Sasa Hanten-Schmidt: Play with Me [en]
Überschwänglich leben mit Kunst
How to Deal with a Collection

As an insider in the largely opaque art market, Sasa Hanten-Schmidt’s astute and entertaining reflections furnish us with profound insights into the process of collecting and the task of passing on a collection from one generation to the next. Working with art can give life a sense of discernment, rapture, and playful abundance – this is something to be rediscovered after decades of collecting as an investment and a proclivity for the prestige of the private museum. Play with Me paints a
picture of a vibrant art collection, of a life with and within art. The book is thus many things all at once: an object lesson in collecting behaviour and an autobiographical sketch, a carnivalesque tour through the sociotopes of the contemporary art world, a self-experiment, and – last but not least – a love story.
Sasa Hanten-Schmidt is a lawyer and an authority on contemporary visual art. She specializes in the appraisal of artists’ estates and collections. Her book Der Faktor Mensch: Wie gelingt der Generationsübergang mit Kunst? came out in 2019.