Vienna Pure and Lust Lite

Vienna is in these days. For the moment at least. Spring turned out to be a great season for Austrian culture in New York. Uptown, the Neue Gallerie continues to draw record crowds. Its elegant collection of pre-apocalyptic decadence—iconized by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele and framed by the ascetic functionalism of Josef Hoffmann's and Koloman Moser's Wiener Werkstätte furniture pieces and household objects—highlights the sophisticated tastes associated with Upper East Side wealth. But it's not the Klimts and the Schieles or the exquisite special exhibition of Oskar Kokoschka's early portraits that enjoy such popularity. It's the gallery's Café Sabarski that has become the hot spot of the Vienna experience (in New York). People have been lining up for blocks to get a seat at the marble-topped tables in the wood-paneled fin de siècle ambience of a Viennese coffeehouse. They can order a Mélange and Sachertorte or Apfelstrudel with or without Schlag at uptown prices that are the culinary equivalent to the value of the works displayed across the hall. Here culture is restored (or at least simulated) as membership in a privileged elite.

The café seats only about sixty people. Those waiting in line may observe those already seated through a glass-paneled door. It functions as a frame that simulates intimacy while opening the scene to the gaze of the excluded; in turn it becomes a picture that is part of the exhibition. While waiting and watching in line, observers can rehearse their own performance in the exclusive period space. The scenario inadvertently reflects the self-conscious mise-en-scène of Vienna's coffeehouses, each of which draws its own group of insiders—writers or journalists, actors or artists. The period decor places its habitués in the context of a long tradition, both rich and troublesome, against which many of them fight in their own artistic or intellectual pursuits. Their designated cafés offer Vienna's public figures, their hangers on, and their mimics both a home in tradition and a site in which to set themselves up against it. In Vienna's cafés you can have your cake and eat it, too.

The Austrian Cultural Forum opened to great acclaim its new building at 11 East 52nd Street. Designed by Raimund Abraham, it sparked much discussion about contemporary architecture and the function of (high) culture (neglected by the United States) in international diplomacy. Abraham's postmodern response to Bauhaus and town house, the narrow, multiangled structure of shimmering surfaces protrudes like an odd quartz formation squeezed between the adjacent flat facades. User-friendly it is not. Negotiating its twenty or so one-room floors (the top floors were not yet finished at the official opening) is as challenging as exploring a cavernous alpine peak. I only got to the fourteenth floor, and that by mistake (the key card was not coded correctly), which caused some frenzy among those responsible for visitors in the small, four-person elevator. There is another very narrow, private elevator for the director that holds a maximum load of one mildly overweight citizen without any packages. The staircase is closed except for emergencies. Even staff members have to use the one official elevator to get to their coworkers, which considerably slows down efficiency and makes for what cynics might call a typically Austrian working climate, between Gemütlichkeit and neurosis. The elevator access to the theater on the second floor leads directly onto the stage, which creates obvious problems for latecomers. Another steep staircase leads to the back of the theater, making it very difficult, if not impossible, for the elderly, among them the surviving refugees who still make up an important part of the Forum's audience.

In a programmatic effort to draw younger generations, many presentations for the three-month nonstop opening festivities were readings of plays and novels by twentieth-century and contemporary Austrian authors such as Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede...