Net Watch

Thanks to Joerg Haider’s Freedom Party, Vienna has two new schools of art: the small and bitter Get-Out-Now movement and the larger, angrier Stay-and-Fight club. The first wants a complete art blockade of Austria to protest the inclusion of Mr Haider’s right-wing anti-immigrant party in a coalition government. The latter plans to stay and protest his ascendancy.

For once artists are siding with the power elite. Although he is a partner in a government with a typical conservative platform, Mr Haider earlier made statements, especially those seen as sympathetic to the Third Reich, that so upset the European Union that 14 countries have downgraded diplomatic relations with Austria. However feared he is by liberals, it’s not clear that Mr Haider poses any threat to the arts. Although artists here are even more careless than politicians about tossing off blithe references to Nazism, no one in the public debate yet suggests that Mr Haider’s party would crack down on anyone he disliked or even cut the generous government subsidies that Austrian gives artists.