Dr Markus Krall
@Markus_Krall
August 13
Why should the so-called “creators of culture” receive any tax money at all?
I don’t care which side they’re on.
They should prove themselves in the market and produce things for which someone is willing to pay voluntarily. That’s it.
“Si non in nugis publicis sermonem profudisses,
peritus rei oeconomicae mansisses.” ¹
Finished.
Dr Markus Krall, the self-appointed expert on absolutely everything —
therefore also, of course, on art.
And on the market. Has spoken.
This is, without doubt, the six-hundred-and-second banally radical statement of this kind that I have had to acknowledge during my professional life.
Yet this peculiar, power-driven, aesthetically hegemonic, compulsively megalomaniac statement by yet another German aesthetic non-doer (FN) should, this time, not remain without comment.
Because what Dr Markus Krall is actually trying to tell us here (as hundreds before him have done) is that he, the great dignitary, social-media influencer, and gold dealer — the “eternal banker,” as he calls himself — is the supposed “customer-king” of all lazy, unproductive, antisocial and economically ignorant, left-green-infected would-be artists.
That he, fundamentally (and without ever moving a finger, without taking any risk, and without ever investing even a single cent in the creation of art), nevertheless believes himself to be the one who, by virtue of his self-proclaimed royal status within our market economy, ultimately decides what art is — and who is an artist.
Simply by waving, for a change, a Degussa gold bar (instead of the usual paper money) in front of those who are currently occupied with entirely different matters — and then, finally, as so many before him, feeling the irresistible need to inform the artist that if no one (meaning above all: no ex-banker) buys his laborious smears, then, “dear artist” — you will simply have to do something else.
So. Well. Once again, Mr Krall has explained everything to us.
Now we know where the hare runs.
And for the six-hundred-and-second time, this unsolicited lecture is not even meant as a basis for discussion.
Because to this little, banally populist sermon, there should, of course, never be any bold, impertinent “but.”
Where do we live, after all?
Least of all when it comes to art.
Least of all from any failed artists.
For this is so — because Krall says it is so.
Hence: universally valid. Finished.
2. The Market Misunderstanding
The problem with these market-banal, art-hegemonic and widely spread power-political misunderstandings in dealing with art is the following:
All the premises of our very talkative Twitter-Philistine are fundamentally wrong.
Allow me to explain:
1.
All right — and this thought may indeed be extremely difficult to convey to someone like Dr Markus Krall, who lives at the very centre of his own self-importance — but the “value” of these Krall-style, market-radical statements about art can actually be expressed with mathematical precision.
You would only need, Mr Krall, to exercise your imagination for a brief moment — which, of course, will be difficult, since you seem to lack all capacity for empathy — but still, please try to imagine the following:
You create, at your own expense, let us say, twelve oil paintings a year.
They stand there, unseen and unphotographed, in your studio.
And every third day some presumptuous German passes by to deliver, unsolicited and full of self-importance, the grand and solemn message that we live in a market economy, and that you — as an “artist” — if no one buys your smears, must certainly do something else.
And so on. Case closed.
The mathematically striking point — the other perspective, the artist’s view of all this — is, however, the following:
At exactly the same moment, eighty-four million Germans are likewise not buying a single painting from me — primarily because they do not even know that these paintings exist.
Your self-righteous, customer-royal opinion of yourself in this whole art-market game, as a kind of kingly would-be-customer and final-boss art-critic, therefore has roughly the value of one eighty-four-millionth.
Or, to put it even more clearly:
The value of your personal opinion on the subject of contemporary, living art and painting in Germany tends, from the artist’s point of view, almost exactly towards zero.
I could also calculate the ratio for all of Europe
(in view of inquiries from galleries in London, Paris, Barcelona, Munich and Poland).
You will now, of course, mutter to yourself that this would mean we had eighty-four million kings in Germany — and a few antisocial, lazy, failed service providers who, in their soot-stained basement quarters in Downton Abbey, must work without pay on the cultural supply for the royal-economic banker elite, in order to fulfil the highest expectations that you, King Krall, place upon this free cultural service.
But if eighty-four million people in your small economic banker world were theoretically all my imaginary agenda-lordly kings, then you yourself would no longer be anything special.
Perhaps only another loud retiree with cultural-political and neurotic fantasies of omnipotence.
3. Freedom, Power, and the False Market Logic
Moreover, there are a few additional problems, Mr Dr Krall:
First, I no longer exhibit in Germany — nor in Switzerland, for that matter — although, as I mentioned, enquiries from galleries (also from Switzerland and from the centre of Munich) continue to reach me.
Second, I am not aware of having entered into any contractual service obligations with you in particular.
And — by the way — doing business with you is not something I actually wish to do.
To my knowledge we are not friends either.
Which is why I must here and now completely reject your arbitrary, hegemonial, royal claim as “customer” over all artists in general, and over me and my work in particular.
You are neither my customer, nor my “king.”
And I most certainly owe you nothing.
(All right? Krall?)
Especially since the rules of a common VW forced-labour camp during the Nazi era — “you will now break stones here, otherwise, on the order of Dr Markus Krall, Andreas Nahles, Peer Steinbrück, Kai Wegner, Klaus Wowereit, the District Court of Maulbronn and the Borough Office of Kreuzberg/Friedrichshain, there will be no more food” — these rules, used to abolish free art in a free country with a liberal constitution in the name of the predator-capitalist version of the market economy, as an “alternative” to the concept of a social market economy — these rules you and others constantly demand would only function, if one thinks it through, under certain conditions:
-
If there were a high-voltage fence or a prison wall around us both, Mr Krall; or
-
If a wall around the entire country could actually prevent academically trained professionals like myself from simply leaving; or
-
If, in your small, limited banker’s world — and in this Schröder-era VW-agenda wonderland — every single artist were in fact precarious and penniless.
And if every artist were therefore so deeply impressed by your many Degussa gold bars that he would sell you, the expert of pure radical market economics, a pleasant decorative picture for your wife for the price of an apple or an ice cream — a picture into which he may have previously invested around 2,000 euros.
Simply because, in the Krallian worldview, that is how the market economy supposedly works.
For various reasons that are none of your concern, however, I am not without means.
Which means: I am, in fact, under no obligation, Mr King Krall.
I do not even have to show you my paintings — if I choose not to.
I know bankers, and also bank customers (true story)
who have been waiting in Bietigheim-Bissingen for over twenty years for the destitute artist finally to appear at their door.
(Because that, apparently, is how the market economy works …)
So please keep your hands off my property.
You may, perhaps, be something quite fascinating — namely a conservative German ex-banker, and at the same time a kind of “whistle-blower” (that is rather amusing) — who has nevertheless decided, like Waldorf and Statler from The Muppet Show, to add his comment from the balcony every single day on every conceivable political topic on Twitter.
But that, precisely, is the core problem of this entire generation:
They truly believe they have already solved and settled all questions of art, culture, and economics.
On the political left, at some point someone will ask whether I took part in the really big and important demonstrations of 1968 — and when I must quietly admit: “No, because I was only one year old then” — mockery and derision are, of course, immediate.
And again, there is (naturally, once more) no further basis for discussion.
Case closed.
(And, friends, since “the left” always ends up stealing from the creatives, and the conservatives later always steal from the left, we are, in a way, simply moving in circles here, aren’t we?)
4. Culture, Responsibility, and What Remains
Curiously, in the larger cities of Germany — Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt and so on — there exist publicly funded so-called universities of the arts.
And these, of course, cost a great deal of money, Mr King Krall.
Have you — especially as an academic — ever reflected on why a city such as Berlin, a major cultural metropolis, maintains such institutions?
(Hint: since reunification, Berlin has had everything twice over.)
Perhaps because a city like Berlin, which lives from tourism, naturally has an interest not only in maintaining a vibrant art and club scene, but — and this I explain best to people of your kind with a football metaphor — because there should also be a few artists who play in the national league.
That is, artists whose works people from all over the world travel to see in person — and who then spend their money in this cultural capital.
An extraordinary idea, isn’t it?
And this, I am convinced, is only possible if one has actually been trained for it.
And I know this because I was trained for it — and because I carry this knowledge within me even when I am once again meant to be starved out.
So now my question to you, Mr Dr Krall — the socially irresponsible ex-banker who never wished to assume any real social responsibility, who has always stood safely at the side, and who has by now completely lost control of his critical pen — although taxpayers also financed your university studies:
Why should anyone be foolish enough to subsidise the cultural sphere in Berlin, or in Germany as a whole, entirely on their own for twenty years — and then, after all the insults, slanders and public calls for deprivation (“starve them out” — as recently declared by the governing mayor of Berlin), still continue to represent Berlin culturally abroad?
Why should someone who, like me, has paid taxes and contributions to unemployment insurance for twenty years be branded as an antisocial, lazy parasite — and yet be expected to provide you in Switzerland, or all those SPD-CDU cultural parasites in the capital, with free access to art?
(Or with “cultural legitimacy.”)
And even offer you a glass of champagne?
Please answer me this question, Mr King Krall — why should I offer you a glass of champagne?
Because you proclaim yourself king and rebrand this entire corrupt SPD-agenda cultural parasitism as “pure market economy”?
As the invisible hand that hands you the champagne?
No, no — don’t worry. You and your banker friends have already won, Mr Krall.
That is not the point.
Not in the sense that there is no longer any market-capable art,
but in this sense:
As a “creator of culture,” I now simply choose my audience myself within our free Western world.
There are other cultural metropolises. Competition keeps the market alive.
And so, I simply exhibit elsewhere.
And then I also pay my taxes elsewhere.
No one needs Berlin.
Admittedly, one must also note here, as a warning, that even the economic logic of Berlin’s tourism industry — as its key factor and main source of income — and the notion of culture as a “soft location factor,” in truth no longer penetrates the minds of today’s capital-city bankers of the Landesbank, nor of the bureaucrats and jurists in the administration.
For these figures have long ceased to care about any of it.
Because they sit so close to the trough of freshly printed paper money that the only thrill left for them is to wave those notes, with supreme arrogance, before the faces of everyone else — entrepreneurs, founders, artists, the self-employed — even in a city growing poorer by the day.
Now, you have chosen Switzerland
(and I, London).
But I wonder whether that was really such a wise decision — especially for a gold bug to settle precisely there.
After all, the Swiss Army’s 2013 manoeuvre simulated a French invasion following an economic crash…
By now, the small country of Switzerland, given the current price of gold, sits upon a gigantic treasure, while one mafia boss seizes the natural resources of Ukraine and another eyes Greenland for himself.
We shall all see, in due course, how matters unfold with customs duties, with the dollar, and with the remaining colourful pieces of printed paper.
A note to Krall fans (keyword: “gold ban”):
You might wish to examine the historical development of oil paintings throughout the entire past century — despite multiple wars, despite hyperinflation, and despite countless currency reforms.
Because:
Monetary systems come and go,
art remains.
Hasta la vista.
¹ “Si non in nugis publicis sermonem profudisses, peritus rei oeconomicae mansisses.”
— Albertus Lascaux (2025), in commentatione satyrica adversus M. Krall, cf. Blog.crit.artis 13 VIII 2025.