BERLIN The Galerie Max Hetzler II in Berlin was empty, so the young man behind the desk seemed happy to stop reading his paperback and suggest a few contemporary art exhibitions worth seeing in the German capital.
Drawing his finger over the map in Index, Berlin's nifty folding gallery guide, he noted more than 20 openings scheduled for that week, most of which he would be attending himself. Like so many young Berliners and foreigners, he had come to the city to revel in its thriving art scene. Even if each stop offered nothing more than pretzels, cheap wine and a chance to cadge cigarettes from friends, this revolving and continuous set of parties seemed to be the foundation of his social life.
"Nobody works in Berlin," he said, picking up his book again. "Everyone's either an artist or a politician."
It's an old tune, bohemia, and Berlin has heard it before, notably during the Weimar Republic. Lou Reed and David Bowie lived in Berlin during the 1970s and sang about its degenerate charms, as Brecht and Weill had celebrated them in the '20s.
On my first visits, in the early '80s, this was a supremely spooky place. The city's Nazi past was still alive in the stooped figure of Rudolf Hess, the sole inmate in Spandau prison. Street lamps designed by Albert Speer lined the avenues. Throughout the cold war, any aggressive noise from either side registered more acutely in Berlin - its neighborhoods still carved up into four military zones (American, Russian, French, English) - than perhaps anywhere on Earth.
But a happening art scene it was not. The dealer Barbara Wien, who arrived from Munich in 1974 as a student, recalls that what little excitement there was centered on committees and communes. "It was an island, and like all islands there was a kind of tedium that eventually infected everything."
The toppling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 recast daily life, as the two halves of the country awkwardly reunited. A capitalist gentility took hold in the historic Scheunenviertel, a district of the old East Berlin, as courtyards along Sophienstrasse and elsewhere were tidied up and residential buildings converted into showcases for art.
Today, what Prague and London were in the '90s, Berlin has now become: a magnet for anyone who wants to live and work in a city that is humming with cultural energy and, by contrast with the rest of northern Europe, an insane bargain. Contemporary galleries seem to open every month, the most attractive recent arrivals clustered off Holzmarktstrasse in a series of brick warehouses that overlook a canal on the Spree River.
Prominent artists from Iceland (Olafur Eliasson), Britain (Tacita Dean), Canada (Stan Douglas), and the former Yugoslavia (Bojan Sarcevic) are only a few of the émigrés who now make their home here. Artists from Oslo and Warsaw look to Berlin as an ideal place to connect to the wider art world and to highlight new creations.
Big-time dealers have followed, too. Max Hetzler, once a force in Cologne, has placed all of his chips on his two Berlin galleries, Max Hetzler and Max Hetzler II; Barbara Thumm arrived in 1994 after seven years in London. Specializing in figurative work, her gallery has a roster that includes Julian Opie, Fiona Banner and Christian Hoischen.
"I was intrigued about being in a city that was reconstructing itself," she says. "And the working conditions are so good. Unlike London, it's affordable."
The New York gallery owner Barbara Gladstone, who visits regularly, is particularly impressed by all the "smart young dealers" in Berlin, singling out Galerie Neu and Klosterfelde for special praise. "There's nothing random about what they're doing. It's a very specific aesthetic." She compares the transformation of East Berlin to the bohemian parts of New York's Greenwich Village - "they've reclaimed a part of a city as a center for art."
Space is no longer a pressing issue as it was in West Berlin during the cold war, when bribes were obligatory to secure decent housing. The city skyline is dotted with construction cranes as the German government continues to reclaim Berlin as its capital. Overbuilding, along with the freeing up of real estate in former East Berlin, has made the city a paradise for artists who want lots of room for little money.
Large, grubby lofts in Kreuzberg, a bohemian quarter since the '60s, can be had for $500 a month, and German artists can count on government subsidies. The photographer Beate Gutschow, who had a sellout show last autumn in New York, rents her own carpeted studio space in a Mitte building shared with about 60 other artists for $250 a month, utilities included.
"It's the most interesting city in Germany and half the price of Munich," said Nicolai von Rosen. Together with his partner, Florian Wojnar, he runs a unique art space called Future 7. Above a McDonald's in an apartment tower full of East German retirees, the tiny rooms constitute both a studio and gallery.
The one ingredient lacking so far in Berlin's contemporary art scene has been a group of avid local collectors, so von Rosen, who is 37, and Wojnar, 32, buy one work by every person they exhibit. They have shown about half a dozen artists thus far, including Gutschow; the sculptor Thomas Scheibitz, who will represent Germany in this year's Venice Biennial; as well as their own work, which recently had a lot to do with computer-generated graphic maps of the U.S. electoral college - the country fractured into red and blue.
"What's new is that German dealers need to have a presence in Berlin," von Rosen said. "The graduates from the art schools in Düsseldorf and Hamburg and Munich are coming here. The movement hasn't crested yet."
The installation of the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection at the Hamburger Bahnhof has been a controversial success. Berlin badly wanted a contemporary art museum, and many local dealers and artists seem willing to overlook the fact that Friedrich Flick's money is entangled in a Nazi past. Works by many art-world heavyweights (Bruce Nauman, Cindy Sherman, Rodney Graham, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley) found in museums throughout Europe and the United States are here and given plenty of space, so much that it takes several hours of zigzagging to comprehend fully.
Less tainted and more refined is the Sammlung Hoffmann, a private collection open to the public only on Saturday. Reservations are necessary for the guided tours, most in German but some in English; shoes must be taken off and felt slippers donned.
Put together by Erika Hoffmann and her late husband, Rolf, who began collecting in 1968, the two floors of contemporary art in all media change once a year. Video is especially strong in this incarnation, with the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist's wailing face on a tiny monitor buried in the floor and Sarcevic's deadpan study of dogs in church being popular with my tour.
A series of grainy photo-based pieces by Felix Gonzalez-Torres on the theme of skies and birds, spaced throughout the two floors, gives a sad, autumnal chill to the show. Confessional text paintings by Sean Landers and the photographs of Nan Goldin add to the intimate, autobiographical tone. The tour ends in Hoffmann's spectacular top-floor sky-lighted parlor, where her daily newspapers are strewn over furniture by Mies van der Rohe, Frank Gehry and Richard Artschwager.
The transformation of the city into an art capital is just as apparent in the complex of 19th-century institutions on Museumsinsel (Museum Island) near Unter den Linden. The pride and joy of East Berlin - but a trial to visit for capitalist tourists during the cold war - this complex of classical buildings has been extensively spruced up.
On a recent trip, I prowled around on a Thursday night, when most galleries stay open until 10, beginning at the Pergamonmuseum, with its matchless Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture, and ending at the Altes Museum, where two small, perfectly done exhibitions - one on the history of clouds in art, and another of romantic paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Friedrich Schinkel - could be enjoyed with only a few dozen fellow visitors.
How long the money for this expensive, subsidized party can last is anyone's guess. The city is now bankrupt. Nobody works in Berlin because for many there is no work to be had. But as in the '20s, this has proven to be just another excuse to drink and dance.
Berlin goes late or all night, especially in Kreuzberg, where Würgeengel (Dresdener Strasse 122, www.wuergeengel.de) serves cocktails in a smoky red room to an attractive crowd, and Möbel Olfe (Reichenberger Strasse 177) caters to a beery gayish crowd of wall-to-wall bodies until 3 a.m. Techno has roots in Germany, and enthusiastic dancers still seek out D.J.'s at the Russian discos. Many late-night art parties, though, are secret affairs, the location changing nightly and able to be found only if you or a friend know where to go or which cellphone to call.
In former West Berlin, the venerable Paris Bar (Kantstrasse 152, www.parisbar.de) in Charlottenburg, hangout for cinéastes like Wim Wenders and the late madcap artist Martin Kippenberger, is still jammed long after midnight. And for those who like it slick, there is the Newton Bar, (Charlottenstrasse 57, www.newton-bar.de) named for the late photographer Helmut Newton. Monumental blow-ups of his nudes line the back room, and a fine list of Highlander scotches is available.
It stands across the street from Lutter & Wegner (www.l-w-berlin.de), a restaurant packed with local politicians and, increasingly, foreigners who have heard about this famous boutique restaurant.
Many of the artists in Berlin shun or cannot afford such finery. The gallery openings I popped into were uniformly crowded by young nomads.
On a rainy night I was led to an alternative space in Prenzlauer Berg, another formerly run-down district since reclaimed by the bourgeoisie. Impossible to find without a guide, it was located inside a nest of three courtyards and up a rickety wooden staircase.
As so often happens, the art itself - a silent video of a deer standing in the road - was hardly worth the trip. But the artist's friends sipped Heinekens and spoke with low-key confidence about Berlin, as if they thought they lived in the coolest city in Europe.
And I had to admit, as I inhaled their billows of smoke and remembered what New York once was like, that they were probably right.
source: Richard B. Woodward, The New York Times
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