Vienna Art Week’s ninth edition wrapped up on Sunday. An initiative of the Dorotheum auction house and Art Cluster Vienna (whose managing partner and president, respectively, Martin Böhm speaks in the video above), 2013 marked the annual festival’s biggest edition to date with nearly 200 events organized by around 70 partners around the city welcoming 35,000 guests from Vienna itself and internationally.
In comparison to Berlin’s art week — an event that Vienna artistic director Robert Punkenhofer is quick to point out took its inspiration from its Austrian forefather — Vienna’s effort plays a slightly longer game. While the city certainly has a bustling art scene, spanning the spectrum from studios to galleries to museums, its highbrow, at times even stuffy or aristocratic image remains an impediment to achieving a marketable, “cool” status in an era where Brooklyn is the hallmark for culturally engaged urbanites from Paris to Perth.
Where the Berlin event hedges on the self-congratulatory — you don’t see New York or London ginning up an art week — Vienna’s shovels a path forward, subtly making headway for the city’s art sector. The theory seems to be that even if each curator only finds one artist from the 100 they visit on the trip or one institution they’d be interested in working with, and by doing so broadens the city’s artistic clout beyond its singular ties to the 60’s Vienna Actionism and its unshakable ties to music of the Classical period, Vienna Art Week would be a success. Likewise, when looking inward, they seek to widen their own residents’ and artistic actors’ perspectival radius beyond its bounds, both in hops of creating a future for the city not quite so tied up with its past.
