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Art Scene in Berlin 2011 - 2012

 

 

The changes in the art scene of Berlin 2011-12

 

 

 

 

Changes in the art scene of Berlin 2011-12 

The new Berlin with its many new art galleries has to be experienced. They make up for a tremendous change in the art scene of Berlin. 

It is said that the presence of these new art galleries evokes long needed changes. Above all, it is claimed that they bring with them a much needed professionalisation within the art scene. For too long, so it seems, Berlin galleries and artists were on a kind of collison course with nothing as outcome, insofar anything goes! Naturally, if that did not help to provoke someone by pretending to be most radical when really Conservative to the bone, then some nude was thrown into the ring, so to speak, just to give some spice to the painting and to make sure on behalf of the gallerist that the buyers would come forth. It was cynical seductive reasoning at its best and meant a dangerous coalition of half hearted makers and seekers of the arts.

Now the new changes may leave the artist himself behind or at best on the side lines. Indeed, the new galleries can make the artist become silent i.e. someone who has not much to say within this new power game. This is because gallery owners and curators begin to assume more power as to what goes, what not. 

Some do it with great love, others with a distinct honesty and devotion while still other galleries are following a strict concept and speak about keeping a stable of artists very much like someone owning a few race horses. The pun of the word 'stable' should not be ignored especially when the times become most unstable. 

The arts may end up doing in a most natural way what they have been doing all along, namely earning their living in and through the gallery business. Hence from being at first an employee to becoming yourself a gallery owner is sometimes not such a far step as it may seem to the outsider. Even and maybe more so there is being asked for in this domain of business quite the entrepreneurial spirit. 

One more thing needs to be said at the outset. In Berlin, most of the galleries are to be found in the backyard where there used to exist in the past factories. Long abandoned, they offer today tremendous spaces. They can let artists imagine many more things than what gallery owners and curators can conceive and are willing to try out. But even while seeking the artist as subject to be identified within this gallery business, there remains still the question posed by Herbert Distel, namely if artists really know how to make use of space?

Hatto Fischer 
Berlin, Nov. 2011/ Athens, January 2012

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