Never before have there been so many private collectors making extensive acquisitions of contemporary art. Are they the real key figures of a global art business?...
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openDemocracy | Tygodnik Powszechny | Prospect | Gazeta Wyborcza | Le Monde diplomatique | Nepszabadsag | Le point | El Pais Semanal | Elet es Irodalom | The Nation
openDemocracy 15.01.2010 (UK)
Two days after Victor Martinovich's novel "Paranoia" was delivered to Belarussian bookshops, it disappeared without a trace, Natalia Leshchenko reports. And she thinks she knows why: "The novel articulates in a convincing and gripping way an argument rarely seen even in 'political-regime' literature - that dictatorships are sustained not just by secret police and oppressive state apparatuses, but by people themselves. It demonstrates how real and perceived fears mix in ways that undermine individual autonomy and stifle liberty. It implies that regime-change begins not at the ballot-box but within a person's own mind. This is a rare insight that Belarusians, based on their own experience, can contribute to the world." (The novel can be found online here)
Further articles: Masjaliza Hamzah and Norami Othamn present a study in Malaysia, which shows that polygamy benefits no man, no, nor woman neither.
Tygodnik Powszechny 17.01.2010 (Poland)
Anita Piotrowska breathes a sigh of relief. After "Dom zly" (The Dark House) and "Rewers" (The Reverse), now a third film, "Wszystko, co kocham" (All That I love), has come out about the People's Republic which is not a realistic film about freedom fighters. "The days of patriotic lectures are over. It's up to the historians to fight over facts and interpretations. And old masters should process the gaps left over from the days of communist censorship. At last Polish history can be told from other, subjective perspectives, which are not concerned with facts but which create a concentrated atmosphere of the past that has been chased through a private filter."
The children's film director Andrzej Maleszka believes in the power of magic: "In my films, magic powers represent the potential inside us, waiting for us to tap it. Our future is decided in childhood - either we will go off into the adult world with the ability to make decisions about our own lives, or we become will-less robots, who are controlled by managers, politicians and advertising. Good fairytales allow children to believe in their own powers."
Prospect 18.01.2010 (UK)
Britain has banned the Islamic group Islam4UK. A bad idea, says Shiv Malik, and not just because Islam4UK has almost no influence in the country: "Through its Prevent strategy, the government has decided to promote one set of ideas over another: moderate Islam over radical Islam. With vast financial grants, they have empowered groups such as the Quilliam and Lokahi foundations to fight 'our' corner. However, the ban on Islam4UK sends out a worrying message about the rules: in this battle of ideas we will help our friends but we will also lock up our enemies for espousing ideas we don't like. (The punishment for membership of a proscribed organisation is ten years.) This sounds like dictatorship. Should the British government continue down this path ... it would represent a huge erosion of freedom and democracy. The rules of the game really will have changed."
Gazeta Wyborcza 17.01.2010 (Poland)
The newspaper compiles a dossier on the treatment of minorities in Poland. The sociologist Antoni Sulek outlines the results of a longitudinal study on Polish-Jewish relations, and comments: "The reconstruction of memory will come when the Poles modernise their country, when they find their place among nations, and when they recognise this achievement as a success, as grounds for pride and as the foundation of a new identity. As soon as they no longer need history as compensation, they will view it more critically. This will also effect their historical relations with the Jews. If we are lucky, though, we won't have to wait that long for a historical narrative to describe the Polish experience of the war more comprehensively. It will include the underground state, organised resistance, individual collaboration, heroes, the ordinary majority, those who rescued Jews, those who sold Jews. The Poles will have to learn to accept this sort of portrayal of their history, withought seeing it as a loss of face."
Of course Poland is interested in the Ukrainian elections. The Orange Revolution enjoyed strong support from its western neighbours. Five years down the line and disillusionment is also widespread among the Poles, states Marcin Wojciechowski: "This time around, not everything is at stake. In those days, the choice was between democracy and authoritarianism. Young people were saying in all seriousness: 'This is worth dying for.' Today, whoever wins, Ukraine will remain an flawed democracy. The question of direction - Russia or Europe - remains open. If the future president manages to stabilise politics to some extent, restoring control to the state, or is even able to push reforms forward a bit, we will be talking about a huge success. Whether this is Yanukovich or Tymoshenko, is less important - both are flawed. But there is still one problem: while Ukraine is thinking about itself, the world is not standing still. Standstill means regression, but the Ukrainian elite have failed to grasp this."
Le Monde diplomatique 15.01.2010 (Germany/France)
"Africa is being carved up again," writes Joan Baxter in an article on how big business and state-investment funds are buying up agriculturally reclaimable land: "International banks and investment funds, industrial nations, agricultural companies and wealthy businessmen want to build giant industrial farms on vast areas of land and grow food and biofuels." But its not only Western companies that are involved in this new round of the 'Great Game': "In the neighbouring state of Mali, where desertification is spreading like wildfire, Libya has snapped up 100,000 hectars of valuable farmland on the banks of the Niger. And Beijing is in it too. Apparently China has leased 2.8 million hectares from the Republic of Congo to build the world's largest oil palm plantation. And Philippe Heilberg, who runs the New York investment fund Jarch Capital, has signed a lease contract with the son of the warlord Paulino Matip for over 400,000 hectares of land in southern Sudan."
The paper also prints an excerpt from Fabrizio Gatti's forthcoming book "Bilal", about the passage of an illegal immigrant to Europe. "The pick up point is Autogar. 'Eight o'clock start' it says at the ticket counter."
Nepszabadsag 16.01.2010 (Hungary)
After the collapse of first the religious and then the moral firmament in the 20th century, now the astronomical firmament faces a similar fate," declares poet and critic Akos Szilagyi. Since it is almost impossible to see the stars in most cities, star reserves have started springing up in recent years, which are degrading views of the "unspoilt firmament" in "its original condition" to a sort of service event, a fairground spectacle: "The reserve's star herds drive the stars out of their stalls at night, leaving them to graze on the sky, and the event tourists gasp and cannot believe their eyes. But this is surely only the beginning. The future belongs to the projected firmament and the artificial starry sky, which will be more beautiful, more imposing and more convincing that the original sky ever was, and cheaper too! There will be more stars in this sky than humans ever dreamed of! Whether these stars are real or fake is irrelevant."
Le point 14.01.2010 (France)
The Darfur conflict continues, but the world is lost interest. For Bernard-Henri Levy, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) under Abdul Wahid el Nur is a representative of moderate Islam who has been abandoned by the world's media. "Here we had an example of Islam without burqa, without sharia, where boys and girls went to school together - and I can prove it. And this miracle was right in front of our eyes. It was the answer to our dreams, it was living proof that a non-fundamentalist Muslim society is possible and that a party like el Nur's can unite Islam and civil society - and we have allowed it to die."
El Pais Semanal 10.01.2010 (Spain)
"Mathematics is the purest drug," insists Oxford maths Professor Marcus du Sautoy in an interview with Julia Luzan: "When you make a mathematical discovery, it gives you an adrenalin kick that is like taking drugs. It's better than sex. When you've tried it, you will want it again and again. That's why sudokus are so popular. Maths is a giant sudoku. But it is difficult for someone who is not involved to keep abreast of everything that is happening in the world of mathematics. Which is why I write books and make TV programmes. I want to show that there are geniuses at work here, changing the world. Otherwise probably no more than ten people would hear about these great discoveries. That's a shame. Because the more people who hear and learn about a scientific discovery, the more it can grow."
Elet es Irodalom 08.01.2010 (Hungary)
In an article slating the Hungarian casting show "A Star is Born", the author Krisztian Grecso asks why intellectuals so rarely appear in front of TV cameras. There have been a number of attempts to put established critics onto the juries of TV casting shows, but it has never really worked because these intellectuals rarely "perform" as the programme's makers want them to. "The problem with the intellectual is that he does not believe that what he does on TV has any meaning. Because it's all a game, a theatre piece, a role, and he, a real person in all his credibility, with all his past and all his writing behind him, has to bring this other person to life. He is not some other person that is earning some money at last, he is himself. (...) The intellectual sits just there pretending he isn't there. But he is not some crooked doorman, he is the king of Denmark. But Claudius cannot loathe himself, however much the actor playing him knows that he is a conniving scumbag."
The Nation 01.02.2010 (USA)
Barry Schwabsky had zero expectations for the Gerhard Richter show at the Marian Goodman show in NY - only going out of a sense of duty, as if visiting an old uncle whose stories he had heard too often. But, as so often happens when expectations are lowered, he had his socks knocked off. "The most powerful works in the Goodman show were several very large paintings whose surfaces were nearly white, though of a quasi-white highly variegated, with a great deal of color within or beneath it, surfacing in ghostly demarcations.(...) In these paintings, Richter achieved, as he has rarely if ever done before, an effect of sublimity such as commentators on the Abstract Expressionists often speak of, though the painters achieved it but rarely. Read Richter's notes again with this in mind and you'll realize that he sounds like a painter of the 1940s more often than you'd imagine. When he speaks of painting as 'an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surrounding,' it might as well be Willem de Kooning talking. Richter's best works might surpass any but the greatest of the Abstract Expressionists, but that's not because his project is radically different from theirs. It's because his is theirs in extremis."
RSS
The New York Times investigates the new hunger for reality. In Salon, Andrzej Stasiuk sees only individual realities. In the Gazeta Wyborcza, the ethnologist Tomasz Rakowski describes the reality of the Polish poor mines. Sometimes you can turn reality on its head, El Pais reads in the Financial Times. Le Monde diplomatique gives the low-down on the ACTA talks. And the New Yorker dreams of less polish and a bit more grit.
In Magyar Narancs Agnes Heller demands more civil courage of the Hungarians. Mohammed Ali Atassi explains in Qantara, why conservatives in Egypt see women as candy: either wrapped or covered in flies. Oliver Roy outlines in Resetdoc, why's there not so much as a hair's breadth between the Christian right and the secular left. In Magazin, the philosopher Ludwig Haslar tells the Swiss that if they want mediocrity today, they cannot expect the superman tomorrow. Jonathan Safran Foer tells Prospect why he neither wants a chicken in his bed nor on his plate. The NYT embarks on a human-flesh search and finds a kitten killer.
The New Yorker tells the story of how corrupt podiatrists almost brought down the US health system. In Polityka, the Kapuscinski biographer Artur Domoslawski explains how he thinks the legendary reporter should be read. In Tygodnik, Zygmunt Bauman calls for more understanding for Kapuscinski. Magyar Narancs celebrates the ban on Holocaust denial in Hungary. In Le Point, Jorge Semprun asks whether Claude Lanzmann is the only person who's allowed to talk about the Holocaust. Wired describes how Google learned how to tell the difference between a hot dog and a poached pooch.
In Eurozine, the Transylvanian-Hungarian-Armenian writer Kinga Kali tells the story of a "virgjinesha". Prospect celebrates the next art superstar, Argentinian painter Guillermo Kuitca. The Gazeta Wyborcza explains how young people use the web. The New Yorker sends out a message to the depressed: stay away from psychiatric literature. Outlook Indian learns to play Carnatic music online. The London Review swims with the salmon sages.
The Atlantic finds out why the Chinese are not enemy number one in cyberspace. Elet es Irodalom asks why no one in Hungary is interested in former informers. In New Statesman, Tariq Ramadan can't tell us what a moderate Muslim is. The Guardian hearkens to the ticking bomb in Emily Dickinson's bosom and links it to the shards of crockery on the floor. And if it can't smoke, El Pais Semanal wants everything painted black.
In Prospect, Tim Berners-Lee invites the world to play with the British government's data. England, not Nigeria belongs on the terrorist list, literary Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka informs The Daily Beast. In Rue 89, Beppe Grillo explains why Sarkozy is more dangerous than Berlusconi. In Tygodnik Powszechny, Stefan Chwin mourns for the Polish idealist. Polityka reveals where a Pole turns to when he's not allowed to marry. Olga Tokarczuk walks her Polish tangle around Amsterdam for Salon. And the Guardian thinks about Armenian women rubbing their soft breasts on a stone.
In Wired, Chris Anderson celebrates the next industrial revolution - taking place in garages near you. The Boston Globe serenades the camel - Nabati style. In El Pais Semenal, the sociologist Edgar Morin complains about European lethargy. Outlook India asks why the Australians hate the Indians. Odra and Tygodnik are still debating the impact of freedom on literature. In OpenDemocracy, Salome Zourabichvili mourns for the wilted petals of the rose revolution. In Prospect, Martin Amis divides the literary sheep from the goats, according to the pleasure principle. The NYT profiles a dyed-in-the-wool jihadist from Alabama.
Das Magazin reports on the dramatic increase in the number of pupils who have threatened to gun down their classmates. The Spectator warns City bankers about gun-wielding dominatrices in Switzerland. In Sinn und Form, Marc Fumaroli remembers the man whose name shall not be mentioned: Mario Praz. In the New Humanist, Laurie Taylor remembers the holy men who sexually abused him as a child. The Guardian asks why Theo von Doesburg slipped into avant garde oblivion. And in the NYRB, Garry Kasparov asks why computer chess programmers are so uninspired?
The New Yorker buries itself in the Arab novel. In Le Monde, Bernard-Henri Levy heaps scorn on the state-run caricature of a debate. Qantara points to the person responsible for all the misery in the Arab world: Daddy. In L'Espresso, Umberto Eco takes a pin to the overblown daily paper. The Nation has earmarked 30 billion dollars to save journalism. In Tygodnik Powszechny, the writer Wojciech Albinski explains what makes Poland exotic. And the Spectator waves a tear-stained old hanky as shabby chic fades into the past.
In Merkur, art historian Wolfgang Ullrich defines a new type of artist: the contractor. In Nepszabadsag, writer Peter Nadas considers the crisis in Hungary and how it might end. In NouvelObs, Francis Ford Coppola explains why DVDs should be free. Eurozine introduces Lithuanian literature. In the New York Review of Books, Wyatt Manson asks why Pleiade is omitting Celine's anti-Semitic trilogy from the collected works. In Express, Philippe Gavi reminds us that Mohammed was not a crazed killer. A Californian marvels in NZZ Folio, at the reincarnation of an Indian factory worker. And confronted with the recent proliferation of literary cuddling, the New York Times yearns for a bit of Philip Roth.
Wired tracks James Cameron's 32-year quest to out-Lucas Lucas. In Nouvel Obs, Alain Finkielkraut and Alain Badiou tear each other apart over immigration and national identity. Tygodnik Powszechny introduces the pioneering artist Miroslaw Balka. Andras Bozoki asks why Hungarians are undermining democracy. In The New Statesman, Leo McKinstry explains why the bombing of Coventry was an inspiration to the British Air Staff.
Vanity Fair goes in search of a superpartner. Elet es Irodalom reads a new collection of essays by Imre Keresz. Outlook India complains about journalistic corruption. The New Yorker reads a new Koestler biography. Nepszabadsag foresees the next French revolution. Rue89 wonders about the provenance of prawns. And in the New Republic, Moshe Halberthal celebrates the sublime humility of Amartya Sen.
In Wilson Quarterly, the economist Tyler Cowen sings an ode to multitasking. Prospect has seen the monsters of the left. The Boston Globe follows James C. Scott to the new Shangri-La in the mountains of Tibet. Weltwoche is up in arms about the criticism of Switzerland's anti-minaret vote. In the Novel Obs, Pierre Nora applies his mind to the bestseller. New Criterion knows why the Pop art bubble won't pop. NZZ Folio examines the chicken nugget. Al Ahram asks what political Islam wants. The Walrus mourns for the first victim of the C-58. In Resetdoc, Joseph Massad explains why Arab homosexuals are an invention of the West.
Slovenian poet Ales Debeljak argues for a fusion of cultures in Eurozine. Umberto Eco agrees in Le Monde. The Nation portrays the Salvadorian author Horacio Castellanos Moya, who himself explains in Babelia why 200 years after independence there's nothing to celebrate in a number of Latin American countries. Polityka lies Poland down on the couch. La vie des idees reads a book on Jews and the resistance in France. Americans read more than Europeans, writes historian Peter Baldwin in Merkur. And in The New York Review of Books Robert Darnton makes two bold proposals for a new Book Settlement.