Der Tagesspiegel 16.01.2007

Nicola Kuhn introduces Mexican artist Damian Ortega, who has been nominated for the Nationalgalerie Prize. "The police must have stared in disbelief. Once the nattily dressed young man with the goatee beard had succeeded in lugging a table, chair and bed onto the pedestrian bridge on Berlin's Holsteiner Ufer, in the next show of strength, he went and threw these over the iron railings straight into the Spree. Then Damian Ortega himself got the shock of his life when the police officers approached and questioned him very sternly about just what he thought he was doing. The Mexican DAAD stipendiary started worrying that his time in Berlin might be up. Help came at last when one of the policemen asked in a somewhat friendlier manner if all this was perhaps just an art project." Tonight Ortega is opening a "Fish & Ships" bar in the DAAD gallery in Berlin that he has created together with the Japanese artist Shimabuka.


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 16.01.2007

Tonight ZDF TV will be airing its demography horror movie "Aufstand der Alten" (The Uprising of the Old), which is set in 2030 and deals with the uncovering of a euthanasia programme created to cull silver-citizen numbers. "We, the Germany that has enjoyed more peace and prosperity than any other time, will experience crisis in our old age," writes the paper's publisher and author of the "The Methuselah Conspiracy", Frank Schirrmacher. The population scientist James Vaupel is not quite so pessimistic in an interview with Christian Schwägerl. "I know of no reputable economic prognosis that assumes that the Germans will be poorer in 2030 that they are today. If we succeed in raising the official retirement age first to 65 and then to 67, the pension system will not collapse. Before this happens, a lot will have to happen, the labour of the older generation cannot continue to be categorically so expensive, employers should not brand older workers as unproductive."


Frankfurter Rundschau 16.01.2007

Now that Edmund Stoiber's popularity ratings are on the decline in Bavaria, where he is head of the Christian Social Union party, and his successor is involved in a adultery scandal, Peter Michalzik hopes desperately that this won't bring down the CSU as a whole. Because the Bavarian model of permanent carnival has won a special place in his heart. "From the point of view of anywhere else in the country, Bavaria is still a cross between an island of the blessed and a curious childishness. The Bavarians have just got it better, one has to admit with a tweak of envy, but they are basically a lot of lovable loons, with all their fuss about traditions and Bavarian idiom that is incomprehensible to the outside world. They spend their whole year in a Punch and Judy show, or in their carnival costumes, in an unstoppable, inexorable celebration of Bavaria."


Die Tageszeitung 16.01.2007

Art historian Wolfgang Ullrich suspects that it is part of the legacy of differentness which is currently making contemporary art so sought-after and expensive. "Since Romanticism, and especially since the avant-garde, art has stood for the state of emergency, for the radical other and its shocking foreignness. While formerly, radical abstractions, gestures of rapture or taboo-breaking performances engendered the aspired difference between art and everything else, today the same is achieved through exceptional prices.… Art with an aura of the trashy, the dilettantish or the hastily dashed off stands the best chance of creating a maximum sensation."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 16.01.2007

As part of a series on megacities, Mexican writer Guillermo Fadanelli lovingly describes Mexico City as an artistically inspiring Hell. "Anyone who ventures into the Tepito neighbourhood finds himself in an autonomous district. The ringleaders, boxers, powerful criminals, smugglers and crack dealers, the underground bodegas and secret corridors, the certainty of the locals that they don't need to worry about the police – all this makes the quarter one of the most successful zoos in the world. Once every two years the police come in armed to the teeth, taking prisoners and confiscating drugs and stolen goods. But that's just a spectacle for the television. On the next day they leave again and people take up where they left off."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 16.01.2007

Peter Hagmann is delighted with a restaging of Handel's operatic oratorio "Semele" at Zurich's Opernhaus, directed by Robert Carsen and conducted by William Christie. "At the very heart of the production is Cecilia Bartoli. She is Semele, the princess who refuses to marry her father's choice Athamas because she has lost her heart to Zeus. She is the woman who longs to transgress borders, who seeks immortality – and who, prompted by Hera, demands God to appear in his true shape. But in so doing she exacts of him something he cannot prevent: her death. Cecilia Bartoli is in fantastically good humour, simply entrancing. And her voice is in equally good form… Her aria of eternal desire in the first act, and above all her outbreak in act three when she informs Zeus that she wants it all, leave the audience spellbound. The tones surge from her throat in wild but well-directed cascades, accurate to the millimetre and in every aspect faultlessly accompanied by the orchestra. Tonight we are once more witness to a luscious demonstration of the art of coloratura."