COVID-19 has put Berlin\u2019s nightlife into an open-ended shutdown.\u00a0Can an art exhibition become a life raft for struggling cultural enterprises?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The coronavirus has shown itself to be\u00a0airborne, to aerosolize through small droplets produced when an infected person coughs,\u00a0sneezes or talks. It is also transmitted by touching your eyes, nose, or mouth after touching contaminated surfaces. What’s also clear about the virus is that it’s likely to have a higher likelihood of transmission indoors and less likelihood with distancing\u00a0\u2014 none of which bodes well for nightclubs and music clubs, whose very business model depends on squeezing as many bodies as possible into a room.\u00a0During May, in Spain and South Korea, authorities traced its\u00a0new cluster of cases right back to their Seoul and Madrid nightclub district, where thousands continued to party. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading infectious expert in the United States,\u00a0warned<\/a>\u00a0they are the worst place you can congregate during the pandemic;\u00a0“Congregation at a bar inside is bad news,” he stated, “we really got to stop that. Right now.”<\/p>\n So what’s going to happen to them? The truth is\u00a0there is no foreseeable \u201cphase\u201d of reopening that is safe for\u00a0nightclubs and music clubs.\u00a0It\u2019s not that a scene of people packed into a room dancing is ever going to be possible again, it\u2019s just that it unnecessarily endangers everyone there. Across the world,\u00a0owners and DJs have opted for livestream of performances to reach their\u00a0millions of music fans while other properties have turned their high-volume nightlife to table service. In France, nightlife workers and owners\u00a0have held demonstrations<\/a>\u00a0to demand they be allowed to reopen. Across the UK fore the more than 1,640 nightclubs,\u00a0the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) estimates<\/a> that up to 70% of clubs could close by the end of September, with many not having the option of outdoor, socially distanced events,\u00a0risking more than\u00a0754,000 jobs\u00a0due to ongoing uncertainty.<\/p>\n And while some have been squeezed out of the marketplace by their local governments that have denied support packages, others have turned to the arts to keep club culture alive. In Berlin, the legendary temple of techno,\u00a0Berghain, which received over one thousand people each night of partying, has been repurposed into an art gallery, lending space for visual artists of the likes of\u00a0Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tacita Dean,\u00a0Thea Djordjadze, Wolfgang Tillmans, Olafur Eliasson, and other Berlin-based artists that were eager to send a message to the city amidst the lockdown: \u201cBerlin\u2019s cultural life is still very much alive,\u201d said collector Christian Boros to The Guardian, who devised the whole gallery when it inaugurated Wednesday, September 9th. Now dubbed the\u00a0Studio Berlin<\/a>\u00a0group show,\u00a0this new art gallery that resurrects what was once the nightlife symbol of a European capital,\u00a0containing works by 115 international artists that were produced in the city during lockdown, which is precisely what lends many works on display in an intriguing edge.\u00a0Studio Berlin, writes\u00a0Philip Oltermann<\/a>\u00a0for The Guardian<\/a>,\u00a0is less of a manifesto for a post-Covid future than a lovingly nostalgic affair, that harks back to the years immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when artists and DJs filled the vacant lots of a city that had yet to be targeted by property investors. Before the club closed down amid the novel coronavirus, some of Berghain\u2019s special status had to do with the fact that Berghain doesn\u2019t allow pictures to be taken inside,\u00a0\u201cthat\u2019s where the myths come from,\u201d says Kosovan artist Petrit Halilaj, \u201cyou can only tell, but not document what goes on inside.\u201d That same no-pictures policy remains in place while the club is an art gallery. \u201cYou\u2019ll be leaving this gallery with a head full of memories and ideas, not with pictures to adorn your social media feeds,\u201d concluded Boros.<\/p>\n This new place, one that urges people to listen and feel, rather than be seen, is breaking Berlin\u2019s past tradition that art and club scenes had drifted apart, and now, amidst uncertainty caused by the coronavirus, it seems that they could both use of each other like never before because the clubs aren\u2019t yet ready to turn the lights off for good just yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" COVID-19 has put Berlin\u2019s nightlife into an open-ended shutdown.\u00a0Can an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":27608,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,45,53],"tags":[4086,99,1385,4088,4087],"class_list":["post-27607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-culture","category-industry","category-opinion","tag-berlin","tag-ceo","tag-ceo-northam","tag-clubs","tag-nightlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27607"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28975,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27607\/revisions\/28975"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}