HIER KOMMT DER INVESTOR …

Investment has replaced the old-fashioned bankbook. Even the petit bourgeoisie, who generally wants for nothing, has hopped on the investment bandwagon — not just in real estate. Whether small investors or venture capitalists, whether direct investments, funds, or crowdinvesting — there are ever larger amounts of capital pouring into the urban housing markets and causing land, property, and rental prices to rise. Are there also critical voices from architecture or the arts? Certainly. Their emergence was anything but recent: In the 1970s, political artists like Hans Haacke and Klaus Staek addressed real estate speculation and the exploitation of the majority through the ownership of a minority with great efficiency.
This book commemorates forgotten artistic works and presents new ones with accompanying texts by Anita Aigner, Gabu Heindl & Drehli Robnik, Wolfgang Kemp, Franz Krähenbühl, Andre Krammer, Reinhard Kreissl, and Isabelle Meiffert. Whether the contributions are academic or essayistic, artistically performative or conceptual — what they share in common is that they do not take the “new normal” of real estate investment for granted and confront the prevailing "expertise of investors" with a critical "counterexpertise."