Friday, September 21, 2007

From Brooklyn To Berlin: New Home For N.Y. Artists

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Where do New York artists go when rents for studios become too expensive? Brooklyn? No, rents here are astronomical too. Hoboken? Nope, there too, it has become unaffordable...and that goes for pretty much all of New York City and surroundings.
So where can artists go to rent a space big enough to actually work without having to come up with a small fortune to cover the rent?
Berlin! That's right! Berlin.

From the magazine Der Spiegel:

Leonard Cohen famously sang "First we'll take Manhattan, then we'll take Berlin." Now many New York artists are doing just that, turning their backs on excessive rents and the stifling conservativism of the post-9/11 city to carve out a niche for themselves in the thriving Berlin art scene.

New York-based artists are inspired to make the move through a combination of rising rents, diminishing opportunities and a growing sense that the city's centrality to the art world has passed its peak. Gone are the days when up-and-coming painters such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg could rent a huge loft in Manhattan for just a few hundred dollars a month. Today those same lofts rent for upwards of $5,000 and sell for millions, forcing artists out of Manhattan and into the outer boroughs. But even in Brooklyn, spaces that rented for hundreds just a decade ago now cost up to 10 times as much.

To Continue reading Article:
From Brooklyn To Berlin: New York Artists Escape To Berlin

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