Hooks on the Net - Online Communities and German Kids

Why do teenagers find SchülerVZ, flickr or YouTube so fantastic? What are they finding in the communities on the internet that doesn't exist in real life, and what exactly are they doing with it? The JFF- Institut für Medienpädagogik (Institute for Media Education) looks into these questions and learns from a 15 year-old "I think the future will just be one big Second Life."... more more

GoetheInstitute

The island of Enlightenment

Friday 20 October, 2006

Berlin's Museum Island is perhaps the most important museum complex in the world. It was embellished this week with the reopening of the Bode Museum, housing the finest display of European sculpture anywhere. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, takes us on a first-ever tour of European history in three-dimensional form.
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Back to barbarism

Thursday 19 October, 2006

It is no wonder that Caravaggio is being rediscovered. Not because he shows us what we have become, but rather what we have lost. On the occasion of a major show in Dusseldorf, Georg Seeßlen pays tribute to the inventor of modern art.
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Big city lab

Monday 9 October, 2006

Autumn is the season of art in Berlin. Elke Buhr surveys the multitude of galleries, festivals and fairs and comes to the conclusion that art is mainstream and Berlin is at the centre of it all. (Image: Berliner Liste © Anja Vormann, Sausage Faces, 2002)

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Nothing can embarrass me anymore

Friday 6 October, 2006

In an interview with Holger Liebs the painter Neo Rauch describes the dense, apocalyptic nature of his work, puzzles over his need to retreat and is very thankful to no longer be 25.

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"The monumental is my sickness"

Thursday 3 August, 2006

For years, Andre Müller has been widely recognised as one of Germany's most intrepid, and most dreaded, interviewers. In 1979 he met and interviewed Arno Breker, who became infamous in the Nazi era as Hitler's favourite sculptor. We have translated the text in full. (Image: Arno Breker: Bereitschaft (Readiness), 1939. Courtesy Breker Archiv Düsseldorf)
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Modern art in Utopia

Thursday 27 July, 2006

Zamosc, the "Padua of the North," planned as an ideal city in the 16th century, is a remote town in the Polish provinces. Until the international art scene came to stay, that is. Now Sabrina van der Ley and Markus Richter have enticed a group of artists to come create works on the theme "Ideal City - Invisible Cities." By Birgit Rieger (Image: Jaroslaw Flicinski, Up, up and away, 2006)

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Hitler's favourite sculptor

Tuesday 25 July, 2006

Until today, all attempts to show the works of Arno Breker, Hitler's favourite sculptor, have failed miserably. The potential for failure is again great at the first major solo exhibition of Breker's works since World War II. The show relies on loans from Breker's apologists, and access to the archives was limited. By Stefan Koldehoff
See also Andre Müller's interview with Arno Breker from 1979.
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Shadows of the East

Thursday 15 June, 2006

"Humanism in China" is a reproduction of an exhibition of over 600 photographs that toured the People's Republic and has now opened in Frankfurt's Museum of Modern Art. No other contemporary exhibition has managed to get this close to the ordinary life of the nation that makes up a quarter of the world's population. By Tilman Spengler
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Art with free beer and sausages

Wednesday 14 June, 2006

The Grässlin family is opening an art space in Sankt Georgen, a tiny town high up in the Black Forest. Their collection of sculptures and installations is scattered throughout the locale, to the amazement of the international public and the locals alike. By Ulrich Stock
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And then it went boom

Thursday 8 June, 2006

The neo-Expressionist painters known as the "Neuen Wilden" were once what the artists of the Leipzig School are today: international stars, celebrated by the press, courted by collectors. Twenty-five years after the pinnacle of their success, they are now fighting for a place in art history. Cornelius Tittel paid them a visit. (Image: Rainer Fetting, "Self Portrait", 1999)
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Sphinxes from the sea

Tuesday 16 May, 2006

The exhibition "Egypt's Sunken Treasures" opened in Berlin's Martin Gropius Bau on Saturday. This is the first showing outside Egypt of some 500 statues and artefacts discovered off the coast of Alexandria by Franck Goddio and his team. Sonja Zekri reports.
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Melancholy and abstraction

Wednesday 12 April, 2006

Now showing in Berlin, "Melancholy: Genius and Madness in Art" is the foremost exhibition of its kind. But what makes a work melancholic? Melancholy is difficult to catch red-handed, and scarcely easier to repress. Eliminate it here, and it crops up over there, tough as any weed. Everything testifies to the presence of melancholy. Yet the more you look, the more it eludes your gaze. By Laszlo F. Földenyi
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In the slush puddle of existence

Monday 3 March, 2006

Far from the over-exitement of today's artworld, the 4th berlin biennale for contemporary art wallows in the dark depths of things jettisoned and biographical, offering the art pilgrim twelve stations along Berlin's Augustraße. By Hanno Rauterberg
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Of patrons and princes of painting

Monday 16 January, 2006

Two billionaire families are rivalling to become Turkey's biggest sponsors of the arts. The Sabanci Museum is now trumping with the show "Picasso in Istanbul". By Elke Buhr
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The last lamp

Friday 23 December, 2005

On Christmas Eve, the most exciting exhibition Berlin has seen in years will open to the public in the Palast der Republik, the former East German people's palace. This ad-hoc show will last exactly nine days and then the building will be torn down. But the Palast is just the art museum the city needs, says Christina Tilmann.
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