Stifling New York Conservatism Sends Artists Fleeing to Germany

"I'm not crazy about living in America while Bush is president."

One wonders how they overcame the ruthless oppression of the fascistic Giuliani reign.

New York Artists Escape to Germany

Leonard Cohen famously sang "First we'll take Manhattan, then we'll take Berlin." Now many New York artists are doing just that, turning their backs on excessive rents and the stifling conservativism of the post-9/11 city to carve out a niche for themselves in the thriving Berlin art scene.

When David Krepfle left his small hometown in Iowa and moved to New York in 1989, he had $100 in his pocket and dreams of becoming an artist. He found a loft in the Brooklyn neighborhood known as DUMBO ("Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass"). Back then, it was the kind of area where nobody cared if he used a chainsaw to make his art -- even if he did often get chased by thieves on the way home from the subway.

Of course back in 1989, New York was at the tail end of the liberal Koch administration and about to enter the chaotic Dinkins years. Seemingly everyone was fleeing from thieves.

But over the years, as the neighborhood became the hippest place to live in New York, Krepfle's rent grew and it became a struggle to keep his home. Then he visited Berlin in 2001 -- and was so impressed that he joined the ranks of the New York artists making the exodus to the German capital.

"It felt like New York 20 years ago," he says, recalling his first visit to the city. "It had the same energy, the same kind of freakiness and underbelly, as New York had then."

That, and it turns out he can live cheaper in Germany.

But of course, it all comes back to Bush Derangement Syndrome and the horrors of living in post-9/11 America.

And it's perhaps not entirely coincidental that there's a political element to Krepfle's art. It's not just cheap rents which are enticing artists to come to Berlin -- many New York artists are leaving because they feel the place they fell in love with has fundamentally changed.

"I'm not crazy about living in America while George W. Bush is president," says David Henry Brown Jr., (pictured above) a painter and performance artist who recently had a one-man show at a Berlin gallery. The intellectual atmosphere of Berlin is "really open," he says. "I feel like I have taken off the handcuffs that were developing in New York."

What planet are these people living on? You can attend any art show, any gallery in New York and see every possible freedom of expression known to man on display.

Nobody is oppressing anyone.

For many artists, the event that alienated them from the United States was the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and their aftermath. While the attacks seemed to bring the nation together, for many on the left it heralded the start of a reactionary period in American history which made them feel less and less welcome in their own country. "You have a transition, especially catalyzed by 9/11, where New York becomes a corporate puppet," Brown says, filled with resentment.

Alaskan-born artist and experimental filmmaker Reynold Reynolds agrees. He feels the 9/11 attacks "made the city much more conservative, much less tolerant, much more a place of paranoia."

So the righteous concern over Islamofascist terrorism that destroyed the World Trade Center is now paranoia.

"Some of the things that I did in New York would now be completely impossible," he adds, noting that throwing dummies off bridges would likely lead to arrest rather than a review in the New York Times. "Berlin is a much more inspiring place to be an artist," he says -- so much so that he recently signed a five-year lease.

I'd have no problem if this dummy hurled himself off a bridge.