And sometimes you can’t get away with it.
Israel, Jews voice ‘disgust’ over antisemitic imagery at German art festival – Hateful caricatures feature at Documenta art fair, despite controversy; German culture minister urges curators to ‘draw the necessary conclusions.’
“Artistic freedom ends where xenophobia begins.”
Graffiti or culture?
Berlin show pays homage to 50 years of graffiti culture – One of the longest open-air exhibitions, which celebrates 50 years of graffiti history, opened Thursday in Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm boulevard.
Spanning a 1.2-kilometer strip of the well-known avenue, “All we wrote – the Passion of Graffiti” is a journey through the history of graffiti culture, from its marginal beginnings in New York in the 1970s to its rise as a “cool” and “mainstream” art-from in the age of social media.
That means corona-tired.
And who isn’t coronamüde these days?
The never-ending game of Regulation Roulette has resulted in an array of responses across Berlin and its many different art scenes. The overall effect is a pervasive sense of coronamüde (literally “corona-tired”) but, beyond that—as gallerist Tanja Wagner put it—“everyone has a completely different take on the situation.”
How could you not? But some of this older stuff might still be of value to someone, one would think.
“Can I toss this or is it part of the exhibition?”
German police say 17th century paintings found in highway dumpster – An art expert has concluded that the paintings by Pietro Belloti and Samuel van Hoogstraten are originals.
Art for Art’s sake. You know Art, don’t you? From the cleaning crew?
We need surrealism to deal with surreality, people. Or maybe we don’t. Hard to say for sure.
A Surrealist Yves Tanguy Painting Was Tossed in Trash at a German Airport – The painting, worth an estimated $340,000, was left behind by a traveler at Düsseldorf Airport and scrapped by a cleaning crew.
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.
Not win, I mean. This is the Berlin Film Festival, after all.
Argentine LGBTQ Sci-Fi Film Wins Berlin Festival’s Teddy Award.
That’s the Berlinale for you. If it’s not about LGBTQ Sci-Fi films it’s about politics. Or should I say other forms of politics?
Santiago Loza’s Brief Story From the Green Planet, an odd genre-mixer involving a trio of LGBTQ friends who discover an actual alien sleeping in the house of one of their late grandmother’s, won the Teddy Award for best LGBTQ film screening at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival.
The Berlin International Film Festival has always been a political stage for filmmakers, and the 69th edition is no exception.
A. HitPer? Never heard of him.
Three watercolour paintings attributed to the former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler have been seized by German police.
The works were up for sale at the Kloss auction house in Berlin, but taken on suspicions of forgery, police say.
“Wir verwahren uns mit aller Entschiedenheit dagegen, dass uns von unberufener Seite eine Nähe zum nationalsozialistischen Gedankengut allein deswegen unterstellt wird, weil wir – ähnlich wie andere Auktionshäuser weltweit, gerade auch in Deutschland – Gegenstände aus dem Nachlass Hitlers versteigern.”
What’s there to be confused about? It’s a golden statue of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In front of the fire department in freakin’ Wiesbaden, Germany. Or it least it used to be there.
The 4-meter (13-foot) statue of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had been erected in Wiesbaden on Monday much to the surprise and confusion of the residents of the southwestern German city.
The larger-than-life effigy installed in the city’s Platz der Deutschen Einheit (German Unity Square) depicts Erdogan with a raised right arm, a pose reminiscent of the famous statue of the late former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, which American forces tore down in 2003 during the Iraq invasion…
It was an art installation, part of the Wiesbaden Biennale for Contemporary Art, but was erected without the knowledge of city officials, a Wiesbaden spokesperson told German news agency dpa on Tuesday. This year’s art festival is taking place under the motto “bad news.”
“Wir haben eine Reihe von irritierten Bürgern, die bei uns anrufen. Es ist für viele nicht erkennbar, dass es im Rahmen der Biennale läuft.”
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.”
Observing Hermann 