The return of the Kunstkammern. What Vienna has in common with Dresden

Ten years ago, the redesigned Vienna Kunstkammer was reopened. The establishment of today's Grünes Gewölbe in Dresden began three hundred years ago. The two unique collections are linked by their long histories, the political dependencies of their creators, similarly ambitious collectors and dynastic strategies. Many works of art in Dresden have their counterparts in Vienna and vice versa. Whether glorified as a ‘fairy palace’ or criticised as a ‘forest of display cases’, a look at changing presentation concepts in the 19th and 20th centuries reveals further networks of relationships, right up to the most recent stagings of the collections and interventions by Wes Anderson and Juman Malouf, Mark Dion or Olaf Nicolai. There has never been so much Kunstkammer.