A popular mythos of the contemporary art world goes something like this: move to Berlin and your every wish will be answered. You’ll have a studio the size of five Williamsburg warehouses. Your apartment, equally spacious, will overlook a lush park where you and your equally trendy peers will laze away the summer days drinking heffeweizen and prosecco before attending the openings of your countless solo shows in crumbling warehouses, which will make your career skyrocket internationally.
That’s perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but truly, there are few more fetishized locales among the up-and-coming artist crowd (with Detroit being a new contender). We seem to want to believe that there’s still somewhere that artists and writers, curators, and gallerist hopefuls can live, carefree, just doing what they wish. But according to the first-ever “Kultur und Kreativwirtschaftsindex” (“Cultural and Creative Industries Index”) published on Tuesday, that may no longer be the case.
After spending over two decades as the art world’s dreamland, Berliners and Berlin-transplants are starting to complain. According to the survey of approximately 1,200 artist, freelancers, writers, and other creative professionals, Berlin’s “poor but sexy” status doesn’t live up to its current reality. Ten years ago it may have been fine to get paid €5 for an article, but your apartment was only slightly more than that. Artists who participated in the survey lamented that affordable studio space is shriveling, likely the result of shiny new loft apartments cropping up first in Mitte, but increasingly also in Kreuzberg, even into bordering areas of Neuköln.
Granted, 62 percent of those surveyed still agreed that Berlin is a highly attractive place to live and a great working environment — it’s just that the money isn’t there, meaning there isn’t a native art market. It’s a rather vicious cycle. With galleries — the ones that can survive, that is — making an overwhelming percentage of their income at the international art fairs they attend and to clients abroad, it’s a wonder some haven’t closed their doors in exchange for a P.O. box and a storeroom.
The government is taking notice of the decline, sponsoring this index both to help raise awareness of the realities faced by Berlin’s creative community and to generate initiatives to combat these hardships. They certainly have no small stake in the sectors success, with it ranking between the chemical and automotive industries in terms of yearly capital-generation (€131.4 billion in 2009).
Whether artists will stick it out in Berlin or find greener pastures further east, however, is still up for debate.
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