VIENNA ART WEEK 2009

Various locations, Vienna, 16th to 22nd November, 2009

The encounters of museum people, gallerists, collectors, and artists create a pulsating energy which makes the city exciting so that everybody is happy to come.

Erwin Wurm, artist

For its fifth anniversary, the motto of the year ‘Temptation for Art’ presented the city of Vienna as one of Europe’s most creative cities, with a dense museum and gallery scene. Compared to the previous years, the member institutions of the Art Cluster Vienna cooperating for the Vienna art week 2009 together with further program partners, prepared a far broader program than previous years, which provided occasion for both art experts and the wider art-interested public to enjoy and be inspired by the rich and diverse art scene in Vienna.

The week included a tight programme of museum exhibition openings, a ‘gallery night’, selected guided tours of public and private collections, tours to artworks in the public realm and to selected examples of contemporary architecture, as well as a special performance series at the independent project space k48.

Several panel discussions were held in different institutions. The Academy of Fine Arts invited curators such as Ute Meta Bauer or Sabine Breitwieser to talk about the role of art education in the specific context of the Academy. Departure hosted a talk about curatorial practice and the art market with Nicolaus Schafhausen and Matthew Slotover, publisher of frieze magazine and director of Frieze Art Fair. At MUMOK the attention was put on collecting, exploring issues with international professionals such as ‘The Pathology of Collecting’ or the example of the Mexican Jumex Collection.