Synopsis
My profile of Harald Falckenberg, which was the start of our friendship. Harald had earned a reputation for championing the unruly margins of contemporary art. But his Otto Mühl retrospective in Hamburg pushed even his own limits. For Falckenberg, whose collection often gravitated toward the forgotten and the feral, staging the show was less about endorsement - he didnt love Mühl's work - than about insisting that difficult art demands a place in the canon. No one I know has thought more deeply than Harald about the role and responsibility of the collector in the artworld.
