And this guy didn’t get away with it.
But nice try anyway.
German gallery fires employee for hanging own art in exhibition – A modern art gallery in Germany has fired an employee after discovering the budding artist had hung his own work in an exhibition.
The 51-year-old man had drilled two holes in a wall to mount his painting in Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne.
And I have the unfair advantage of not knowing anything about art.
William Blake’s Universe review – polymath’s paintings are outclassed by the Germans.
A wide-ranging exhibition on the English mystic makes unfortunate comparisons with his European contemporaries who, it turns out, are the far superior Romantics…
“Barry was hid. I am hid”, wrote Blake of their common struggle against the art establishment – but he probably didn’t even know his German contemporaries, Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich, existed. Runge scrutinises himself with sickly melancholy while Friedrich depicts himself with a bandaged eye, not covering any physical injury but suggesting his wounded soul.
Marginal art made by marginal artists, that is. Actually, the story’s about the marginal artists who are upset about being marginalized, for being marginal.
There is a difference here, of course, albeit a marginal one. I have an idea. Perhaps, just maybe I’m thinking, if they made their art better and not so marginally successful they could stop being so marginal and protest about something else a little less marginally interesting.
Earlier this week, stickers and posters started circulating in and around the city of Berlin that point to a disparaging fact: according to a group of arts activists, 75% of the artists being platformed at Berlin Gallery Weekend are white and male.
The stickers protesting the lack of diversity within the Berlin art scene feature a white sausage — known in German as Weisswurst — against the blue background of Berlin Gallery Weekend’s main logo and branding typography.
It’s gone completely wackodelic, captain. I don’t know how much longer the ship can take it!
Really enlightened Berlin activists (all activists are enlightened, of course, but you can tell the really enlightened ones by that weird gleam in their eyes) are now instructing us to become shoplifters for humanity. Upset about the conditions under which chocolate, bananas, orange juice and other products are harvested and/or produced, they are calling on us to begin stealing this stuff from our local supermarkets. The money we save by doing so will then be donated to those who deserve it. They mean us thieves are supposed to donate it, of course.
Think of Robin Hood except with a big coat at your local Safeway. Oh, the humanity of it all. It gives me goosebumps. No, wait. That’s a nasty rash. I’m going to run over to Aldi real quick and steal some skin creme or something. For the needy, you know? I’m just sayin’.
Schokolade, Bananen, Orangensaft: Viele Lebensmittel werden unter zweifelhaften Bedingungen hergestellt. Jetzt provozieren Aktivisten mit dem Aufruf, die Waren im Laden zu stehlen – und das gesparte Geld an die Produzenten zu spenden.
This time Germany’s way cool new censorship law (NetzDG or Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, if you prefer) has seen to it that a German artist’s works be effectively banned on Facebook and Instagram because, well, no one even bothered to explain why this time.
That road sign up there is a form of hate speech, you see. If you look closely, I mean. It’s sexist, right? Or is it racist (the dark part)? I don’t know but something is definitely distrubing about it and I think that the nameless employee who pressed on the Censor Sensor Button or whatever it is they call it was right on the money. Better safe than sorry, I say. When it doubt, censor it out. It’s good to know Big Bruder is watching.
“Über das Löschen von Beiträgen entscheiden irgendwelche Angestellte von privaten Firmen im Auftrag von Facebook und Instagram, die im Schnellverfahren entscheiden und nicht einmal irgendwelche Gründe für das Löschen nennen. Ich sehe die Freiheit im Internet dadurch mehr als nur bedroht, sie wird aus meiner Sicht dadurch ruiniert.”
Something called the Peace Wall, being part of Berlin’s Biennale, which will focus on political art this year (isn’t all art political?), has been constructed just down the road from Checkpoint Charlie by a Macedonian artist to “underline the gap between the upper Friedrichstrasse – characterized by fancy shops and expensive flats – and the poor southern part of the road which heads to the multi-ethnic Kreuzberg district.”
You know, it’s all about the gentrification “issue” and that terrible gap between rich and poor so prevalent in, uh, Germany.
“A wall is a symbol of division,” the artist says. “And is in itself capable of highlighting invisible gaps.”
True, I guess. But this lady clearly doesn’t know what the real Berlin Wall was about (the fewest out there who make comparisons like these do) or she would have chosen another object to work with. There were no invisible gaps about the Berlin Wall at all. It was for way real, concrete in the truest sense of the word, and had nothing at all to do with any of these fairy tale divisions artists living in free societies today have to struggle with all the time like they do, or seem to want to.
Hey, this is art. And art doesn’t have to have anything to do with reality, does it? Whether you call it political or not.
„Sie erreichen mit dieser Mauer, dass Sie diese Ecke erst recht sterben lassen.“
We’re artists. So give us your, I mean our money.
This is what Germans get for a billion euros of arts subsidies each and every year. Jiminy Crickets. I don’t even want to think about what they’d be getting for less.
Please, Berlin. For the love of all that is holy freakin’ cow. Keep those subsidies coming.
“Der Kulturinfarkt: Von allem zu viel und überall das Gleiche.”
An evicted group of about 20 subculture artist/activist types chained to the remains of Berlin’s graffiti-covered Tacheles alternative scene “living space” ruin is about to be forcibly dragged out kicking and screaming into German reality by black-clad gentrification special forces troops right here live on TV, I hope, but nobody can tell me when. Or on which channel or anything (maybe later in the Internetz?).
The group is defending “one of Berlin’s last bastions of alternative subculture, and are fighting eviction ahead of plans to develop it (the Tacheles) as an office and luxury apartments complex” and has to be dealt with accordingly, of course. After years of pussyfooting around with them first, I mean.
I would advise them not to let the door hit them on the way out but there are no doors at the Tacheles as they were surely used as firewood long ago during one of those quaint, Stone Age let’s-not-freeze-to-death-tonight gettogethers so popular with artist types there and elsewhere here in Berlin.
Tacheles “is just the latest in a long line of public spaces that have been lost to private investors” and will surely be missed by all, myself not included.
Darko stands behind an iron gate, his bare chest daubed in red paint with the words “victim of bank.”
PS: This German subculture is not to be confused with this other German subculture here.
Observing Hermann 