Arts Funding

Martin Roth, the director of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, unleashed a slew of stinging criticism aimed at the state of Saxony, saying its fiscal policies threaten the cultural landscape of the city. He made his comments in Thursday's issue of Die Zeit weekly.

Despite world-wide praise heaped on the newly reopened Grünes Gewölbe (Green Vault) gallery, the capital of Saxony can hardly keep its museums running, Roth wrote.

At the opening of the famed Green Vault, Roth noted, Saxony's prime minister, Georg Milbradt, compared Dresden's museum treasures to the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

But, Roth noted, the Louvre has 2,000 employees and the Met has 2,500, whereas Dresden will need to reduce its personnel from 450 down to 259 due to budget restrictions.

"It has long been impossible to run the museums in any normal way. We can only race, panting, through our days," Roth wrote in Die Zeit.

"Every year the state finance minister expects more profit, and museum subsidies are cut deeply," he wrote. As a result, he said, the successful series of museum exhibits that showed off the treasures of Dresden in metropolises like Paris, Moscow, New York, London and Rome, cannot continue.

Roth also said that the state seems only capable of funding new museums or expanding them, not running them, adding that the current finance ministry shows "mainly destructiveness or ignorance" when it comes to aesthetics.