American Hipsters and Hollywood Stars Invade Berlin

from the Observer UK, via AlterNet:



American Hipsters and Hollywood Stars Invade Berlin

By Kate Connolly, The Observer UK. Posted October 8, 2007.

Affordable rents and cultural buzz are luring young Americans and big movie stars to the reborn German capital.



It's not, is it? Clint Eastwood downing a beer in the Helmut Newton Bar, John Cusack cycling along a cobbled street, Matt Damon strolling through a courtyard of fashion boutiques drawing on a cigarette? Nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the cultural life of the city has suddenly exploded again and is propelling it on its way to becoming the new New York.

Hollywood stars are rapidly discovering the once divided city, lured by its sizzling creativity and raw charm. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are just the latest to have bought a home -- a loft apartment in the trendy district of Mitte in the former communist East Berlin. Tom Cruise is considering the more sedate lakeside area of Wannsee. Their arrival and that of other celebrities in love with Berlin's grittiness, its disrespect for authority, the lack of paparazzi, even its lax smoking laws, is part of a wider trend -- creative Americans are discovering Berlin.

The city is increasingly said to have the edge over New York as an international centre of art and creativity that many say America's cultural capital started to lose 20 years ago, when they began scrubbing the graffiti from the subways.

"Berlin is like New York City in the 1980s," proclaimed the New York Times. "Rents are cheap, graffiti is everywhere and the air crackles with a creativity that comes only from a city in transition."

New York artists have been moving here in droves, lured by low rents and an 'anything goes' atmosphere. According to Damaso Reyes of the cultural magazine Krax: '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.'

Naturally the art dealers have followed the artists. A year ago Robert Goff opened a branch of his New York gallery Goff + Rosenthal, citing Berlin's 'energy as a city in which artists can actually afford to live'.

The creative atmosphere has snowballed, with more and more artists drawn in. David Krepfle has swapped a loft under the Manhattan Bridge for a leafy street in east Berlin. The move has enabled him to concentrate on his bold paintings rather than on worrying about the bills. Those who have left the US because of the Bush administration's foreign policy see Berlin as a land of exile. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/64641/

Unless they're trying to call the artists "Hipsters". That's an insult to artists. Hipsters are the people who are trying to be cool by being artsy. Beautiful people who ugly themselves up for acceptance. In case you didn't notice, I don't like hipsters.

I wouldn't mind having a bolt hole in a country with demostrated sanity, myself. Whether Germany counts as such is debatable, but the Common Market in general has much to commend it as a second home.