Lange Nacht der Museen

As sad as I was to leave Schwäbisch Hall and all of the friends I had made there, I was ready to live in a city again. Even amidst the stress of dragging multiple oversized suitcases through half of Vienna, when I first stepped onto the streets last Thursday, tasted the cold city air, and tried to avoid getting trampled by the rush of people streaming out of the U-Bahn station, I knew I had made the right decision. I like to tell myself that I could live anywhere the revolution takes me, but I’m a city girl at heart.

I was again reminded of this fact on Saturday evening. ORF (the Austrian equivalent of the BBC) sponsors a „Lange Nacht der Museen“ (Long Night of the Museums) twice a year. All of the museums in the country are open from 6pm to 1am for a flat admission fee (for students in Wien, 11 Euros). There are also free shuttle buses departing from the city center that take you to and from some of the more outlying museums, and the Museumsquartier (which, at five, has the highest concentration of major museums in Vienna) had free concerts on the plaza until 11pm. Lange Nacht der Museen is high-culture made accessible,* and there seemed to be a wide range of people taking part, from tour groups to families to packs of teenagers to old couples.

I began my evening at Bank Austria Kunstforum (normally 7 Euros), which had an amazing Frida Kahlo exhibit up. Some of my favorites:

Self-Portrait on the Border between Mexico and the USA

Lucha Maria, Girl from Tehuacan, or Sun and Moon

I then made my way to the Museumsquartier, where the Kunsthalle Wien (normally 4.60 Euros) had an exhibit about street art, which was also amazing. All the shots of New York and of high-rise public housing projects made me a little homesick for America, though. (My thoughts about Vienna's architecture deserve their own post. But suffice it to say that it is totally different from your typical East Coast city layout.)

And I ended the night at MUMOK (MUseum MOderner Kunst, or museum of modern art, and normally free for students). I was actually disappointed by this museum. The main exhibition was comparing the rise of modern art with the rise of modern physics, which meant a lot of historic scientific instruments were on display. Not exactly what I'm looking for in an art museum. And it was fast approaching midnight at this point, so I wasn't in the mood to read the long descriptive passages that laid out the thesis of the exhibit. But there was a pretty cool bar in the basement playing lounge music, so MUMOK wasn't a total wash.

More important than my impressions of the original museums, though, is the existence of Lange Nacht der Museen itself. I know it will never happen, but I would like to see the Museum Mile Festival in New York morph into something more like this, where high-culture becomes cool, night life becomes intellectual, and an American exchange student begins to fall in love with a city.

* Financial accessibility is debatable. It really is an amazing deal, especially if you plan out your seven hours well, but not everyone has the extra cash for museum visits.