not E.ON, as he clarifies, but the Foundation, a small but crucial distinction — sits between the positions and finds the interesting territory exactly there: the art world is a microcosm in which the great questions of the energy transition can be studied as if under a magnifying glass. No business case, no transformation — that is the sober core of his optimism.

And technology? Gehlen remains measured. The art world is a “people’s business” — relationships, networks, long-standing trust. AI provides relief; a chatbot now answers 150 visitor questions a day about opening hours and vegan catering, freeing up time for the actual work, the personal kind. But he does not see an AI artist: an artist is someone who sends out the agent, not the sub-agent. From a Hasenkamp workshop comes the phrase that best sums up the afternoon — “Power of the Real.” However good virtual tours become, people still want to travel to Paris, hear the floor creak, stand beside the work.

How true that is becomes clear at the end through an anecdote. Two days before Easter, the fair’s freight forwarder reported total failure — fifteen articulated lorries carrying walls had to get from Cologne to Düsseldorf, and no logistics company between Hamburg and Switzerland had a truck free. Until Gehlen called Thomas. He didn’t have the capacity either, but through his personal contacts he found a haulier who prioritised the shipment. “That’s why we’re sitting here.” The whole reckoning in one sentence: in the end, it is not the system that holds. In the end, it is the phone call.