Berlin Is Learning to Live With the Cuts

September in Berlin means Berlin Art Week, but this year the event also offers a useful measure of how the city’s art economy is changing. Its HQ is a garden at the Kulturforum, between the Neue Nationalgalerie and the Gemäldegalerie, with daily talks and screenings before the festival closes at a long communal table.

Talking Galleries, the Barcelona trade-talks platform, is holding its first Berlin edition, while Discovering Collections and Meet the Artist will open private collections to ticket holders. Berlin Art Week itself is supported by the city’s Senate Department for Economics, Energy and Public Enterprises and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), among other partners – striking in a city where cultural funding has been cut by roughly EUR 240 million across two budget rounds, and where project spaces and artists’ ateliers, not to mention museums, have lost funding.

The money that pays for Berlin Art Week is economic development and ERDF money, not culture money. Berlin is not simply finding ways around the cuts; the financial logic of its art scene is changing.

An American Approach

Klaus Biesenbach joined the Neue Nationalgalerie after 25 years running museums in the US and promptly put on exhibitions by two viral artists whose work transcends the confines of the artworld. He gave Beeple his German debut in April, a 12-day free presentation of a work already shown at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2025.

The Preis der Nationalgalerie 2026 was awarded to Maurizio Cattelan, whose Comedian (2019) sold at Sotheby’s New York for USD 6.2 million in November 2024. NIGHT, Cattelan’s first solo exhibition in Germany, opened on 10 September and runs to 7 March. Meanwhile, at Hamburger Bahnhof, Chanel is the title sponsor of Lina Lapelyte’s exhibition in the former railway departures hall.

Image courtesy Berlin Art Week. Photo: Joe Clark

These institutions are also running popular programmes aimed at audiences far outside the artworld – Biesenbach through performance, which draws thousands of young people who then stay for the exhibition, and Hamburger Bahnhof with its crowded musical nights.

“The cuts have hit the institutions,” says Philip Solf, an entrepreneur and owner of the Wilhelmshallen complex, which is hosting the art festival Hallen07. “They’re trying to become more American, because their fundraising is a perfectly normal means of financing an art operation. Hamburger Bahnhof very successfully raised funds through its gala at the start of this year. Nobody [in Berlin] would have done that before,” he says.

A Fair That Is Not a Fair

Up in a former foundry in the sleepy borough of Reinickendorf, the seventh edition of the ‘open format art festival’ Hallen07 is taking shape. The Berlinische Galerie’s GASAG prizewinner is showing a few metres from a Mercedes-Benz Art Collection presentation, which sits across from ChertLüdde’s Heike Kabisch installation. Artist Christian Jankowski has installed his Luftschlösser.

Sixteen commercial galleries are showing largescale work in the main halls, with Esther Schipper, Nagel Draxler and Mehdi Chouakri among them. They are joined by four corporate collections and several museums. Galleries pay EUR 5,000 to take part, the institutions pay nothing, and the organiser charges EUR 14 per ticket.

The festival was founded in 2020 by Philipp Solf, whose company owns the halls and runs conferences as its main business, together with seven galleries, as a COVID-era initiative to bring the community together. Of that founding group, only Alexander Levy and ChertLüdde remain. “None of us could go to the fairs. It was difficult to put on exhibitions in the galleries, and this was a way to come together again,” says Florian Lüdde, who has co-run ChertLüdde with its founder Jennifer Chert for ten of its 18 years.

Other initiatives appeared that year, among them the gallery guide Index and the coordinated opening day Sunday Open. “That idea of working locally and addressing the local audience really started in 2020,” Lüdde says. “Wilhelm Hallen is the only one of them that has actually survived.”

Image Courtesy Berlin Art Week. Photo: Joe Clark

He puts that down to the building – “the spaces are beautiful, they’re large, there’s something of the first ABC about it, or of Art Unlimited in Basel” – and to the format: “You have fewer galleries, and it’s essentially very balanced between galleries, institutions and collections, whether private or corporate. I don’t know of another format like it, at least not in Europe or in Germany.”

“Our company owns these halls, and conferences are our day-to-day business, similar to a classic trade-fair operation,” Solf explains. “In the end it was also marketing for us, to put this place on Berlin’s agenda.” But “it’s difficult terrain for galleries, because we aren’t a classic fair, where they have four walls,” he says. Galleries are encouraged to bring large scale installations: “we don’t arrange the art using a classic curatorial approach, but a dramaturgical one,” he says.

What the Galleries Get

Lüdde is transparent about what the EUR 5,000 participation fee buys. “In the first instance you don’t think it’s about selling at all,” he says. Asked whether that is an unusual position for a gallerist, he does not soften it: “There’s no point kidding yourself. If it happens, it’s great, but it isn’t really the reason you do it there. I think it’s genuinely for the place – or let’s say, for the city.”

What it does deliver is new names. The collectors ChertLüdde meets in Reinickendorf are, he says, “people who work for their money and have jobs – architects, doctors”, rather than the tech money the city was supposed to have generated. “They’re often people we don’t yet know. And each year you get to know one or two more. And that alone makes it worthwhile.”

In another shift, Berlin’s opera houses and theatres are drawing closer to the art scene. The Deutsche Oper opened Aviel Cahn’s tenure with a two-day festival curated by artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, while the new director at the Maxim Gorki Theatre opened her tenure with an exhibition. “That cross-genre quality and the interplay between different houses is very interesting. It enlivens the scene and is still a unique selling point for the city,” says Lüdde.

More Buyers, Fewer Artists

The economic backdrop for Berlin Art Week is decidedly mixed. Germany was the only European market to fall by double digits in 2025, down 10 percent, per the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2026, against Switzerland up 13 percent and France up 9 percent. German auction turnover fell 17 percent to $626 million, below Switzerland’s $828 million. Germany’s auction market is also far smaller than the UK’s $2.8 billion, leaving it with little exposure to the segment that grew in 2025: lots over $1m rose 21 percent, while works under $50,000 fell 2 percent in both value and volume. German dealer sales fell 4 percent.

A cut in VAT for artworks from 19 percent to 7 percent has benefited the art trade not just inside Germany but across the EU, as Lüdde notes. His own sales are up, including to foreign buyers, even in a year when the German market as a whole fell 10 percent.

Where Berlin’s Senate cut spending, federal funding rose by about 10 percent to €2.57 billion annually. The economics of the Berlin audience are shifting too. Solf sees an increasingly “well-off audience who are buying art. But you have fewer artists, because the spaces are disappearing.”

Lüdde also sees local collecting broadening, mostly among architects and doctors rather than buyers from the tech sector. Hallen brings new faces to the gallery, which makes the event worth doing. But asked whether Berlin can now support its galleries, he is plain that the fairs and other cities still matter more: “We still have to do that.”

Public institutions are behaving more like private ones, drawing increasingly on galas, sponsorship, tickets and other forms of private support. Yet the private sector is not replacing what has been lost. Seven editions in, Hallen made what Solf calls “a small plus” for the first time last year, and he would still like to have more artists at the heart of the presentation.

“There’s still an incredible force here, and there are great possibilities for expressing yourself artistically,” Lüdde says. “You just have to try to respond to the circumstances, and there isn’t only one answer to that. It’s simply a multitude of things we have to do.”