Süddeutsche Zeitung 29.12.2006

Jazz musician and writer Chris Abani opens a series of articles on the world's megacities with a homage to Lagos. "If Lagos is a body and the oil pipelines which zigzag across it are its arteries, then the inhabitants of the city are vampires. This vampirism is new. It started very gradually with someone drilling a hole in one of these pipelines to steal a little oil, a barrel here, a barrel there. Then like hungry mosquitoes, more and more people started biting into the arteries taking ever greater risks to get their lifeblood. For a long time the city bled this thick, sweet raw material into buckets that were sold and resold, until eventually it had to rebel. The arteries which had been tapped too often and too swiftly started exploding. Like a sick person trying to save his body from a deadly virus, the city began to kill its parasites, its demons. Every year thousands of people were killed stealing oil. The city has to survive."


Holger Liebs takes delight in falling for the tricks of Andreas Slominski, the artist trapmaker who is currently showing at Frankfurt's Museum for Modern Art. "Take for example this very ordinary-looking football which is lying about in the museum's (vitually) empty hall. There is the temptation to kick it just to hear the space echo when it smacks against the wall leaving perhaps a rounded mark behind it (performance art?). But you know you shouldn't do a thing like this because you're in a museum and the only question which springs to mind is: what is all this nonsense? It's only by asking that you learn that a child's skull is apparently sewn into this ball, which in turn refers to snippet of information from some ethnological primer which claims that the cannibals in Borneo stopped their head hunting when they were introduced to football. And there we were, wondering whether to risk another volley shot. Slominski has got us again."


Die Tageszeitung 29.12.2006

The film of the year, writes Harald Fricke is Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's documentary "Zidane". "Not only because of its excellent protagonist but because it records in 2005 the blueprint for the Materazzi head butt. "On April 2005 the two video artists were in the stadium with a total of 17 video cameras to record the game between Real Madrid and Villareal. Or more precisely, a single player in this game, because all the cameras were set on Zinedine Zidane alone. Gordon and Parreno sat in a broadcast van giving instructions, telling the cameras to zoom in on Zidane's face, his sweat, which drips from his chin throughout the match, or on his comical scuffling steps in between. The documentation is as thorough as it is psychedelically frayed. A minimal art profile of Zidane, with crazy sound effects coming from the microphone which was attached to the footballer's sock so that every bit of ball contact booms like a thunderclap. And this is all laid on top of a grating looped soundtrack from Mogwai. So far so good, as far as the art goes. Right up until the 85th minute. When Zidane clashes with his opponent Quique Alvarez in front of the goal. Zidane pushes him brusquely – and gets a red card."


Die Welt 29.12.2006

On the media page Joachim Bessing portrays the Canadian Tyler Brule, founder of the lifestyle magazine Wallpaper and the English-language newsmagazine Monocle, due for launch in February. "In Brule's opinion, the publishing houses of his chosen city of residence, London, have failed to grasp that this city is home to people from all over Europe, Asia and the USA. And he finds it incomprehensible that the much-praised British daily and Sunday papers fail to do justice to this internationality, and instead, as he sees it, are 'getting more provincial by the day. But the banker from Germany who lives in London, does not read the German GQ magazine to keep up with fashion trends. He does not take the weekend journal of the Handelsblatt seriously.' The greatest weak point of German publishing houses, says Tyler Brule, is their faith in market research. 'All this is involves is inviting round a couple of housewives from Rostock, giving them a cup of coffee and a few Bahlsen biscuits, and asking them what they think should be printed.'"

The writer Jan Koneffke remembers the time he spent in Romania in 1998. "August 1998: My first visit to my in-laws. Driving from the airport into the city, my father-in-law draws my attention to a 19th century building now home to a casino, where the Hitler-friendly ambassador von Killinger committed suicide after Romania split with Nazi Germany. In the following weeks people I talked to referred without exception to August 23, 1944 as the day 'we betrayed you'. Everyone is utterly convinced that Romania has such bad press in Germany thanks to this forgotten 'betrayal'."