Questionable award ceremony in Berlin: Thinking too big

Showing solidarity and making the little known heard – that’s a thing of the past. Even in the cultural sector, which otherwise likes to strike nuances. This feeling creeps up on you now in the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin. Not because there is a large exhibition dedicated to the famous art mischief Maurizio Cattelan. But because the exhibition is accompanied by the award of an important art prize that has previously only been awarded to young artists.

Cattelan lands punchlines and they go around the world. Around 2016, when Trump became US President, with his ostentatious readymade toilet “America” made of 101.2 kilos of solid gold. Cattelan has never had a solo show in Berlin, even though Germany and its Nazi past appear again and again in his art, which is characterized by moral questions.

His Berlin exhibition is political, even profound. Stuffed pigeons on the ceiling transform Mies van der Rohe's glass art temple into a morbid place, something between a bus stop and a dilapidated cathedral. Kneeling in the middle is “Him,” a life-size praying boy with the face of Adolf Hitler. A fire extinguisher stands around, filled with the actual ashes of a deceased friend. Cattelan stands for “images that you can’t get out of your head,” says curator Lisa Botti.

The problem is the National Gallery's prize and its symbolic content: the award has existed for 25 years. The list of nominees today reads like a who’s who of contemporary art – Christian Janikowski, Monica Bonvicini, Ceal Floyer, Cypriend Gaillard. Most of them started small in Berlin. They are part of the much-hyped art city of Berlin. However, this currently seems to be dissolving in the face of cut cultural budgets and a loss of studios fueled by high real estate prices.

In 2024, the prize was even awarded to all four nominees. There was talk of “togetherness” and “inclusion”. But times are changing, the prize must be realigned, it is now unanimously said by the award winners, the financier BMW, the friends of the Nationalgalerie, and not least by Klaus Biesenbach, the director of the Neue Nationalgalerie. No more nominees, only one artistic position will be chosen.

Now it’s about “museum honor” and “artistic radiance”. For the art city of Berlin, this realignment is a rejection. And it is an expression of an uncanny zeitgeist: when in doubt, for the big, popular, heavyweight. The gentle, unknown is then ignored.