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Essays on Macbeth Ambition

Hook examples for macbeth ambition essays, anecdotal hook.

Picture a man driven to the brink of madness by his insatiable ambition, a descent into darkness fueled by power. This is the tragic tale of Macbeth.

Question Hook

What happens when ambition blinds one to the consequences of their actions? Macbeth's journey from a valiant warrior to a ruthless tyrant poses this thought-provoking question.

Quotation Hook

"I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none." — Macbeth. Explore the depths of ambition through the words of Shakespeare's iconic character.

Statistical or Factual Hook

Ambition is a central theme in Shakespeare's "Macbeth," a tragedy first performed in 1606. Its exploration of ambition's consequences remains relevant to this day.

Definition Hook

What defines the ambition that leads to greatness or destruction? "Macbeth" serves as a literary mirror reflecting the complexities of this human trait.

Rhetorical Question Hook

Can ambition be both a driving force and a destructive obsession? The story of Macbeth and his unrelenting ambition provides a compelling answer.

Historical Hook

Step into the world of medieval Scotland, where ambition for power and titles was a constant struggle. Explore the historical context that influenced Shakespeare's play.

Contrast Hook

Contrast the noble aspirations of Macbeth at the beginning of the play with the ruthless ambition that consumes him. The transformation is a testament to the play's exploration of ambition.

Narrative Hook

Embark on Macbeth's journey from a loyal subject to a paranoid ruler. His narrative is a cautionary tale of ambition's perilous path.

Shocking Statement Hook

Prepare to witness a descent into madness and moral decay as Macbeth's ambition spirals out of control. The consequences are as shocking as they are tragic.

Blind Ambition in Macbeth

Lady macbeth: the destructive nature of unchecked ambition, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

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Corruption and Corruption in Macbeth

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The Basic Elements of Ambition and Evil in The Story of Macbeth by William Shakespeare

The dangers of ambition in william shakespeare's macbeth, how ambition drives macbeth into downfall in shakespeare’s play, ambition and power in shakespeare’s macbeth, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

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The Effects of Uncontrolled Ambition in Shakespeare's Macbeth

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William Shakespeare

"I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and falls on th’ other." With this phrase, Macbeth makes it clear that he is aware of the power of ambition, which can make people rush and make mistakes. He clearly states his lack of motivation and does not deny the fact that now he is driven only by ambition.

The main theme of Macbeth is the destruction that occurs in a person because of his ambition. Ambition makes the protagonist overstep moral principles, which ultimately makes him even more paranoid and anxious.

1. LOWRANCE, B. (2012). “MODERN ECSTASY”: “MACBETH” AND THE MEANING OF THE POLITICAL. ELH, 79(4), 823–849. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/23356185) 2. Zambrano, A. L. (1974). Throne of Blood": Kurosawa's" Macbeth. Literature/Film Quarterly, 2(3), 262-274. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/43795658) 3. Smidt, K. (1969). Two aspects of ambition in Elizabethan tragedy: Doctor Faustas and Macbeth. English Studies, 50(1-6), 235-248. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00138386908597335?journalCode=nest20) 4. Carlisle, C. J. (1983). Helen Faucit's Lady Macbeth. Shakespeare Studies, 16, 205. (https://www.proquest.com/openview/f32bc8310f2789df4e15d81ed2db2a4b/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1819311) 5. McPherson, H. (2000). Masculinity, Femininity, and the Tragic Sublime: Reinventing Lady Macbeth. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 29(1), 299-333. (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/267252/summary) 6. Draper, J. W. (1941). Lady Macbeth. Psychoanalytic Review, 28(4), 479-486. (https://pep-web.org/browse/document/PSAR.028.0479A) 7. Williams, E. W. (1973). In Defense of Lady Macbeth. Shakespeare Quarterly, 24(2), 221-223. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2868860) 8. Alfar, C. L. (1998). 'Blood will have blood:'Power, Performance, and Lady Macbeth's Gender Trouble. Jx: A Journal in Culture and Criticism, 2(2), 179-207. (https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/mla:931/) 9. Reyes, C., & Kenny, A. (2020). Shakespeare's Violent Women: A Feminist Analysis Of Lady Macbeth. UC Riverside Undergraduate Research Journal, 14(1). (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/43v335x5) 10. Gerwig, G. W. (2002). Lady Macbeth. Shakespearean Criticism, 69. (https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1420046125&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=08839123&p=LitRC&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E194c4eda)

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Ambition Essay on Macbeth

This essay will discuss the theme of ambition in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” analyzing how ambition drives the characters’ actions and the play’s tragic outcome. You can also find more related free essay samples at PapersOwl about Ambition.

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Macbeth, by nature, is an ambitious and passionate person which is what a great leader entails but when that ambition is directed towards greed and power, another side of Macbeth begins to surface. A side that shows the deterioration of Macbeth as a character. Various events and people in the play influenced Macbeths decision making and in turn lead to his character change.

The prophecies brought by the three witches reveals Macbeths curiosity which consumes his thoughts when the first prediction, that Macbeth shall be “Thane of Cawdor”, is fulfilled.

These prophecies fed Macbeths desire for kingly power and this urged him on to commit the murder of Duncan in order to take his place as king, “My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, shakes so my single state of man”. The predictions take control over Macbeths mind as he is uncertain of whether or not they mean well, “this supernatural soliciting cannot be ill; cannot be good” he constantly questions that if it is good then “why do I yield to that suggestion whose horrid image do unfix my hair”. Macbeths thirst for power makes him take action in the cruellest of ways which ultimately turns him into a killer.

Lady Macbeth uses manipulation to persuade Macbeth into doing whatever she needs him to do, one of those things is murdering Duncan. Macbeth comes to the conclusion that he no longer wants to kill Duncan and they “will proceed no further in this business”. Unfortunately for him, he has one weakness, Lady Macbeth and her manipulative ways. She pushes him to commit the murder of Duncan by questioning Macbeths honour as a man and his love for her by saying that “from this time such I account thy love” and “art thou afeard to be the same in thine own act of valour as thou art desire?” As soon as Macbeth gives in, it is evident that he is one who holds great pride in his manhood and honour as well as his love and obedience to Lady Macbeth.

Over the course of the play and after the various events that took place in Macbeths life, the deterioration was clearly visible from the moment when he starts to hallucinate after the murder of Banquo took place. Macbeths guilt takes over as he hallucinates, he sees Banquo’s ghost before him and he start to rage and make a scene about it. At this point, his mental state is at its lowest and the deterioration begins.

Macbeth started out as the brave and noble man on the battle field as well as a loyal member of the royal team but his ambitions got a hold of him when his character was tested through various ways throughout the play. By the end of the play, Macbeth has completely transformed into someone who solves every problem with a trail of blood to follow.

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Essay Sample about Macbeth’s Ambition

In the play Macbeth by Shakespeare, the main character, Macbeth, is controlled by his overgrown ambition.  He is determined to do whatever it takes to become king of Scotland. His ambition forces him to kill, slaughter, and disassemble families to protect his throne.

Macbeth’s ambition mostly comes from his wife and the three witches. The witches tell him three prophecies. He shall be Thane of Cowdor, King, and Banquo’s sons shall be king (Shakespeare Act I iii, 50-70). Fulfilling his prophecies the king’s knights tell Macbeth on the battlefield that he has been named the Thane of Cowdor. As well, his wife hightens his ambition by persuading him to kill Duncan and take his crown. Thus fulfilling the prophecy that he will be king.

In the play Macbeth, ambition affects Macbeth and his wife in negative ways. Macbeth is forced to change his ways and become ruthless. He kills families and children all for the protection of his crown and legacy. Although he becomes ruthless he still feels guilty of his deeds stating, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine”(Shakespeare Act II ii, 55-61) This explains that he is guilty of his deeds. Ambition also affects Macbeth’s wife, Lady Macbeth. Although she persuades Macbeth into killing Duncan she suffers from a mental sickness due to this where she reenacts the killing of Duncan when she sleeps.

In the play some characters can resist the allure of ambition while others cannot. For example, Banquo can resist the allure of ambition. He doesn’t believe the witches' prophecy towards him while Macbeth falls for their prophecies. Believing these prophecies Macbeth cannot withstand the temptation of his ambition to become king and could not be stopped. As well, Macbeth cannot resist the allure of ambition when Macduff comes to kill him. He decides to kill his entire family and village to ensure the protection of his throne. 

The play Macbeth is progressed by ambition. Without it the story would have never progressed. As well, Macbeth would have never committed the murder of King Duncan and Lady Macbeth would have never perished. Also, Macbeth would have never endangered Scotland or killed Banquo. Without ambition Macbeth would have continued his life on the battlefield and would not have died by Macduff’s hands. Macduff would have never come to Scotland without ambition present in the play and Banquo’s son would have never fled to England and would have become the King of Scotland. 

In the play Macbeth ambition is a main theme. Ambition can be traced throughout the story to the main characters. Our main character Macbeth can be traced by ambition. His actions are of ambition and ambition alone. He cannot change his ambitious ways and proceeds to use his ambition to protect his crown for his future generations until his gruesome and well deserved death.

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Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid: an invigorating romp that cleaves to the real history of Macbeth’s wife

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“Out, damned spot,” Lady Macbeth famously says as she wrings her hands, attempting to remove a bloodstain her guilt-ridden mind has conjured. Her hands are clean in reality, but her conscience is not. Ambition and cunning drove her to influence her husband, Macbeth, to murder their king – and now that it is done, the crime haunts her.

Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most well-known and powerful female characters. She is often seen as a smart, ruthless figure, but one who miscalculates what she can get away with. In her new book Queen Macbeth, Val McDermid takes on this formidable character in a reimagining of Shakespeare’s archetypal scheming wife. But McDermid’s version is full of surprises.

First, by calling her book Queen Macbeth, McDermid shifts readers’ perceptions and emphasises the major historical role that the real-life “Lady Macbeth” played in the complex network of political units making up early medieval Scotland. The second surprise is that McDermid’s Queen Macbeth is still alive after the final defeat of her husband’s forces. She did not “die hereafter”, as Shakespeare says, after all.

Once you’ve processed these surprises from the first few pages, prepare for more: Queen Macbeth rousingly plays with Shakespeare and the medieval histories that shaped his play, Macbeth. But it makes a serious point too: what do we really know about Gruoch – the historical wife of the historical Macbeth – and how has her story been hijacked?

McDermid’s short, sharp novel does everything it can to upset the narrative we think we know to tell us a magical new story.

Gruoch and her companions

Some of the most famous lines from Macbeth are delivered by the “witches” or “weird sisters”. “Double, double toil and trouble: Fire burn, and cauldron bubble … By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.”

McDermid recasts these characters in her tale as Queen Gruoch’s companions Aife, Ligach and Eithne, the women who wait on her and run her household. They care for her clothes and wash her, monitor her health and support her political intrigues. Instead of being outcast demonic hags, they are just ordinary women – as McDermid makes clear in this book, she believes all accused “witches” were.

Aife is a clever baker and Ligach has a knack for taming and handling animals. But it is Eithne who has the most witch-like abilities of the three: she is a seer and herbalist, skilled with not just lavender and rosemary but more politically useful plants like white poppy and henbane , which put talkative mouths to sleep. This is handy because Gruoch starts the novel on the run from her enemies. She needs to escape and travel across Scotland to seek sanctuary with her husband’s allies on the Isle of Mull.

The peril of this escape and journey gives the novel its suspense and is cunningly interwoven with flashbacks to Gruoch’s earlier life.

An unhappy union

True to history, she begins her adult life as the wife of another man – Gille Coemgáin, the Mormaer or Earl of Moray.

It’s this first unhappy union, the book testifies, that gives her some of the characteristics we associate with Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. McDermid’s exploration brings new life and meaning to the woman we think we know.

Yes, Gruoch is a clever politician who ruthlessly embraces the possibility of change, but her motivation is as much self-preservation as ambition. Yes, she will have no children with Macbeth (whom she marries after Gille is killed), but that is also explained by her life with Gille – a plot point that draws on established historical fact.

Many real-life, researched aspects of the real Gruoch’s story appear in the novel in this way – as interpretations and allusions. I wondered about the historical plausibility of a fugitive queen hiding successfully for years in a barn before embarking on her flight to Mull, but the novel doesn’t present itself as a historical textbook, so why not?

And as Gruoch’s story goes on, fantastical elements strengthen until a final surprise – and one that I very much enjoyed, because it was completely unexpected. I also liked the repeated echoes of Shakespeare’s Macbeth throughout the text. There’s lots of courage screwed to the sticking place, and lots of tingling in Eithne’s thumbs, as in the play.

Queen Macbeth made me smile. It’s not history, but it’s not wholly fictional either. It’s highly relevant to modern Scotland with a nod to present-day political struggles and the role of women within them.

In the book’s acknowledgements, Nicola Sturgeon is credited with resolving a plot point for McDermid, and it was hard not to see in Gruoch a more colourful version of the SNP ex-first minister’s story: a female leader pursued as her successors fall out among themselves.

The novel is dedicated to Linda Riley , a campaigner for lesbian visibility and rights, with a wry comment about the routine misrepresentation of women in public life. I enjoyed McDermid’s pushy, playful rewriting of Shakespeare and Scottish history in the context of the hurly-burly present.

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Ralph Fiennes Sidles His Way Into Power as Macbeth

By Helen Shaw

Simply getting to the almost totally sold-out monster hit “Macbeth” in Washington, D.C., which has already been staged in Liverpool, London, and Edinburgh, contains its own, particular adventure. Produced in the capital by the Shakespeare Theatre Company, which has two venues in D.C., the show is actually being mounted offsite, in an old television soundstage, basically a cavernous concrete hangar in one of the city’s industrial stretches. (This is perhaps why New York doesn’t get a stop on the “Macbeth” tour—our theatrical stock is insufficiently gritty.) Outside, audience members negotiate a wilderness of warehouses and big-box parking lots; inside, we spend time in a maze of dark, clubby rooms made luxe with velvety drapes. Finally, we walk to our seats via a path through a hyperrealistic no man’s land: rubble, the sound of distant bombs, and a soldier with a thousand-yard stare, sitting in front of a burnt-out car beneath a stunned and flickering street light.

Even just that lone taste of immersion promises both sensation and intimacy. The director Simon Godwin (who is also S.T.C.’s artistic director and an associate director at London’s National Theatre) delivers on the latter: the purpose-built theatre inside the more than forty-thousand-foot studio is actually relatively small, so the play’s stars—Ralph Fiennes as Macbeth and Indira Varma as his Lady—seem quite close. Both actors are also familiar, and come cloaked in associations of unalloyed evil and political homicide, respectively. Fiennes was nominated for an Oscar for his role as the Nazi Amon Göth in “Schindler’s List,” and is feared by legions of moviegoers for his viper-faced Voldemort in the “Harry Potter” films; Varma played the scheming mother of the murderous Sand Snakes on “Game of Thrones.” Of course this slithering pair will team up to kill their liege, King Duncan (Keith Fleming), at the vague prompting of three fortune-telling witches.

Up-to-date military trappings have become de rigueur when stars take on Shakespeare: Daniel Craig donned army fatigues for an Off Broadway production of “Othello”; Florence Pugh did the same, in a televised adaptation of “King Lear,” as did Fiennes himself, in his own film of “Coriolanus,” from 2011. This production, with costumes designed by Frankie Bradshaw, is no exception, but here, Fiennes, playing the ambitious Scottish thane, wants us to think he’s unworthy of his combat boots. His obsequious, unmilitary physicality, particularly in the first hour and a half of the play, can be extreme: he sneaks and sidles; he rotates his arms so that they swing like a monkey’s; he keeps his shoulders high and tucks his hips, appearing to recede even as he moves forward. In a company full of ramrod-straight spines, his convex slump makes him look like the one guy who hasn’t gone through basic training. (Maybe he had bone spurs?) Some of his intentionally strange performance is poor stagecraft: Godwin allows Fiennes to occasionally mime his lines, to a sometimes ridiculous degree. When Macbeth, whose guilt is making him insomniac, bemoans the loss of “sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,” for example, Fiennes helpfully indicates his own sleeve. At least he didn’t mime “sleep.”

To misquote the wrong Shakespeare play, there’s method in much of this madness. Fiennes’s weedy Macbeth is no alpha, but nonetheless he gets what he wants. Nearly half a millennium after Shakespeare’s death, we still recognize the trend of absurd, unqualified leaders who accept the reins of power from sleepwalking aristocrats. In Washington, in an election year, one’s thoughts on that topic form an extra drumbeat underneath the text. Godwin’s contemporary interpretation seems to lean toward Russia—the doomed King Duncan wears fur on the collar of his royal greatcoat—and when Duncan passes by bluff, capable Banquo (Steffan Rhodri) to reward oily Macbeth for putting down a rebellion, it immediately seems suspicious. Is this how Duncan maintains power? Putin reportedly promotes weak men; perhaps, we think, Duncan does, too.

Godwin’s political reading is savvy, but the famously magical elements of the play don’t always seem to have the full force of his attention. The witches who corrupt Macbeth’s ready mind, wearing bleach-stained overalls and fingerless gloves while lounging about on the set’s faux-concrete stairs, for instance, look less like “midnight hags” than bored art students. The sound designer Christopher Shutt does fill the air with eerie screeches and compositions by Asaf Zohar that go heavy on the spooky strings, but so much reliance is placed on these atmospheric elements that they grow obtrusive. The Macbeths’ palace at Dunsinane is represented as a fancy brutalist condo—the set, with gray stairs leading to frosted glass doors, was also designed by Bradshaw—and in one underwhelming attempt at spectacle, a trickle of red-tinged water drips down its walls. What was probably envisioned as a tide of blood just looks like a problem with rising damp.

The performances Godwin elicits from his actors are more daring. Varma’s Lady Macbeth is brusque and goal-oriented, capable of bustling her sometimes balky spouse into action. She’s not overtly malevolent but, rather, she’s a real housewife intent on getting tasks—kill a king, order a crown—ticked off her checklist. (Varma’s touch with the language is exquisitely deft; she lets us see the moment her slow-moving conscience finally catches up to her too-efficient haste.) Godwin is offering a “banality of evil” reading of the gory old tragedy, which requires his leads to shuck off a great deal of their movie-star majesty. When Hannah Arendt was writing about the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, she noted that the Nazi war criminal “was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.” His mind, she saw, had been smoothed by little sayings that allowed him to excuse his own monstrosity. Macbeth, having met the witches in what is surely the most astonishing encounter of his life, says, “Come what come may / Time, and the hour, runs through the roughest day.” Audaciously, Godwin and Fiennes interpret Shakespeare’s aphorism as the kind of meaningless cant that lubricates a man’s internal slide toward murder. At last, when Fiennes reaches the banquet scene at the play’s midpoint, and we see his nervous attempts at playing both gracious host and confident king, all his weird, capering, Ed Grimley-style anxiousness clicks into place. Ah, of course. Even after the four-star generals quit the cabinet, insecure clowns are the ones who will kill us all.

After intermission, the show gallops toward its ending. The adaptation, by Emily Burns, has cut a comic character and increased the number of defections from Macbeth’s administration, and Fiennes, as if shocked by his character’s loneliness, finally begins to deliver his speeches with simultaneous introspection and command. The culminating fights are fantastic, conducted not with swords but with machetes, which clang away in the smoky dark. So it’s odd that what I’ll actually remember from this blockbuster show is a moment of silence.

One of the puzzles of staging “Macbeth”—harder to solve than how to dress the witches—is the Macduff issue. Macduff (played here by Ben Turner) is one of Macbeth’s rough equals, another thane, but one who puts the interests of Scotland above personal ambition. Shakespeare reveals his villain-protagonist’s foil late in the plot: Macduff only stands out from a miscellaneous herd of Scottish lairds once Macbeth sends assassins after his family. Why should this be the guy to run Macbeth to earth and not, say, one of Duncan’s much aggrieved sons? To answer that question, Godwin finds a way to rebalance the play.

He does it entirely through timing. When, quite late in the drama, a man brings Macduff the news of his wife and children’s slaughter, Shakespeare gives the traveller an odd, misleading message to deliver: he first assures Macduff that his family is well, and then slowly, oblique phrase by oblique phrase, reveals that they are gone. Godwin has Turner stand stock still and silent, for what feels like minutes, as he takes in the information. He asks a clarifying question, then again falls silent. The ambient cello and night owls are quiet, for once, and the pace, at last, rests. Turner is nailed to the spot—“What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam / At one fell swoop?” Macduff plants himself like the steady leg of a compass, and the whole play must pivot around him. Agitated, scampering Macbeth doesn’t know it off in Dunsinane, but his headlong rush to power has been stopped, here, by one unmoving man. ♦

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A Smooth-Running Gallery Weekend Amid a Shaken Berlin Art Scene

The annual event brings art collectors to the city, but the spirit of freedom that draws artists there has been damaged by the fallout from the Oct. 7 attacks.

By Scott Reyburn

Reporting from Berlin

Berlin’s international reputation as a liberal, relaxed city that nurtures artists’ freedom to express whatever they want is under threat. The art scene here has been roiled by protests, cancellations and boycotts after the Oct. 7 attacks in southern Israel, and many artists now say that a climate of fear has replaced the city’s anything-goes vibe.

But at the 20th edition of Gallery Weekend Berlin , the annual showcase for the city’s contemporary art dealerships that concluded Sunday, it was business as usual, with no sign of the clashes that have been shaking the cultural sector.

Those conflicts — between institutions funded by the German government, which has staunchly supported Israel, and artists wishing to show solidarity with Palestinians — were a frequent topic of conversation at the event’s 1,000-guest dinner in the spectacular Neue Nationalgalerie on Saturday. Yet few organizers or participants wanted to discuss the situation in interviews.

“We need to react with intelligence, not emotion,” said Esther Schipper , one of the three dealers who founded Gallery Weekend 20 years ago. Otherwise, like other participating dealers, she declined to comment on the discord in Berlin’s art world.

In 2005, Berlin was the first city to offer a formal program of coordinated gallery shows as an alternative to a commercial art fair. Initially, it featured 21 dealers; this year, there were 55. The idea has caught on and there are now more than 20 gallery weekends scattered across the globe, from Los Angeles to Dublin to Beijing .

Unlike competing art world hubs, such as New York, London and Paris, Berlin doesn’t have any international auction houses or fairs, or a large client base of super-wealthy residents. But according to the city’s Department for Culture and Social Cohesion, it does have an estimated 20,000 professional artists living here. Their creative energy, and that of exhibiting foreign artists, has been a draw for visiting collectors.

“Unlike New York, there’s zero pressure to buy, and you can put together a serious collection for not a lot of money,” the Vancouver-based collector Marshall Webb said of Gallery Weekend. He added that, in his view, the Berlin event remained the pick of the international offerings in this format.

North American accents weren’t heard as often in the participating galleries as in recent years. Dealers said that having the recent preview of the Venice Biennale among this year’s competing attractions had reduced the number of international visitors.

“Wars don’t help,” said Lena Zimmermann, a partner at Galerie Buchholz, which had plenty of foot traffic, albeit mostly German-speaking, on Saturday at an exhibition of photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans , one of Berlin’s local superstar artists.

The show featured more than 70 images, mostly new, including landscape and still-life studies Tillmans made on recent visits to Silicon Valley and Mongolia. Echoing the current experience of many art dealers, Zimmerman said that business for Galerie Buchholz had been “a bit slower since Covid,” but the gallery did sell two large versions of Tillmans’s “San Francisco Still Life,” priced at about $115,000, to American and European collectors, she said.

There were also early sales at a conceptual group show of works by five young Asian women artists at Sprüth Magers. Curated by the gallery’s senior director Shi-Ne Oh, this included a slowly self-destructing concrete wall sculpture by Gala Porras-Kim and an aquarium filled with concrete cactus sculptures by Zhang Ruyi.

“Everyone says it’s a museum show, but people are buying,” Shi-Ne said. About 40 percent of the works sold during Gallery Weekend for prices between 15,000 euros and €150,000, or around $16,000 to $160,000, according to the gallery.

For some international artists who have made their homes in Berlin, the upheavals of the last six months have been difficult to understand. Debates around whether artists should be free to align themselves with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, which Germany’s Parliament has officially designated as antisemitic , had been simmering for years. But since Oct. 7, some artists have said that they lost opportunities at state-funded institutions after expressing simple support for the Palestinian cause.

“I’m from the U.K. It’s been an adjustment for me to realize the German position,” said the artist Angharad Williams, who has been living in Berlin since 2020.

“I’m worried. Many friends have had events canceled. It’s closing down conversations that are important. It feels extremely regressive,” Williams said. “Many artists have told me they’re planning on leaving. Berlin will suffer, and is already,” she added. “I’m scared of expressing my opinions.”

For Gallery Weekend, the up-and-coming dealership Schiefe Zähne (“Crooked Teeth”) was showing new works by Williams in a range of media inspired by what she sees on the streets of today’s Berlin. Large spray-painted panels that memorialize the city’s once-ubiquitous graffiti culture, now threatened by gentrification, were priced around $16,000 each.

Antonia Ruder, Gallery Weekend Berlin’s new director, declined to comment in an interview on the issues fracturing the city’s creative landscape. However, when asked if Berlin’s state government, which is the event’s largest sponsor, had censored any elements of this year’s event, Ruder said: “Totally not. It was never ever a point of discussion.”

Ruder, a former head of communications at Berlin’s Schaubühne theater, said she had no plans to change or expand the 20-year-old event. “The format is still doing very well,” Ruder said. “The art world is changing rapidly,” but Berlin’s gallery scene is “very strong,” she added.

The huge number of artists living in the city is what gives Berlin its strength as an art hub. But with rents soaring as the city becomes ever more gentrified, can Berlin continue to be a magnet for artistic talent if artists don’t feel free to say what they want to say?

Scott Reyburn is a London-based freelance journalist who writes about the art world, artists and their markets. More about Scott Reyburn

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