From the feature sections – Cheap rents for creative people

By Burkhard Müller-Ullrich

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Empty New York office towers could be made available to creative people, urges artist Laurie Anderson. (Niyi Fote / The News2 / imago-images)

The “FAZ” reports that as a result of the pandemic, five percent of New Yorkers left the city and that there will now be a lack of tax money. Meanwhile, the artist Laurie Anderson is calling for a radical change in cultural policy there.

One of the most terrible things that can happen to a pianist is the loss of a hand or an arm, or the nervous command of the muscles in that limb. The American Leon Fleisher, born in San Francisco in 1928, one of the few students of Artur Schnabel, experienced this in his middle years and became like them WORLD writes, “to the genius with left”.

Memory of a legendary concert

Fleisher has now died at the age of 92, and Manuel Brug recalls a legendary concert 16 years ago with the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle. It was the world premiere of a play by the young Paul Hindemith, which Paul Wittgenstein had commissioned in 1923. “He was the piano-playing brother of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was one-armed as a result of a war injury. As one of the richest men in Vienna, he turned his physical hardship into a patronage and from the early twenties ordered a whole range of repertoire from the most famous composers of his time Piano works for the left hand – for exclusive use. “

Ravel, Prokofjew, Strauss and Britten composed pieces for Wittgenstein, but the client didn’t like Hindemith’s – and so it remained unplayed until Fleisher’s Berlin concert.

Also Wolfgang Schreiber from the SÜDDEUTSCHEN ZEITUNG mentions the Hindemith premiere. He characterizes Fleisher’s playing as follows: his “penetrating intellect did not hinder his great emotional development in all of this.”

Demand for funding from the state

New York, where Fleisher’s career once began, is now apparently devastated. That you can stay in luxury hotels for 70 dollars, like Frauke Steffens in FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINEN ZEITUNG reports, says it all: The Corona crisis has virtually paralyzed business life.

“Between March and May 2020, 420,000 people left the city, that is five percent of its population,” we learn, and with the mostly wealthy emigrants, the city is losing a lot of tax revenue. However, some people, like musician Laurie Anderson, believe that the crisis also offers an opportunity:

“‘As in earlier times, cheaper rents would attract the creative scene in the future. Like the factory lofts in Soho fifty years ago, empty office towers could soon provide shelter for creative people.’ Anderson also called for a radical change of course in the cultural sector. Only one lesson can be learned from the plight of the pandemic: ‘Everything free and financed by the state’ should be the motto in the future. “

So Laurie Anderson would like conditions similar to those in Germany. Here, the state puts an average of three times the amount on every entry ticket for theaters and orchestras, such as Dieter Haselbach from the Center for Cultural Research and Pius Knüsel from the Adult Education Center in Zurich WORLD to explain. Both were among the authors of the book “Kulturinfarkt”, which caused a stir eight years ago.

Oppressive theses on the development of the cultural industry

Now, in the Corona period, they are again drawing an oppressively sober balance sheet: “It is foreseeable that parts of the audience will stay away permanently, especially in the big theaters, concert halls, opera houses, where the proportion of risk groups is high,” it says in the text, and: “The lockdown has shown how little of what has been done so far.”

There is no need to refer to these experts with the catchphrase “system relevance”. Instead they write:

“Politicians must, however, break away from the notion that cultural institutions are still central catalysts of urban bourgeoisie today. In our society, which is characterized by diversity, the understanding of values ​​has long since shifted to social media. Cultural establishments remain institutions of social selection.”

Despite all the criticism of wasted money, which one might agree with in view of the structures of the German cultural industry, the talk of “understanding values” betrays the socio-political thrust of the authors. But culture is not a mentally revamped cohesion project. Rather, culture is the simple consequence of the fact that man is a spiritual being.

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