Die Welt 08.05.2007

Jörg von Uthmann isolates several cultural objectives in a policy speech given last year by Nicolas Sarkozy: "Culture and education are to be merged into one big ministry. Universities are to receive more funding, as is art education at school. And the same goes for foreigners studying in France. On the other hand, Sarkozy also wants to encourage private patrons to do more in this area, which despite all his messages to the contrary is still seen by the high-handed cultural bureaucrats as their own private domain."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 08.05.2007

Burkhard Müller pays a compliment of sorts to Thomas Pynchon, who turns seventy today. "Pynchon's books float by like clouds, inspiring in readers the irresistible urge to identify figures and patterns in their highly vivid forms. But in fact they're just clouds, whose changeable complexity refers back to nothing other than themselves."


Die Tageszeitung 08.05.2007

Heimo Lattner of the artist group e-Xplo explains to Kirsten Küppers why their contribution to the Sharjah Biennale in the United Arab Emirates consists of a number of loud speakers distributed throughout the country, playing love songs by gastarbeiters. "In the run-up to the Biennale, we were concerned that the huge majority of people in the Emirates have no voice in the sense of a political voice. Over 85 percent of the work here is done by foreigners. These are people from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, Iran, Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Philippines, Syria, Egypt, Ethiopia etc. These people have no rights whatsoever. We were interested in how the political voice of these people might sound. And the fact that it is illegal in Sharjah to report on one's working conditions was of course an added provocation."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 08.05.2007

In the series on global megacities, the Daily Telegraph film critic, Sukhdev Sandhu (more), proclaims Brick Lane as his favourite place in London because it is constantly being converted by migrants: "If you walk along Brick Lane today, past the converted steam baths and soup kitchens, the buildings with the faded lettering from old tailors and tinned-goods dealers, you will eventually come to the Jamme Masjid. This mosque was built in 1742 as a Huguenot chapel and was taken over by the Methodists in the 19th century, before becoming a synagogue in 1989 in front of which Jewish anarchists would regularly hurl strips of bacon at the oldest members of the Orthodox community. For a long time Brick Lane was not even considered a part of London."


Der Tagesspiegel 08.05.2007

In an interview with Nicola Kuhn, painter Daniel Richter talks about his retrospective in Hamburg's Kunsthalle, the pressure to put labels on things, and artistic success: "If something's good, it'll be successful. A musician or a writer might write a fantastic book then take a nose-dive. In art that's hardly possible, because of art's economic basis and easy accessibility. In the 20th century many artists went hungry as a result of pogroms and wars. Still, they became famous. It hardly happens that an artist's work is re-interpreted once they're dead. All others have the usual ups and downs, and that's how it'll be with me, too. Now I'm having a good period, then will come a bad one, then remorse, humility, self-questioning, twelve-tone music."