Art: Part 1 (Day 21)

Strangely some art historians would disagree

Sign from the Altes [Old] Museum

Lately I've been having some trouble when viewing art both in terms of how it ought to viewed and how it ought to be presented to the viewer.

But first, for the purpose of this entry, some background on the art scene in Berlin.

In a word it is fantastic. Berlin has the obvious two advantages of being the capital city of a European great power, namely 1) being able to draw artists to itself by serving as a cultural center (in Berlin's case this is true mainly for the period from 1871-1933 or between the creation of the Second German Empire (an event that at least one German has mentioned gleefully happened in Versailles) and the rise of the slightly more infamous third one) and 2) having been able to bring back large amounts of "booty" from the rest of the world, in the German case this was accomplished mainly through archeology rather than empire, both because they were archeology in the early 20th century and because they were a bit late to the whole empire thing.

Now on display in Berlin [Pergamon Museum]

Having accumulated so much art, they have set about with some vigor displaying it. The original plan was for a cultural strip to be formed in the middle of the city to allow for the display of the various works. This was canceled part way through due to various Kings named Frederich bankrupting the country with their wars. Still after some delay and a glacial period of construction, a central district of museums (currently called the Museum Insel [Island] a name that not surprisingly comes from the fact that the museums involved are in fact on an island) emerged. Unfortunately, as it inevitably does, the Second World War complicated everything. All of the museums were in the east, the west (in order to avoid a "museum gap") predictably build new ones in their territory, petty feuds occured between curators, few people cared, and now the city is awash with art galleries.

Interior of Hamburger Bahnhof
Museum for Contempory Art

The Museums tend to be organized chronologically, the Pergamon contains antiquites, the Hamburger Bahnhof (a former train station) contains contemporary art, and other museums fit in between them. But there are loads of it here especially when one includes titanic structures like the Ethnologisches Museum [anthropology] in the count. This partucular cultural edifice was made after five full sized anthropological museums decide to join into one. Interestingly however, there doesn't seem to be as much of an emphasis on maintaining a permanent exhibition (this is especially true of the more modern art gallaries and less so of the archaeological ones). Instead almost all of the museum space is taken up be a traveling exhibitions. I was of course bemused by this at first, after all, what about all of the great objets in the permanent collection? Can't we see them? Still I can understand it from the perspective curator, as the rotating exhibitions tend to draw many more people in from the city itself.

All told I am more than satisfied and more than stimulated by the art scene in Berlin, the only issues I'm left with are firstly, how to get enough time to visit it all, and secondly (and far more troublingly) how to best observe the art itself. But that topic I'm afraid will have to wait until the next entry.

Art?
Stop #$%@ing with me Duchamp

Found Object: Bicycle Wheel
Hamburger Bahnhof