The museum-ification of Europe continues unabated. I can't get into the mind of the people who thought that this award was a good idea, much less anyone who'd feel happy about receiving it (it's usually not the 'real' locals anyway, but people who are close enough to feel some connection but far enough to not be exposed to the reality; or people with financial interests).
The museum treatment is the end for any artform, IMHO; it's petrification. Did rock'n'roll grow and move and thrive after its Hall of Fame opened? I suppose there was grunge.
It freezes the artform in a certain state (and by who and how is that state chosen?) and defines it that way for eternity. That's death - growth and change are ended; like the dearly departed it's defined by memories of it, not who it will be today or tomorrow; it's no longer doing something new that will surprise you or make you uncomfortable; it's sometimes reenacted by people who try to represent it, who miss the point of art - to express something of your own.
This is not a museum. It doesn't prevent new things from happening or old things from closing down, although it may provide some legal weight to prevent them from being forced to close down or not happen (e.g. because the CDU wants to build a highway through the poor part of town, as it does right now).
Demoscene is on the same list, but that doesn't mean UNESCO is forcing demoparties to run a certain way or forcing demosceners to make demos a certain way or that any of it became a museum. It just means the government shouldn't try to shut it down. Maybe it enables the government to make some official demo archive in the future or something, but what's wrong with that? A demo museum can exist at the same time as an active scene, just like museums about the past of Berlin can exist at the same time as Berlin exists, and the same in techno.
