Vienna letter

ArtForum, Dec, 1993 by Georg Schollhammer

Vienna suddenly seems quieter than it has been for some time. Curator Kasper Konig has gone back to his job as director of Frankfurt's Stadel school, and his Swiss colleague Hans-Ulrich Obrist has taken up a project in Paris; "Der zerbrochene Spiegel" (The broken mirror), the show they came here to produce, has finally come down, after months of complaints about its failure to realize the bold new claims it made about painting. At the same time, the dealers who spent much of the year attacking the selection of foreigners Andrea Fraser and Christian Philipp Muller for the Austrian pavilion of the Venice Biennale have stopped quibbling, faced with the more pressing struggle just to stay open. Perhaps the most ominous reaction to the dismal current market is that of pioneering contemporary-art dealer Peter Pakesch: after 12 years in business he has closed both of his galleries to deal privately.

Even the wave of art-world visitors from abroad seems to have waned. For two years curators Robert Fleck and Cathrin Pichler, working as advisers to Rudolf Scholten, the government's minister of education, invited European and American curators, critics, and artists here in an attempt to infuse the state's sagging cultural structure with new ideas. But their terms will be over soon and a successor is yet to be named. Meanwhile, recession has even caught up with the state-run Austrian Airlines, which can no longer afford to dole out free plane tickets for the program.

So the Viennese art world is focusing once again on its principal anxieties, its long-standing structural weaknesses. Since Austria has no viable private-patronage system, no developed university programs in modern art history or criticism, and few collectors, it is the government that provides the foundation for the country's art world. Now that the state is facing an economic crisis, it is increasingly less eager to subsidize an already dependent art market.

The Austrian state understood early on that in the modern world economy its role would be to subsidize nearly every area of the market, from agriculture to industry, to keep the country internationally competitive. But its art policy remained bound to a feudal idea of culture. In the early '70s this seemed as if it might change, with the supposedly liberal policies advanced under Chancellor Bruno Kreisky. But Austria was unwilling to relinquish the ideological principle of Social Democratic cultural policy: the notion that the state had to control culture, in a kind of enlightened absolutism, with a network of commissions, stipends, prizes, and purchases. Nor did it recognize the need to establish modern, market-oriented, and media structures if an active "art life" was to be maintained. It is only now, with the opening of the East, and with Austria's pursuit of closer ties with the European Community, that Vienna's potential as a strategic cultural relay station between East and West might be realized.

The struggle to modernize Vienna's art world goes well beyond that world's own small, exclusive milieu. The battles extend to the print and electronic media, which are closely tied to the state, so closely, in fact, as to be unique in Europe. In 1946, Austria had 33 daily newspapers with a net circulation of 2.5 million. Now, half as many newspapers have a net circulation of about 3 million. Until recently, a single paper, the right-wing tabloid Kronenzeitung, captured half of those readers. Quality papers like the conservative Catholic Die Presse, or the liberal Der Standard, teeter on the edge of survival. If cable TV and satellite dishes, which receive foreign stations, hadn't been installed privately in the past few years, Austrians would still have to be content with two television stations, both state-run, which enjoy a monopoly and are subject to meddling from the political parties. The country publishes not a single art magazine of international interest.

Vienna's most powerful culture critic is Hans Dichand, a collector of the work of classic Viennese artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka, and the publisher of the Kronenzeitung. Claiming freedom of speech, his paper attacks artists, government ministers, and curators for promoting the new. Chief targets include Peter Weibel, a champion of art in new media who is one of Scholten's art advisers and was the commissioner of the Austrian Pavilion at the '93 Biennale, and Oswald Oberhuber, head of the traditional Hochschule fur Angewandte Kunst (Academy for applied arts) in Vienna. For the right-wing tabloid press, these two embody the enemy--the upstart art scene.

It is an unwritten rule of Austrian politics that political initiatives can succeed only if sanctioned by the tabloid press. One project that may die because of a consistent battering by Dichand and his allies is the Museumsquartier, a museum complex being designed by Laurids Ortner for the area in and around the former royal stables, near the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The goal is to create a coherent program of museum space for Modern and contemporary art. Vienna has only one modern-art museum, split between two provisional spaces. The city has long wanted a museum for 20th-century art--the federal government promised one back in the '60s--but ever since the architectural competition for the Museumsquartier, in 1987, conservatives and the media have been fiercely attacking the project, which is financed from both federal and city monies, and the design has had to be downscaled so as not to offend the public's conservative eye.