Für Freunde des schlechten Geschmacks:
www.spiegel.de/video/video-42450.html

An exhibition, 5th – 19th December 2008 @ Xenado Galerie, opening this Friday at 6 PM.

Artists: Claudia Rey & Dr Walker

Xenado Galerie
Chorinerstraße 79
10119 Berlin

English-language books on Berlin are oddly rare, for reasons I don’t entirely understand. Trying to hunt one down on Amazon, I ran into Jason Lutes’ Berlin, a portrait of ’20s Berlin as a graphic novel. I’m pretty enthusiastic about comics; 90% are crap, but the few great successes make up for them. And, if this review is anything to go by, Berlin is one of the good ones:

tracing the arcs of several overlapping narratives; playing with time; a fiction based around real events; in particular, mapping the sense of bewilderment, loss, chaos, creativity, and uncertainty in Berlin at that point – a city on the edge. Lutes plays out the chance encounters in bustling city life with real grace, ultimately to heartbreaking effect.

Has anybody read the thing? Is it as good as all that?

Part of 'Millennium Mythology' by Tacheles regular Alexander Rodin.

The prospect of Tacheles being demolished is somehow both inevitable and unthinkable.

Inevitable because in any battle between money and art, money wins. Unthinkable because Tacheles is a focal-point for so much, that I can’t imagine what would fill the gap if it went. Sure, the artists will find other places, the parties move on. Foreign tourists will turn up, look in confusion at a building site, and be picked off by the commercial tour operators. But all of it together, the whole unstable combination of dismal and excellent? Once that goes, it’s gone for good.

For all Tacheles’ faults – the dirt (a cleaner there once earnestly explained to me how he viewed pissing in the stairwells as a form of artistic expression), the in-fighting, the omnipresent drug-pushers – it’s the best we’ve got. I don’t know how to help Tacheles keep going: the legal battles are for insiders, mass demonstrations are more uplifting than effective. I hope somebody does, though.

If you’re in the city in August or early September, make sure to check out Urban Affairs.

+++ ATM likes to invite you to URBAN AFFAIRS – probably the biggest streetart groupshows this year in Germany with about 45 different artists from all over the world! ATM is proud to be a partner of this event and likes to show you new works of participating ATM Artists BIMER, EMESS and BONK!

URBAN AFFAIRS , Brauerei Friedrichshöhe, Landsberger Alle 54, Berlin-Friedrichshain 05.07.08 – 05.09.08, Di-Do 14:00-20:00, Fr-So 15:00-23:00, www.urbanaffairs.de +++

three days, thirty-four galleries, thousands of art mavens. attend at your own risk….

because i will be flying back from Nuremburg just in time to run down to my German conversation course at the Goethe Institut but:

Art critic Heinz-Peter Schwerfel will be premiering his film Berlin – arm aber sexy at the Martin Gropius Bau on the 7th of May at 19:00. The film, with music from Johannes Brahms, Lychee Lassi, MIA, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Stereo Total and others, examines Berlin’s happening art scene and the locust like behaviour of the artists, critics, collectors and charlatans that have descended on the city in the past few years. Schwerfel himself will be in attendance along with Sabrina van der Ley, artistic director of ART FORUM Berlin, and a bunch of other art mavens. Since entrance is FREE…yes…FREE, you can expect a crowd of penniless types like yourself so get there early. But If you – like me – end up missing the premiere, you can also catch it showing on arte on the 5th of June.

Martin-Gropius-Bau
Niederkirchnerstr. 7, 10963 Berlin
07 May 2008, 19:00

Two new exhibitions are opening at Architekturforum Aedes this evening:

April 25 – May 30, 2008
Opening: Friday, April 25, 2008
Aedes Am Pfefferberg, Christinenstraße 18-19, 10119 Berlin
Opening hours: Di-Fr 11 bis 18.30 Uhr, Sa-So 13 bis 17 Uhr