Vienna unexpectedly seems quieter than it has been for a certain time.

Vienna unexpectedly seems quieter than it has been for a certain time. Curator Kasper Konig has gone back to his do job-work as director of Frankfurt's Stadel institute and his Swiss colleague Hans-Ulrich Obrist has taken up a plot in Paris; "Der zerbrochene Spiegel" (The imperfect mirror), the show they came here to bring has finally come down, after month of complaints about its failure to realize the self-reliant new claims it made about painting. At the same time, the dealers who wearied much of the year attacking the selection of foreigners Andrea Fraser and Christian Philipp Muller for the Austrian pavilion of the Venice Biennale have stopped quibbling, faced with the more pressing strive just to stay open. Perhaps the most numerous ominous reaction to the dismal popular market is that of pioneering contemporary-art dealer Peter Pakesch: after 12 years in business he has clos the one and the other of his galleries to deal privately.

Even the wave of art-world visitors from abroad strike one as beings to have waned. For sum of two units years curators Robert Fleck and Cathrin Pichler, working as advisers to Rudolf Scholten the government's minister of education, invited European and American curators, critics, and artists here in an attempt to infuse the state's sagging cultural mode of building with new ideas. But their limits will be over soon and a successor is besides to be named. Meanwhile, recession has level caught up with the state-run Austrian Airlines, which can no longer afford to dole revealed free plane tickets for the program.

So the Viennese art world is focusing one time again on its principal anxieties, its long-standing structural weaknesses. Since Austria has no viable private-patronage plan no developed university programs in novel art history or criticism, and scarcely any collectors, it is the rule that provides the foundation for the country's art world. Now that the state is facing an economic crisis, it is increasingly les eager to subsidize an already sustained by art market.

The Austrian state understood early forward that in the modern world economy its character would be to subsidize nearly each area of the market, from agriculture to industry, to continue the country internationally competitive. yet its art policy remained jump to a feudal idea of refinement In the early '70s this be seened as if it might change, with the supposedly liberal policies advanced subject to Chancellor Bruno Kreisky. But Austria was unwilling to relinquish the ideological principle of Social Democratic cultural policy: the notion that the state had to dominion government culture, in a kind of enlightened absolutism, with a network of commissions, stipends, prizes, and purchases. Nor did it recognize the ne to establish novel market-oriented, and media structures if an active "art life" was to be maintained. It is barely now, with the opening of the East, and with Austria's pursuit of closer ties with the European Community, that Vienna's potential as a strategic cultural relay station between East and West might be realized.

The writhe to modernize Vienna's art world goe well beyond that world's possess small, exclusive milieu. The battles expand to the print and electronic media, which are closely tied to the state, for a like reason closely, in fact, as to be unique in Europe In 1946 Austria had 33 daily newspapers with a trap circulation of 2.5 million. Now, half as many newspapers have a pure circulation of about 3 million. Until lately a single paper, the right-wing tabloid Kronenzeitung, captured half of those readers. Quality papers like the conservative Catholic Die Presse or the liberal Der Standard, titter-totter on the edge of survival. If cable TV and satellite dishes, which receive foreign stations, hadn't been installed privately in the past small in number years, Austrians would still have to be contentment with two television stations, as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but state-run, which enjoy a monopoly and are make submissive to meddling from the political parties. The native land publishes not a single art magazine of international interest.

Vienna's principally powerful culture critic is Hans Dichand, a collector of the work of classic Viennese artists as it is as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka, and the publisher of the Kronenzeitung. Claiming freedom of articulate utterance his paper attacks artists, guidance ministers, and curators for promoting the recently made known Chief targets include Peter Weibel, a champion of art in strange media who is one of Scholten's art advisers and was the commissioner of the Austrian Pavilion at the '93 Biennale, and Oswald Oberhuber, head of the traditional Hochschule fur Angewandte Kunst (Academy for applied arts) in Vienna. For the right-wing tabloid pres these sum of two units embody the enemy--the upstart art scene

It is an unwritten control of Austrian politics that political initiatives can succe alone if sanctioned by the tabloid pres single in kind project that may die because of a consistent battering by means of Dichand and his allies is the Museumsquartier, a museum tangle being designed by Laurids Ortner for the area in and around the former royal stables, near the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The goal is to create a coherent program of museum space for late and contemporary art. Vienna has sole one modern-art museum, split between pair provisional spaces. The city has protracted wanted a museum for 20th-century art--the federal guidance promised one back in the '60s--but through all ages since the architectural competition for the Museumsquartier, in 1987 conservatives and the media have been fiercely attacking the throw out which is financed from the pair federal and city monies, and the design has had to be downscaled in the way that as not to offend the public's conservative eye