A short blast of Vienna

I visited Vienna. Beautiful. The place is coming down with statues and fountains. If you like those sort of things; it's great. If you don't like things of that sort; avoid.



The main goal of the visit was to see exhibitions of work by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimpt. Mission accomplished. There are only so many hours in a day, and realisticly only so muany of them that most people can give to spending in a museum. This was a shame as we found that the Muzeum Quartier was teaming with the bloody things.



Of the two main choices we opted for the Leopold museum as oppossed to the contemporary museum. We did find strength dn time to dedicate to quartier21 though ad found that a fab way to spend a slice of an afternoon.



I spent a fair amount of time in Electric Avenue, oggling the various stores and mini exhibitions.

Transforming Freedom had a projection of a lecture on the topic of freedom of information, when I tuned in the speaker was waxing on the subject of torrent sites being closed and how this was bad for the future of artists everwhere.




The Stash (Beyond Collectables is their second title - implying that the material they exhibit is beyond any sane collectors desire to go near it, or it's too precious to consider asking to add it to a collection - I was unsure) was hosting a sort of fashion collection. It had some of the bad elements of a student show; lack of common theme, wildly different presentation and construction qualities,but there was something otherwordly about a few of the creations that made me smile.



This was after being at play.fm. The electronic music scene in Austria is pretty happening according to the information on their site and this is backed up by the collection available at Musiktank. I decided that there was something a little sad about the place. It had huge amounts of flyers for a wide variety of clubs (none of which, surprisingly, had anything on that Saturday evening?!?) and it had free access to computers and great big photos of artists who'd played there previously. It was scarily quiet though. A radio station should have more of a buzz about it. Maybe it was quiet because of the time of day we arrived...




Musiktank however semed a little more alive, with a selection of Mac tapping coffee drinkers chatting outside. Musiktank is a record store with a bit of a difference. There are shelves full of tubs of records, but they're not organised in a way that immediately invites a customer to come in and browse through the stock. It's more like a reference library, but you can purchase your own custom compilation CD by looking through their catalogue on their computers and choosing from their database of rare and deleted tracks.



Other highlights of the visit included a huge sport fair in the park. A large street market with all sorts of food, bric-a-brac, clothing, antiques, performance art, and music. A rose garden with free novels left out on the benches for anyone to pick up and read. Bars which are a little different from the usual 'herna' style mini pubs which are all over the Czech Republic.