Berlin, April 29, 2010

Tonight was Olafur Eliasson’s night. His Berlin gallery, neugerriemschneider, threw a dinner to celebrate the retrospective show in Berlin’s Gropiusbau exhibition space, and upwards of 200 or so guests came to celebrate. The event was held in Olafur’s boxy, brick and very large studio/factory, formerly an abandoned factory north of Mitte on the way to the Prenzlauer Berg area, itself a former working class neighborhood now rapidly being gentrified.

When we first visited the "studio" two or three years ago, it was a virtual ruin. It must take up half an acre. Now it is clean and tidy, with a large banquet/exposition space, brilliantly lit with the usual complement of glistening glass and mirror lighting fixtures hanging from the 30-foot ceiling. Classic Olafur gadgets, geometric models, arcane scientific instruments and a couple of installations ringed the party space. Olafur employes 35 to 40 architects, artists, designers, computer persons and office personnel, all dedicated to making the artworks. Michelangelo might blush at the scale of the studio.

The crowd was a well-dressed group of heavy-hitter collectors, with pockets of artists, professors, museum directors and critics thrown in for taste and spice. Dare sat next to the Director of the Moderne Museet of Stockholm at dinner. I sat next to a Dutch artist and across from Monica Bonvincini, a well-known Italian artist whom I would never wish to have as an antagonist.

My first encounter was with my long-time artist friend, Franz Ackermann, and our greeting turned into our customary wrestling scuffle. Franz was a professional soccer player and philosopher before he became an artist, and he’s a lot of beef to try to move around.

There must have been 40 to 50 long tables for the dinner, all open seating. Open seating comports with Olafur’s Scandinavian egalitarianism. It could not have been otherwise without insult to two-thirds of the guests. There is always anxiety to these events. Am I standing in the right place? Have I taken the most advantageous circulation route? Has so and so from Philadelphia noticed that I am here yet? I didn’t know that THAT guy had even heard of Olafur, let alone possibly bought one of his works. Will I get a seat next to someone interesting, as open seating turns into a kind of musical chairs? Am I having a good time yet?

All was justified, however, when I wended my way to the far rear of the room and saw a handsome group sitting together in comfortable camaraderie: Tim Neuger, Burkhart Riemschneider, Gavin Brown, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Elizabeth Peyton and Arto Lindsay. The latter is a fabulous Brazilian folk music and jazz performer whom I had seen perform but never met. Arto shyly flattered with a nice, short chat. You might or might not recognize who these folks are. Just say we knew them all perhaps 15 years ago when they were young, poor and on their way up. Now they are in their ‘40’s, successful, famous and happy. It’s a good feeling when talent, courage and hard work turn out just as they should.

Berlin, April 27, 2010

This evening we had dinner with a young couple at their exceedingly pleasant home in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin. “Young” means that Johanna (not her real name) is nearing 40, and Hans (not his real name) is slightly younger at 37. Both are professionals. Dahlem is spacious, grassy and tree-lined, a testament to what must have been an exemplar of comfortable bourgeois living anywhere in the early twentieth century.

The couple’s house is full of cheerful contemporary art and surprising examples of pre-1950 furniture design. The structure is “modern,” i.e., its architecture is Bauhaus era in spirit and line. It is one story, all right angles and big windows, I would guess about 2,500 square feet. There is a nice garden with a lawn. The house is one of 24 built in concentric circles around a small lake. The houses were constructed in the early ‘50’s as housing for U.S. Army officers stationed in Berlin. I stumbled mentally the next morning when I realized, with some difficulty given my age, that the original military residents must all be dead. The early days of occupied Berlin are still vivid in my memory.

The couple have a marvelous dog but no children. This was not for lack of trying. Three years or so ago they applied to adopt a child. The third question asked of Johanna by the government social worker in charge was whether she had ever considered divorcing her husband because of their inability to have a child. She was so infuriated and sickened by this soulless intrusion and with other red tape that they gave up temporarily. They are close to re-applying, knowing that they face almost three years of bureaucracy, justification, close inspection and waiting both in Berlin and in Mongolia, Russia or wherever else a child might be found for them.

The question is: Why can a Turkish, Albanian, or Arab mother in a poor neighborhood of Berlin have any number of children, all of which are immediately enrolled in the welfare system, when a respectable couple in good health, with a high income, integrated into the solid echelons of society and with a great zip code in their address have to wait three years before being classified as fit to adopt and raise a baby they intend to rescue from the slums of Calcutta or Shanghai? Forget the loaded language with which this question is phrased, the question deserves a thoughtful answer.

Berlin, April 28, 2010

Today the “tree” finally arrived in Berlin. The “tree” is from our art collection, a large sculpture made from the trunk and limbs of a cedar tree, felled and dragged out of a woods in northeastern Pennsylvania by the American artist, Mark Dion, late in 1995. Mark soaked the trunk and limbs in fiberglass to kill the bugs and strengthen the wood, split the trunk vertically and reassembled it around a steel armature and then filled each scraggly branch with books. All the books depict the “episteme,” in Michel Foucault terminology, of Western Culture about and around birds. Which is to say that we know nothing of birds, we only know what our culture says about birds. There are shelves on the history of birds, the mythology of birds, ornithology, Rachel Carson, Audubon, Hitchcock, and on and on. The work is entitled “The Library for the Birds of New York.” The idea was that birds flying over New York who needed a rest could alight on the tree and read up on what human beings in the Western World had ever thought or said about them.

the tree is a big piece. We became art collectors the day we bought it in February of 1996 because we bought it first and then went home and measured the ceiling. At eleven and a half feet high, and six or seven feet at its widest extent, the tree cleared the ceiling of the playroom in our house in Woodside by six inches. Until you spend several thousand dollars on a stunt like that you are not an art collector; you are just decorating your home.

We agreed with neugerriemschneider, a prominent contemporary art gallery in Berlin that the gallery would try to sell “The Library” this coming weekend, known in Berlin as the Gallery Weekend. That meant dismantling the tree in San Francisco and air freighting it to Berlin through the volcanic cloud. The dismantling , packing and crating were a monumental task and getting Lufthansa to grant some priority to the shipment in light of their crushingly crowded loading dock at SFO was even harder. With more luck than sense, the tree arrived by air in Munich Tuesday in two crates, each about 12 by 6 by 6 feet in size, and was trucked up to Berlin. We walked into the gallery space as the pieces of the tree were being unpacked. The tree required re-assembly from about 60 photos, as each book, birds nest and picture that hang from the trunk or limbs must be precisely in the right place. Miraculously, by the end of the day, the four or five person crew (Dutch, American and German) of young people had assembled the tree. Faith in the young generation renewed. The oohs and ahs from all the people working on the opening of the gallery’s show Friday as the tree neared completion of its re-assembly in a room of its own were ample reward for the anxiety – and expense - of attempting such a foolhardy task. We now hope that “The Library” finds a good home in Europe, while at the same time somewhat despairing that a great work by an American artist seems to be appreciated mainly by Europeans. The piece had been offered for sale in New York on and off for two years. This speaks poorly of the cultural faculties of Americans compared with Europeans, but it’s been this way for about 300 years.

In the afternoon we spent a pleasant hour and a half at the svelte, modernistic gallery of Mehdi Chouakri, a streamlined, dapper, “young” Algerian, Gallicized to the gills, elegant enough to make you want to go on a stiff diet right now. Mehdi was showing Hans Peter Feldman, one of the original European pop artists. Our new friend and fairly recent artist-find, Luca Trevisani, a 30 year old Italian from Verona who is working in Berlin - except he is now on the ladder (we can only hope) to stardom, so he has fellowships to work in New York and other venues – was in the gallery, having just installed two new sculptures. Against all reason, we swooned over the new pieces, even though there can’t be more than 25 people in the whole world who would agree. We left the slick, shiny and buttoned-down environs of the gallery and walked on through the warm afternoon through the dusty, gravelly and broken pavements of the East Berlin neighborhood back to see how the installation of the tree was progressing.

Last evening the big art event of the Berlin season arrived: The Olafur Eliasson restrospective opened at the Gropius Bau. This building is a monument designed by Martin Gropius, father of Walter of Bauhaus fame, around 1900. It is ponderously elegant. This is not the space to describe the art of Eliasson except to say that he works to simulate natural phenomena through glass, mirrors, white and colored light and mist, among other things. Olafur, of Danish/Icelandic heritage, is one of the most prominent and excellent artists in the world, and he is based in Berlin. This, however, is the first chance that Berliners have had to see the work. We own a print, a photo and two sculptures, and we have had the privilege of knowing Olafur, albeit at some distance, since the late nineties.

The show was publicized and anticipated for days in all the Berlin newspapers. We walked over about eight in the evening and waited in line for a half hour to enter the building. There was no admission charge, and thousands must have filed through the show. It was even more spectacular than ever. It is art made from mathematics and light that captivates everyone from knowledgeable art people through the casual visitor. The opening was a grand celebration, and it made everybody there happy.

We capped off the evening by taking the U-Bahn to Alexanderplatz for a party at a vaguely disreputable establishment on the twelfth floor of an ugly East German high rise known as the Weekend Club. This was the inevitable post-opening party, billed to start at 10 p.m. and go on indefinitely. It was an elite affair for about 300 people of various ages, all dressed in black and gray. First you hear the breastbone throbbing techno beat from two DJ’s as you enter a very dark forty by seventy room with a view over the lights of the city. Then you wait twenty minutes to be served at a your-elbows-crushed-together bar by a skinny bartender (free drinks) who is fast and double-jointed (an amazing show in itself), all the while trying not to cry from the clouds of cigarette smoke pushing into your tear ducts.

We recognized only three or four people until we met and went through the ritual hugs and both-cheeks kisses with a glamorous, raven-haired woman we know well, an Iranian-American raised in Corte Madera who heads a prominent contemporary art foundation in Mexico City. This woman knows everybody. When I complained that we had recognized hardly anybody there in the packed mass of party people and that the crowd seemed shy of eminence, she informed me that I had literally been leaning against Countess Francesca von Hapsburg for five minutes. I turned around and stared blankly. It isn’t every day one rubs shoulders with aristocracy.

Berlin, April 26, 2010

Berlin Mitte continues to hustle and bustle with new eateries continually appearing on each block. A new one that has arrived since my last visit in February surprised me. For as long as we have been in the Gendarmenmarkt neighborhood, more than eleven years now, a rather plain and dispirited restaurant/ice cream/pastry establishment, the Cafe Moehring, held the southwest corner of Jaegerstrasse and Charlottenstrasse. It was a faded third cousin of the rich old, pre-calorie counting palaces like the dear, departed Rumplemeyer’s at Seventh and Central Park South, where mounds of whipped cream seemingly dolloped onto everything in sight were proudly served with the cocky old attitude of damn-the-abstemious. At last the dingy milieu has departed this Mitte corner. But what has opened in its place?

Retrogression, plain and simple. The new restaurant/Gasthaus is enormous, a virtual cavern of several thousand square feet. Inside are smaller and larger tables, no tablecloths, each shining surface beaming raw and unfinished – or more precisely sanded - to a velvety consistency that begs you to stain it if you can. There is a large mahogany bar and there are old pictures. The female servers are in modified dirndl (allure through frumpiness). Only the stuffed stag heads on the wall are missing. Large banners of small blue and white checks, the symbol of the sovereign superiority of Bavaria,* billow over the walls.

The door proclaims that you have entered the establishment of “Augustiner Brau Muenchen, founded 1328.” The menu proclaims that you can have all the Thuringian bratwurst, fatty chops, sauerkraut, roast potatoes and red cabbage in vinegar, all soaking in a thick brown sauce, you can eat, all to be washed down with all the light and dark Bavarian beer you can drink. Until recently one has had to look hard to find real German cooking in Berlin, among the welter of sushi, Thai and Vietnamese offerings, not to mention international same-ole, slimmed down Eurofood. Here we have an establishment telling you that after 6 p.m. you can have the real stuff, “Edelstoff,” from wooden barrels. Turns out that’s just more beer only higher proof. It was late Monday evening, but the sparse crowd was having the usual mellow good time – not an expression of carb-guilt in sight.

One wonders where we are. Europe was progressing smoothly to a seamless economic and cultural union, and diversity was giving way to a pleasant blend of European niceness. Suddenly, the Greeks can’t pay their bills, and a bunch of Berliners are feasting on 1950’s food and beer from a fourteenth century recipe. Where will it all end?

* I don't think it's true that Eddy Arnold's hit song of the late '40's, "Make the World Go Away," was commissioned by Bavarians.

Berlin, April 25, 2010

A warm and sunny Sunday for April, with hundreds out on the streets of Mitte. The tidy outdoor vendor stands along the Spree near the Cathedral in Mitte were open and thriving. The clientele is post-East German, casually dressed and without apparent link to any bourgeoisie past or present, but solid. Occasionally, six foot amazons in tight jeans would drift into sight.

A visit to a newly opened treasure trove, the Neues Museum on the Museum Island. Smashed and battered during the air raids of the War and badly cared for in the following years, the museum re-opened during the winter. It is now cavernous, gaunt and spare with brickwork showing through crusted concrete walls. But once inside, it is a delight. It has the feeling that Santa Claus emptied his bag of gifts, as one is greeted with a wide array of mostly ancient artifacts. Finds of Schliemann’s digs at Troy soon blend into a marvelous collection of Cypriot pots and small statuary in stone and terra cotta. Ascend a grand staircase, and there you are. And there she is, the magnificent Nefertiti, or at least her hallowed bust, a portrait of the most beautiful woman who ever lived. This is a museum that could be visited weekly for a long time. We wandered through less than 20% of it in less than an hour, since it was too sunny outside to tarry in a rainy day venue.

Later, time to buy the seven day tickets good for transportation on the U-Bahn, the S-Bahn and any bus to anywhere for a week. The reasonable cost is Euro 26.40 per week, about $35. Alas the automatic ticket dispensing machines in both the Stadtmitte and Franzoezische Strasse U-Bahn stations were malfunctioning, and so I had to walk up to the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof to buy the tickets at the municipal transport office. The Bahnhof is never dull for people watching.

We took a taxi to the massive Marienkirche, a high-steepled, red-brick Protestant church near Alexanderplatz for our 6 p.m. Anglican worship. The service had been relegated to a chapel off the main nave, but not knowing we entered through the main entrance to find a protestant service in progress. It was billed as a “university” service, and it looked to be well attended. Christian worship appears to be making a slow but steady comeback in urban Berlin.

We found our service, and there was the redoubtable Reverend Irene, our German lady Anglican priest from St. George’s in the west end of Berlin near the Olympic Stadium, tall, firm, graying, elegant and very handsome, presiding at the service. There were about 25 in attendance, Brits, Nigerians, we two Americans and others of uncertain provenance, all attentive to the scripture readings, old English hymns, beautifully phrased liturgy and a warm-hearted homily from the Frau Reverend, who exudes enough faith and holiness to carry hundreds of us along.

Irene told a story about a bible study class somewhere where the participants were asked to name who in the Bible they would like to be. The usual answers of “Samuel,” “Mary Magdalene” and “Peter” were forthcoming, but one young girl answered “Lo!” When told there was no person in the Bible named “Lo,” the girl responded: “Of course there is. Right here it says, “Lo, I am always with you.”

After the service we walked about a mile west along Unter den Linden in the blue and gold sunset to one of our favorite restaurant/cafes, the Café Einstein on Unter den Linden, a Viennese-affecting gathering spot for people who are dressed in tans and grays and look intellectual. Since we are now just commencing the best time of the year in Germany, namely, white asparagus season, we fell into the fabulous good fortune of a magnificent dinner consisting of huge, luscious spears of white asparagus, a tender small Wiener Schnitzel ample enough for a meal in itself, small peeled potatoes soaked in butter and parsley and a tiny vat of concentrated, potent, lemony, creamy, ecstasy-invoking Hollandaise sauce. Add the pilsener beer, and we had the best dinner in the world that evening.

News produced by feedback

During a quick read of the Financial Times one morning last week, my eye was engaged by this headline:

“Demand Media enlists Goldman Sachs in preparation for IPO”

Fair enough and not unusual. Reading further, “Demand has created a system through which writers and programmers are assigned stories or projects based on a software algorithm, which determines the interest of web visitors and calculates potential revenues from the content.” “Assigned” is the word that piqued my interest. Later, “The company has struck deals to supply content to mainstream news organizations such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Gannett’s USA Today.”

When I was editor of my high school paper, events were said to happen. If deemed significant or affecting a significant number of readers, those events were news. After subjection to the who, what, where, when, how test, a description of the events appeared as news in the paper. The events were primary in the process.*

It struck me that Demand Media will now provide a feedback function. They will determine what the public is interested in, then seek out and report what the readership wants to read about, if not how the readership wants to hear about it, i.e., those topics that pass the interest test. The editorial function becomes a selection of events to present that will be interesting. The aggregate quantity and quality of the information fed back to the public will continually be multiplied by a fraction having a value of less than one, ad infinitum. That news sources will spend less for news goes without saying.

That might be an improvement over what news sources often provide today, namely, stories that the editors present to influence what the public will be interested in – the primacy of the thought that events themselves have some neutral, intrinsic interest having long ago subsided.

Nonetheless, the echo-chamber news reports will be interesting to track.

*In the interest of full disclosure, the readership of my high school paper were all of a unified culture.

The iPad: From Albert Speer to Steve Jobs

The contrast could not have been starker this past weekend. On Saturday morning, April 3, 2010, it’s almost Easter. I am mindful of the eternally recurring, that Jesus is lying in his tomb, awaiting the glorious resurrection at midnight. The next morning the stone will have been rolled away and the open tomb will be discovered, the symbol of freedom and new life for untold generations.

I, however, am in the Apple Store with dozens of the faithful to something other, the latest Apple device. Billed as a compact liberator, the entrance to a universe of information and enlightenment, this sleek, hand-soothing bit of streamlining suddenly reveals itself as utterly closed. Closed as in prison and the tomb with the stone blocking the entrance firmly in place. Nothing is open or alterable. Competing browsers cannot be downloaded, familiar iPhone apps will not work, many if not most videos will not play. Access to a many sites is restricted. One is being channeled into rings of an unfamiliar but comfortable inferno – Apple World.

One submits willingly because the whole slide is so comfortable, but then one reflects on the core meaning of the enterprise of modernity – all feeling is to be stripped away, and simplification leads to impenetrability, confinement and death. Foreseen by Piranesi’s prisons and continuing through Speer’s Zeppelinwiese in Nuremberg and Mussolini’s E.U.R., documented by Simon Starling's representation of the public cemetery in Stockholm with its massive ovens installed in the early thirties, years before Auschwitz, we now have the virtually perfect closed system, the iPad that millions will be carrying around to remind is of our fate on earth.

Thanks, Albert. Thanks, Steve.