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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Edge.org |The Spectator | Il Foglio| Nepszabadsag | DU | The Economist | L'Express | Die Weltwoche | Folio | Le point | The New York Review of Books
Edge.org, 30.05.2006 (USA)
The best essays about the disconcerting media revolution known as the
Internet continue to come from the USA. A fortnight ago in the New York Times Magazine, Kevin Kelly (more here) set out
his euphoric vision of the Internet-based collective and the universal
book. Almost immediately, although without direct reference to Kelly, Jaron Lanier (more here) penned an acerbic counter argument, criticising the collective spirit kindled by projects such as Wikipedia which believes a collective intelligence will aggregate by itself on the net without responsible authors. Lanier talks of a "new online collectivism"
and the "resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise". "This
idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme
Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that
it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and
futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it
any less dangerous." Lanier does not believe in erasing authorship:
"The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people.
If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has
something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves
into idiots."
Lanier's essay provoked many people to enter into the debate at edge.org, Kevin Kelly among them.
The Spectator, 12.06.2006 (UK)
Peter Oborne reports from Darfur: "When we visited the scene of the battle we found that bodies had been shoved hastily
into mass graves. An arm stuck out from under one bush, and the flesh
had been eaten by wild animals. A human foot obtruded from another
grave. Dried pools of blood stained the ground. The stench of human
putrefaction was heavy in the air. Bits and pieces of clothing, spent
bullets and the protective amulets used by African fighters lay
scattered on the ground. One body still lay exposed. The dead man had
evidently climbed a tree to escape his attackers, but been shot down
from his hiding place."
Il Foglio, 10.06.2006 (Italy)
The Golf GTI was, sociologically speaking at least, the forerunner of the now controversial SUV, writes Maurizio Crippa, and also the perfect symbol of the 80s. "If cars have a spirit, then it is certainly an evil one, demonic. The enemy is inside them, a man like in Stephen King's 'Christine' of 1983. Christine might have been a Plymouth Fury of 1958, but its cursed spirit uncovered the ghastly depths of the GT decade and all the souped-up, turbo-boosted and drilled-out
engines. That all came to an end in 1989, famously the year of
salvation. The Golf, in particular the GTI, the black one - and we are
not talking about the one with rabbit's foot in the back – was
aggressive, demanding, loud."
Nepszabadsag, 10.06.2006 (Hungary)
After substantial renovation, the legendary New York coffee house, one of the most important literary coffee houses of the Danube monarchy has reopened. The writer Ivan Bächer recollects:"Once
upon a time, not only the coffee house but the whole palace, even every
room, every corner every nook and cranny of the the entire block of the
surrounding houses was full of journalists, writers, publishing houses
and editorial offices." The new Italian owners have redeveloped the literary spirit to death,
Bächer states disappointedly: "On the wall is a box of reinforced glass
in which a dozen beautiful old books are hermetically sealed. A book safe.
At the opening celebrations in 1895 the playwright Ferenc Molnar threw
the keys to the coffee house into the Danube so that the splendid
institution could never be closed again. After the reopening, perhaps
someone should take the precaution of throwing the keys to the
reinforced glass box into the Danube to prevent anyone from
entertaining the idea of ever opening a book in these rooms. (Here and here photos of the coffee house in its heyday, Here, here and here after the renovation.)
DU, 1.6.06 (Switzerland)
DU magazine focusses on Germany for the World Cup and has its
correspondents report from every corner of the Bundesrepublik. As usual
only a very small selection is available online, but Albrecht Tübke's photographic portraits which accompany the pieces of writing can be viewed here.
The lengthy discursive
essays are less illuminating than the small atmospheric pieces such as
the one by Svenja Leibe on the village where she grew up. "Drive off the motorway, on and on through the scattered settlements,
none of which you will find surprising. Drive through them, but do not
hope to see anything through the panorama windows of the bungalows,
drive on down the curvy streets, past the pig farms, past the silver
bunting of the car show rooms. Follow the neon coloured invitations to
'foam parties and barn raves'. Look out for people, you won't see many
of them. Don't think the red lantern in front of the family house is a
forgotten Christmas decoration. Drive. Drive down the pretty hill, on
past the hidden building sites in the garden of the old pheasantry,
down to the 'tank resistant' bridge that stoutly spans a tiny stream.
The road runs directly into the heart of the village and to a little
house behind a metre-long curve sign where it turns very sharply to the
left. Don't look out of the window with too much interest here, you
will only make them suspicious. There is nothing to buy any more. Leave
them in peace. Let them file away at their gardens, take that seriously."
The Economist, 09.06.2006 (UK)
Inspired by Isaac Asimov's futuristic vision "I, Robot", The Economist asks in its Technology Quarterly how secure our future will be among robots. Do Asimov's three laws
for the protection of humans hold today? "Regulating the behaviour of
robots is going to become more difficult in the future, since they will
increasingly have self-learning mechanisms built into them, says Gianmarco Veruggio,
a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in
Genoa, Italy. As a result, their behaviour will become impossible to
predict fully, he says, since they will not be behaving in predefined
ways but will learn new behaviour as they go."
Other articles dealing with new fuel cells, artificial neural networks in car motors and the victory march of Bluetooth (wireless personal area networks) are unfortunately not online. Not in the magazine but also topical here is Robocup, the world robot football championships taking place this week in Bremen.
L'Express, 09.06.2006 (France)
Does globalisation make Karl Marx a "pioneer of modern thinking"? The question is tossed around in this issue by two indiviuals who are convinced the answer is yes: English historian Eric Hobsbawm and Jacques Attali, economist and former advisor to Francois Mitterand, whose book "Karl Marx ou l'esprit du monde"
was published last year. Hobsbawm finds a renewed interest in Marx
entirely natural: "Today we are seeing the globalised economy that Marx anticipated.
Still, he didn't foresee all of its repercussions. For example, the
Marxist prophesy whereby an increasingly numerous proletariat topples capitalism
in the industrial countries did not come about." Attali comments: "The
Socialist International was a remarkable attempt on Marx's part to
think the world in its entirety. Marx is an extraordinarily modern
thinker, because rather than sketching the outlines of a socialist
state, his writings describe the capitalism of the future."
Die Weltwoche, 08.06.2006 (Switzerland)
Daniel Binswanger portrays Segolene Royal, the promising presidential candidate whose conservative views are pushing French socialists into an identity crisis. "Re-education camps for criminal youths controlled by the army,
state paternalism of parents with authority problems, cutbacks in
funding for people with delinquent children: for the last week people
in France have been discussing a whole catalogue of measures aimed at
coming to grips with youth violence in the banlieues. But for once the
debate has not been set off by the hyperactive Minister of the Interior
Nicolas Sarkozy. The French are rubbing their eyes in disbelief: as if
in a political mirage, the discourse on law-and-order has changed camps."
Folio, 06.06.2006 (Switzerland)
What's become of lunch? A sandwich gulped down while you're walking. Folio presents this rule and exceptions to it.
Stephan Israel visits Michel Addons,
cook for the Italian EU Commission: "Today there's lobster tails on
spring rolls with ginger and oyster sauce. For the main course there's veal sweetbreads
with new potatoes and green asparagus from Provence. For desert there's
strawberries on creme brulee. Today is the yearly visit of the
much-feared auditors from Luxembourg."
Italian author Andrea Camilleri commiserates with those who have to swallow down a hamburger on the street, reminiscing about how his grandmother used to cook at noon. "As primo there was mostly pasta, as a gratin or with meat sauce, sometimes there was also melanzane alla parmigiana. As secondo there was poultry, lamb or fish, then cheese and sausages. Of course a lunch like that took its time. No one went back to work before four in the afternoon."
In his "Duftnote" column on fragrances, Luca Turin voices his amazement at a new summer perfume: "This is so wretched that it almost sets new standards in the matter." (Here the English version.)
Le point, 12.06.2006 (France)
Bernard-Henri Levy is up in arms that no one in France has said a word about Simone de Beauvoir, who died 20 years ago. In his "notebook"
column, he pays homage to seven women, all of whom are "proof of the
timelessness of de Beauvoir's tremendous work": Hillary Clinton,
Condoleezza Rice, Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, French
politician Segolene Royal, women's rights activist Fadela Amara,
Burmese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and – German chancellor Angela Merkel. Levy writes: "Angela Merkel, 'that woman' as Gerhard Schröder,
Putinist and world record holder in matters of corruption under a
democracy, called her; that 'girl' who peeved him no end at the time of
his election defeat... She, the specialist in quantum physics
(elementary particles are not Michel Houellebecq's terrain, but hers),
enjoys a popularity that has her predecessor, and all of
Europe's heads of government, green with envy. And on top of that she's
rehabilitating the finances of an economy that thanks to her is once
more becoming what it always has been and should definitely be once
more: the moving force in the European equation."
The New York Review of Books, 22.06.2006 (USA)
Five years after the American victory over the Taliban, Ahmed Rashid sees Afghanistan
once more on the verge of collapse: "A revived Taliban movement has
made a third of the country ungovernable. Together with al-Qaeda,
Taliban leaders are trying to carve out new bases on the
Afghanistan–Pakistan border. They are aided by Afghanistan's resurgent opium industry,
which has contributed to widespread corruption and lawlessness,
particularly in the south. The country's huge crop of poppies is
processed into opium and refined into heroin for export, now accounting
for close to 90 percent of the global market."
Further articles: Alan Ryan presents three books in which renowned philosophers – Kwame Anthony Appiah, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum – address concepts of cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism. Freeman J. Dyson reviews Daniel C. Dennet's philosophical treatise on religion, "Breaking the Spell",
in which Dennett pinpoints the real problem as "belief in belief": "He
finds evidence that large numbers of people who identify themselves as
religious believers do not in fact believe the doctrines of their
religions but only believe in belief as a desirable goal."
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?
OpenDemocracy explains why a novel called "Paranoia" suddenly disappeared from Belarussian bookshops. Prospect fears that a ban on Islam4UK could undermine British democracy. The Gazeta Wyborcza explores Polish-Jewish relations. Le Monde diplomatique watches the carving up of Africa. In El Pais Semanal, maths whizz Marcus du Sautoy explains the sex appeal of suduko. And Gerhard Richter manages to surprise the Nation.
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.