No Silver Lining Without Its Cloud
Berlin receives a gift of over 2000 works by major 20th century artists. But there's a catch
Berlin is broke. Tens of billions of euros in debt, the city won't be drawing up plans for major cultural funding programs any time soon. In fact, the irony the municipal government is saddled with is that it's run by a "red-red" coalition of Social Democrats and Democratic Socialists whose only choices are which opera houses, museums and so on to shut down.
Along comes multi-millionaire Friedrich Christian Flick with an offer: Over 2000 works by major 20th century artists such as -- deep breath: Duchamp, Giocometti, Picabia, Polke, Richter, Twombly, Kippenberger, Kosuth, Judd, Tillmanns, Koons, Nam June Paik, and that's just for starters. The price? Zilch. Nothing. Nada. The sugar on top: Flick will even pay for the renovation of the Rieck Halle, a building next to the Hamburger Bahnhof, which the German train company will rent out to the city at a low, low "culture rate". The only money the city will have to come up with will be for maintaining and staffing the new museum.
Did the city hesitate to accept? Of course not. On Thursday, the contract was signed and Flick and Mayor Wowereit were beaming on the front page of Der Tagesspiegel the next morning. All the Berlin dailies, in fact, were pretty upbeat about the whole thing.
But. There's a cloud lurking behind every silver lining and the cloud in this case is the money that made the Flick Collection possible in the first place. It "smells of blood and sweat," fumes Hans Leyendecker in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Flick's grandfather built an industrial empire during the days of the Third Reich on the backs of tens of thousands of forced laborers. Alice Strover, the Berlin Green party spokesperson for cultural politics, warns that, while "Mick" Flick, as the 57-year-old heir to the family fortune likes to be called in the gossip pages, can't be held responsible for his grandfather's sins, "the capital of Nazi crimes has a particular historical responsibility."
Berlin is not the first city Flick has approached. Strasbourg, Dresden, Munich, and most controversially, Zurich have all turned him down. Most controversially because that Swiss tax haven is where Flick has made his second home. Leyendecker roughly estimates that Flick has saved himself about 125 million euros in taxes by not living in Germany.
It gets worse. When a fund was set up to compensate surviving forced laborers of the Nazi era, Flick refused to contribute to it. His money, he says, comes from private investment. To compensate for his lack of compensation, though, he's set up a foundation to promote "civil courage" to fight "hatred of foreigners, racism and intolerance".
So is Berlin doing the right thing? Christina Weiss, Germany's new minister of culture, puts it this way: "Neither the artists nor their works deserve to be taken as hostages."
Elsewhere
When Telepolis itself is in the news, it's usually good news. There was that Grimme Online Award last year, for example, for "incorruptibility" and "professionalism of the highest level." Last week, however, was a different story. When, last summer, a poster to the forums praised Afghan militias for killing Taliban fighters, Holger Voss hit back with a sarcastic reminder that murder is murder, no matter who the victims are: "Congratulations to the murderers of 11.09.01..." Which was immediately interpreted by some anonymous coward as "glorification of a criminal act," a criminal violation in Germany. Voss was actually dragged to court, but fortunately, there was an outbreak of sanity on Wednesday and he was acquitted. The BBC has the details.
The newsweekly Der Spiegel is known for thorough reporting and not particularly for taking political stances, left or right. But take a look at this week's cover: "Blood for Oil: What it's really about in Iraq." Imagine such a cover on Time or Newsweek.
Artforum senior editor Eric Banks looks back 20 years to Wolfgang Max Faust's essay on Zeitgeist, a controversial exhibition in Berlin.