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.

As an art association (“Kunstverein”), soft power follows the long tradition of an institutional model that has the potential to act as a forum for self-organisation and the democratisation of contemporary cultural production. Kunstvereins – as associations in private sponsorship, often at least partially financed by their members – like to position themselves as relatively autonomous from political or economic interests, and thus distance themselves from public institutions or the art market. Yet, since the emergence of these private, aristocratic/upper middle class initiatives in the early 19th century, such a positioning presupposed one thing above all: the wealth and public influence of their members.

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”?

With this project, soft power continues its approach of integrating the annual members' meeting (the “Mitgliederversammlung”, a bureaucratic obligatory event of the Kunstverein culture) into its artistic programming. soft power aims not only to create productive exchange among the members, but also to regard the Kunstverein as a public space in which – not without self-criticism and irony – an active, self-organised and critical engagement with contemporary art and the conditions of its production, reception and ownership can take place.