Are artists abandoning Switzerland?

Yesterday, I had two conversations which made me aware that artists are abandoning Switzerland.

The first was with a woman who is a singer and songwriter, who said that the space for creativity was being shrunk in Switzerland. When I asked in what way, she replied that Switzerland was too uniformly expensive. In other countries, even the most expensive cities, such as New York, have areas which are run down and where artists can live. But, as artists gather there, they gradually made the area attractive because small theatres and galleries come up there, though of course then gentrifictaion starts, making it necessary for artists to eventually move to other areas. So where was this woman artist moving to? Berlin.

The second was with a man whose wife is a prominent artist. The couple is based in Switzerland, but the wife goes for work-related travel to Berlin, and he unwittingly confirmed that Berlin is becoming the mecca for artists at least in the German-speaking world.

Great for Berlin. Bad for Switzerland.

While Switzerland has financial policies that attract the most succesful artists in the world to Switzerland for financial reasons, does it not seem very short-sighted to have a complete absence of thinking about a cultural policy that helps to to keep young Swiss artists here?