Austria Will Allow Museums to Reopen in Mid-May, Making It Among the First European Countries to Ease Restrictions on Art Institutions

Museums and other cultural venues in Austria will be allowed to reopen in
mid-May, the country’s government announced today. And when they
do, they’ll be among the first major institutions in Europe to
reopen their doors after going into lockdown to prevent the spread
of the novel coronavirus last month. 

As of today, Austria counts more
than 14,500 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 431 deaths. The number of
new cases has declined significantly since late March, when the
country was experiencing nearly 1,000 new diagnoses each day.
Today, that number is down to the low hundreds—or less than one
percent. 

The country began easing its
restrictions earlier this week, as small shops were allowed to
reopen. Mid-sized stores and other businesses will follow on May 1,
while “presentation venues in the artistic and cultural field” and
“definitely museums” will be given the go-ahead in the middle of
the month, said Austria’s Vice Chancellor, Werner Kogler, in a news
conference. An exact date for the proposed reopenings has not yet
been set. 

State-run institutions such as
the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Belvedere, home to Gustav
Klimt’s masterpiece The Kiss, have agreed to postpone their openings to
July 1.

Meanwhile, museums in China are
also planning their own returns to normalcy. The UCCA Center for
Contemporary Art in Beijing announced this week that it will again
open its doors for the first time in four months, on May
21. 

To inaugurate the occasion, the
museum will mount “Meditations in an
Emergency,” an
exhibition conceived in response to the global health crisis,
featuring 20 artists from China.

“‘Meditations in an Emergency’
understands implicitly that it will be seen by people wearing
masks, standing two meters apart from one another,” reads the
description for the show. “People whose temperatures have just been
measured and do not exceed 37.2 degrees centigrade. People whose
data trails can verify that they have been in Beijing for the last
14 days.” 

The show will be the first held
in 2020 for the UCCA, which, like institutions across the world,
has had to dramatically reconfigure its calendar in the wake of the
crisis. All of the UCCA’s shows originally scheduled for this time,
including a solo exhibition for artist Cao Fei and a group show
that looks at the downtown New York art scene in the 1980s, have
been postponed to 2021, according to The Art
Newspaper. 

Other venues in the country such
as the China Art Museum, the Power Station of Art, and the Shanghai
Museum have been open
since mid-March, when
China first saw declining COVID numbers.

The post Austria Will Allow Museums to Reopen in Mid-May,
Making It Among the First European Countries to Ease Restrictions
on Art Institutions appeared first on artnet News.