Tulipmania 2002
In 17th Century the first crash was happened named Tulipmania at the stock exchange in Holland. The Artist Herbert Stolz and Jürgen Huber created two monumental pictures to this historic and actual topic in our first exhibition of Innovative Biotechnology and Art.
Tulipmania - The Art: With the Tulips, the artists demonstrate that mankind has a “natural” need to change things, play with them and to hope for a realistic or possible optimization of those things. Over the centuries art has always done this, as is the case with biotechnology. The scientific, modern survey of biology began with Mendel's initially ridiculed experiments which mirrors perhaps Goya and his “Free Art” which also initially suffered ridicule. However, whereas artists are generally allowed to do as they please, biotechnologist s have to withstand stronger ethical scepticism.
The Artists: Jürgen Huber und Herbert Stolz bought a bouquet of tulips, photographed it, then painted it, finally the artificial “interpreted tulips”, using paint, paint brush, canvas were superimposed onto the photographed realistic image of the tulips with a computer.
The Result: Two translucent variations of the tulip bouquet, which shine like over-dimensional slides and are being exhibited up in the atrium "heavens" of BioPark Regensburg GmbH, each 10 by 10 meters large.
The History: In 17th Century Holland, tulips led to the first stock market crash of the modern age. Between the summer of 1633 and February of 1637 many upstanding citizens were completely mad about tulip bulbs. This led to the unassuming bulb being valued at from ten to a hundred times its weight in gold. In 1630, 1000 different types of tulips had already been recorded. At that time, no one could have known that the beautiful marbled petals were a result of the mosaic virus, which had infected the plants. Even so, the prices ceased to increase. The investors who owned stock in the tulip trade panicked and felt it necessary to sell off their shares as quickly as possible. The prices deflated. Florists, who on paper where fantastically rich, lost their entire financial existence overnight.
