Süddeutsche Zeitung 11.07.2008

Till Briegleb traces the success story of Danish architecture since the 90s, thanks to architects such as the Bjarke Ingels Group (here their designs for "The Battery"), Mutopia, 3xNielsen and Henning Larsen. "Exciting designs and top quality living are so successfully combined with the Danish design tradition that Oerestad exudes the cheerful urbanity in which Danes take so much pride. BIG, for example, are building a colourful complex of offices, terraced houses and apartment blocks in the form of the number eight. It has a revolutionary serpentine structure which enables people to cycle up the tenth floor. Danish cycling professionals could learn a valuable lesson here about climbing mountains without doping."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 10.07.2008

Markus Ackeret informs us about the plans of the new Russian Minister of Culture, Alexander Avdeyev to boost the arts in the new Russia: "We should look, he believes, to sports sponsorship, where wealthy businessmen step in as sponsors. We could make financially powerful magnates the new museum chairmen. Because the state is keen that art should again serve the greater good. Avdeyev is not only concerned about the declining state of the arts; morals need rescuing too. And film sponsoring is a priority. In future the state will directly commission films, the cultural minister announces. The best directors will be invited to realise projects which uphold ideas of humanism, morality, patriotism and other spiritual values of Russia's peoples, he said."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 10.07.2008

Mongolian shaman and author Galsan Tschinag witnessed the heavy protests which followed the supposed election fraud on July 1 in Ulan Bator. He reports:"You can learn a lot by watching a tragedy play out. It is surprising what can suddenly emerge out of a routine protest: everyone slides into the abyss of terrifying violence. The state is not as strong as it makes out. The police were overwhelmed by the rioters. And the soldiers, who rushed to support them, were equally ineffective. We are seeing the consequences of a blind glorification of the country's marauding past through the recent overnight u-turn in historiography, art and culture - the young people will stop at nothing in acting out this questionable heroism."


Die Zeit 10.07.2008

Georg Blume and Jörg Binder visit Xu Jiehua, the wife of the Chinese environmental activist Wu Lihong, who was thrown into prison for his fight against water pollution. "A worker, who single-handedly took on the factories and the authorities and whose fame has reached Bejing. For over a decade Wu fought to protect Lake Tai, one of China's largest inland waters. 30 million people live on its shores and around 3000 factories pump their waste unaccounted for into the lake. But officials behave as if everything was fine. Wu discovered that the city of Yixing had been tampering with the water quality tests. He filed over 200 reports against companies, demanding that factories pay damages. 'Now he can spend his time in prison thinking about what his family means to him,' says Xu. She is just as furious with her husband as she is with the authorities."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 09.07.2008

Gustav Seibt reports back elated from the Sebastiano del Piombo exhibition in Berlin's Gemälde Galerie, a brilliant painter of the High Renaissance whose reputation has still to recover from Vasari's unjustly negative legend. For Seibt, Sebastiano's perhaps most impressive painting is the Pieta of Viterbo, which was painted ten years before the plundering of Rome in 1527. "Christ lies in the foreground, athletic, yet with a Giorgioniesque softness. There is a sweet monumentality to him, that foreshadows Ingres. Behind him, separate, a pyramidal, almost androgynous Madonna in costliest lapis lazuli blue wrings her hands, while looking up calmly at the sky, a hellish night sky with fires and storms raging on the horizon. Many interpreted this as a reference to Dante, because it was believed that the entrance to the Inferno lay in Viterbo. Be that as it may, Sebastiano's painting flickers with a stark ambivalence between the beautiful godly flesh of the dead Christ and the hellish absence of salvation in the world. Anyone who can develop tensions like this doesn't need historical catastrophe to advance aesthetic form."


Frankfurter Rundschau 10.07.2008

Arno Widmann was present when German President Horst Köhler had the enviable privilege of listening to the world's top experts discuss modernity in all its many facets: "When the Chinese speaker, Professor Hui Wang, explained that China has always been an empire and not a nation state, and that therefore the yardstick of the nation state should not be used to measure the Tibet question, Köhler had just left the room. Would he have been able to sit there silently? Would he have not had to 'respond'? It was cunningly nimble of him to have just popped out precisely at the only delicate moment of the nine-hour marathon session. I ask myself if Hui Wang had announced that he would only come on condition that he would be allowed to say this, and if Köhler's office had answered that 'We live in a democracy so you may say what you wish'."


Die Welt 10.07.2008

German-Iranian author and Iranian regime critic Said wanted to read together with his Israeli colleague Ascher Reich at the Berlin Beirut-Festival in September, but the Lebanese Embassy has torpedoed the initiative: "It's clear to me that I cannot undertake this token of reconciliation in my place of birth, Tehran – I'm not too welcome there at the moment. Blue-eyed as I am, I thought that Berlin would be the suitable place."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 09.07.2008

Jürgen Kasten celebrates the discovery of parts (of a 16mm copy, not the original) of the classic film "Metropolis" in Buenos Aires, which were believed to be lost forever: "What the MGM cutters had edited out in 1927 were mainly sub-plot sequences. Now the secretary of the youthful hero becomes a more developed character, as does the worker who functions as the doppelgänger of the millionaire's son and who is kept under surveillance by the futuristic city patriarch. This was admittedly previously known from the screenplay, but only seen rudimentarily in the film. It shows Lang's infatuation with sub-plots that branch out into complexity and paranoia. More important are two other parts of the discovered footage. For one, the background story to the millionaire (and thus his neuroses and narcissism) and his love rival, the inventor Rotwang, become comprehensible, as they were both in love with the same woman."


Die Welt 08.07.2008

Uta Baier takes up cudgels for the impressionist Gustave Caillebotte, as an exhibition takes place in Bremen showing numerous rarely seen works from private owners. He was not only a patron of the Impressionists, he was himself a great painter who has long been misjudged by art history because he was wealthy and did not need to earn a living from his art, writes Baier: "This erroneous view hindered the careers and recognition of many artists, Caillebotte among them. He painted some of the boldest, most radical and most modern pictures of his time: racy vistas over the new Paris, homages to technical progress, bridges which pierce through nature like a giant foreign body, never-seen cross-sections which draw the beholder directly into the events."


Spiegel Online 05.07.2008

Henryk M. Broder enters the debate about the cartel of human rights abusers on the United Nations Human Rights Council who would like to report in future on 'abuses of the freedom of expression and thought' where 'racist or religious discrimination' is involved: "Naturally, it's not about the organisation punishing vilifications of Christianity by Muslim fanatics or denouncing anti-Semitic cartoons in the Iranian press. It's about banishing any criticism of the practice of Islam and suffocating any discussion about Islam and Human Rights. Had a representative of the Pope launched such a motion, the outrage in the western media would undoubtedly have been massive. Scores of commentators would have written about usurpation and censorship. But because the point has been about protecting the Islamic 'religion of peace' from impertinence and protecting Islam from a further endurance test of its peaceableness, there was only a glaring silence to be heard in the Western media." (Aside from Pascal Bruckner's appeal at signandsight.com, of course).