Übergang

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[uebergangmagazine]

Do you still work for free?

Professor Aruna D’Souza used to work for free, a lot, exposure and that, you know the drill. But one day she stopped it altogether and actually changed careers not because she was “sick” of it but because otherwise she would starve. In this Artpratical article she lays bare the reasons behind her decision.

And how about you, when is enough enough? When is it ok to work for free in 2015? What would be your advice?

[uebergangmagazine]

Atonal Mix by CoH

Berlin Atonal, 2015. Photography by Camille Blake

Do we even have to advertise the Atonal? The festival, re-launched to be held again at the power plant since 2013, definitely one of the audio-visual highlights of the summer, if not the year. After just two editions in the new location, the Atonal is already an event that you do not want to miss. Since 1982, when the Atonal still took place at SO36, and shaped the entire 80s West Berlin experimental music, a lot has happened. And so this year show new faces and Altbekannte to Atonal and after party in the honor of Ohm. The line-up also lets us know who's who and who's up-and-coming. My personal highlights were definitely the Diagonal Showcase heard on Thursday and the performance of Head High. And these acts are the reason we know there’s no booking agencies involved, when it comes to Atonal. To top it all these Olympics of electronic music even take place in a power plant. In order to push the exhilaration, here’s a mix by CoH (pronounced: ZON)

Originally published in Wolfauftausendplateaus

[uebergangmagazine]

Curator Simon Njami: The only true country for an artist is the studio

Simon Njami is a rather international author and curator. Born in Lausanne and based in Paris, he was responsible for the inception of unprecedented exhibitions focusing on African artists. “Africa Remix” (2004) was one of those and it toured the world challenging the mainstream perception of contemporary African art, from London to Tokyo. As an author Njami has also written a biography of James Baldwin – another man of the world with renowned insight into notions of Otherness and belonging. So quite fittingly Simon Njami has curated “Xenopolis”, an art exhibition part of the STADT/BILD cooperation of four institutions, which opens during Berlin Art Week. “Xenopolis” explores the complexity of the city in times of global migration, nodding to Roland Barthes’ idea that the city communicates with its residents, who in turn change its language. Sleek speaks with the curator to find out more about the metropolis as a “free zone” in a liminal state between placelessness and rootedness.

As cities lend and sell culture and products to one another, how can we talk about the authenticity of a city or person?

Authenticity is a word that I personally dislike. There is no such a thing in our contemporary world. Nevertheless, every city, as every individual, bears an identity that is unique, and that is due to architecture, culture, history, and all those dimensions that shape an entity. New York, Paris, Berlin, London, despite globalisation, have a strong identity of their own, and one can never be mistaken. The problem with nostalgic people always regretting old times when things were better is that they don’t realise that a city, just like a human being, has to evolve in order to remain alive. And that evolution, like any other, is never a loss, when it is lived for what it is: the natural movement of life.

Could you talk us through your selection of artists for this show?

I precisely wanted to give an impressionist portrait of a city that different people, with different backgrounds, identities and sensibilities could claim theirs. It teaches us about this very notion of authenticity you were referring to, and gives it a very vivid shift. When Kennedy claimed to be a Berliner, he could of course say it in the same way the artists in the show could. But that metaphorical statement could not have worked if he would claimed to be a German, which would have not made any sense. Through the works and the biographies of the artists I have selected, I would like every Berliner to experience the sharing of the space and convince them that the notion of stranger is much more complex than what they might think.

What do you think are the implications of an artist remaining an outsider in their chosen new city?

No one can really be an outsider on all accounts. Of course, a passport may be a limitation, as far as regulations are concerned. There is a number of things that a “legal stranger” cannot perform in certain territories (voting, for instance). But there are many other ways of belonging. Having said that, I tend to think that the very nature of an artist is to remain an outsider, wherever he is, be it in the place where he was born and grew up. To be a stranger is to allow oneself to keep a critical distance from the crowds. The only true country for any artist, I believe, is the studio. That very space where the artist is faced with herself or himself.

Berlin as a city and art hub has changed tremendously in the past decade. What do you think it will be like in five years?

Five years is too a short a period. I don’t think any major change will occur within that time. For me, Berlin has that provincial taste that makes its charm. It not a big commercial hub, like New York or London, it is not a mega art capital like Venice or, let’s say Kassel and to be honest, I would not like it to change much. What attracts people to this city, at least my artists friends, is precisely this different time and rhythm. One can still lead a “normal” life in Berlin.

Interview by Will Furtado

Photography by David Damoison

Originally published in Sleek

[uebergangmagazine]

Writer Anne Chebu on being Black(in) German(y)

Why am I black and not brown? What does that even mean? And can I be black and German? These are some of the questions Anne Chebu answers in her book “Anleitung zum Schwarz sein”. Translating to “Introduction to being Black”, the book is a positive and empowering take on the black identity of the African diaspora in Germany. Exploring themes such as self-designation, exotism, hair and self-perception, the book also works as a guide offering practical advice on how to deal with police harassment and white (German) society in general. The book benefits parents, teachers and anyone unafraid of analytical discourses on race. The author and journalist is currently promoting the book, holding readings across Austria and Germany, where Will Furtado met her in Potsdam.

When did you decide to write this book?

From an early age I kept meeting young black [people] who had a very low self-esteem. Often they had grown up without any black caregivers and defined blackness with something negative. And I’ve been having such encounters up to this day. On top of that, the topic of my bachelor’s thesis was “Black people in the German media”. It offered a detailed introduction to the topic “What is racism actually?” and I thought it’d be a pity to just shelve the finished work. Moreover, at the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (Initiative for Black People in Germany) I very often met young black people who had many questions on what it actually means to be black. All these situations induced me to write a guide, so that these young black people would get their questions answered.

Is there a similar book in other countries?

I’m not so sure. In the USA there’s the book “How to be black” from Baratunde Thurston. It came out as I was almost finished with my book. I haven’t read it but I think it’s more a bit more on the comedy side. There’s a lot of good literature that shows of the history and prospects of black people in an impressive way. But if there is such an introductory book like mine, I don’t know.

Do you have plans to have the book translated?

Yes. I would like to bring out an English version this year. I hope it happens, it’s a question of funding. With the English version I could also offer lectures in English-speaking African countries or the United States. There are also many black people in Germany who would like to read it in English.

What is so special about being black in Germany?

A lot of things. Of course, one can think at first of the perception and reactions from white society: that they constantly remind blacks and people of colour that they don’t have white skin, that they’re don’t belong to the “norm”. But in my book, I try to show much more than the negative experiences. I want to strengthen my readers. I want to show them that there have been black Germans for over 300 years, that we also have a history here and fully belong in this country. For many people with a migration background Germany is their only home and my book is based upon that – an immersion into this homeland and its own story that connects black people with their homeland. The book will confirm to readers that their perceptions are right, and explain where these different racisms (from seemingly harmless situations) come from. The reader should be aware they have the right to decide how they want to be referred to. The “don’t be so sensitive” theme has to be wiped out and replaced with historical facts and a collective perception. And the white readers shall get an insight into the reality of an Afro-German life.

The interview was carried out in German and translated into English by Will Furtado.

Image: Noel Richter

https://www.facebook.com/AnleitungzumSchwarzsein?fref=photo

http://www.unrast-verlag.de/neuerscheinungen/anleitung-zum-schwarz-sein-393-detail

Originally published in Afropean

[uebergangmagazine]

Don’t be a douche about the Prepuce

It was in New York where I first became aware of how a very small piece of skin attached to my dick could make me more desirable. Or not. As a bonafide gay tourist in the States, the second I found a wireless connection in a Bedford Ave. café, I turned on all my sex apps – enough of them to keep me so busy that I almost had no time left to actually meet the guys. But these apps became my window to just one more standard of beauty gay men hold themselves and others to.

In Europe, one of the joys of doing short city drop-ins is how one easily becomes the new kid on the block: One hour in a place and I’m soon eroticized by a bunch of Euro boys for being a foreigner, or for my dark skin. I can never tell which.

So, it was with certain surprise that while in Brooklyn, many of my future lovers (or haters, depending on how you look at it) were not racist, nor xenophobic but 'prepucist': they judged me on my foreskin.

It’s not like “No foreskins, please” is an appropriate message to put in your Grindr profile. That would have been too rude. So some NY residents decided to ask me via private message if I, as a non-American, in fact had a foreskin. My positive answer put some people off, while others almost cried with excitement (or whatever that blue splash emoji means.)

Brooklyn is a mixed bag when it comes to the nationalities of its inhabitants. And the Europeans there were close to begging for my uncut meat. They must have been deprived. The negative reactions predictably came mostly from the Americans themselves: “Do you mind washing it one more time?” was the most common. For fuck sakes, I was already late for my next date, I had to think.

How can such a small piece of skin be so polemical and lead to such fervent bias?

There are various reasons for male circumcision in the world. The main being religious and hygienic, though even the religious ones are in one way or another rooted in personal hygiene practices from a time when running water didn’t exist.

However, the most curious story of circumcision I found was the cereal one. It was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a man as bland as corn flakes (which he invented, by the way), who in the 1900s advocated male circumcision (and pure carbolic acid for the clitoris!) to stop nature from taking its course, to stop the horny young folk from tossing off. Too bad for this Adventist Church fanatic? his plan didn’t fucking work – clearly boys kept on wanking. But for all his evils, the Kellogg’s company he founded with his brother later came up with Froot Loops and Coco Pops, which for me, come in handy as sexual innuendos. Fancy a bit of my Coco Pop in your Froot Loop?

Anyway. So does this mean that other kinds of prejudice could also be based on outdated laws that seeped into public consciousness via pseudoreligious heteronormative white businessmen? Probably. That’s too much to answer in one column.

I too realised that, not surprisingly, I have foreskin preferences. I found myself looking for the ‘whole’ thing, the ‘real’ thing, the ‘natural’ thing. But I was in the USA, and my holiday libido didn’t allow me to be fastidious about sex. So I travelled the length and breadth of the city, from Downtown to Washington Heights and tried many of them: cut, uncut, XL to S, because at the end of the day, with or without a foreskin, a cock is a cock.

Originally published in Dandy Dicks

[uebergangmagazine]

Houellebecq is islamophobic and so are you

The French writer Michel Houellebecq, best known for his best sellers ‘Atomised’ and ‘Platform’, claimed in a recent Paris Review interview that ‘Islamophobia’ is not a kind of racism. This happened while promoting his new novel ‘Submission’ which hypothesizes a France led by a Muslim government. The novel had already kicked off Islamophobia rows when it was released before the Charlie Hebdo attacks and it has now grown more salient in the discussion surrounding Islamophobia. I have not read the book but the author himself in the same interview says he does use fear tactics regarding Islam in France in his novels.

‘Islamophobia’ – the word is being pronounced across the world but not many seem to know exactly what it means, its connection to racism and its usage as an excuse to silence critics of Islam.

The French author had previously faced trial on charges of inciting racial hatred after calling religions ‘dumb’ and Islam ‘the dumbest’ of them all but the charges were later cleared. From an unbiased point of view his comments were not racist, but things are not that simple as to say that ‘Islamophobia’ has nothing to do with racism.

The definition of ‘Islamophobia’ as a term is still divisive as there is no consensus on its definition and limitations. That means that people use it in an arbitrary way (Houellebecq included) according to the definition they believe to be right. And while being an ‘Islamophobe’ doesn’t automatically mean being racist; racists often use the word to justify their racist remarks.

The popular usage of the term is relatively recent, and is sensitive to geographical and cultural settings. The term itself was coined in a 1996 report produced by the Runnymede Trust, a UK-based race equality think-tank. This report’s definition of ‘Islamophobia’ is currently the most accepted Europe-wide – ‘an outlook or world-view involving an unfounded dread and dislike of Muslims, which results in practices of exclusion and discrimination’. So this definition (note, before 9/11) already relates to discrimination. That is, phobia (from the Greek phobos fear) which means: a persistent, abnormal, and irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid it, despite the awareness and reassurance that it is not dangerous – is only one part of the definition.

But despite this definition the term is still weak and part of that weakness is that it was firstly used within the British social framework and therefore doesn’t properly account for any other attitudes towards Islam; attitudes in other countries and attitudes that have been transforming. After 9/11 the term has been used throughout the whole world without a global consensus on its meaning. And the lack of consensus on the scope and definition leaves the doors open for anyone to use the term to back up any personal agendas. ‘Islamophobia’ can take many forms, depending on the person using the term. Furthermore, it can possibly be stretched to envelop a fear of other characteristics such as Muslim names, Muslim attire and anything else that can be perceived as ‘Muslim’.

Other critics also argue that the term attempts to dismiss any sort of criticism of Islam, which is what happened in the case of Houellebecq and it took a court case to make clear that criticising Islam is not racism. British authors R. Miles and M. Brown who published ‘Racism’ in 2003 wrote that portrayals of Islam and Muslims as the national ‘other’, e.g. Pakistani and Algerian migrants in Britain and France respectively, significantly interacts with racism, although ‘Islamophobia’ itself is not racism. But they also argue that ‘the existence of different “Islamophobias” does not invalidate the concept of “Islamophobia” any more than the existence of different racisms invalidates the concept of racism’. So despite the fact that ‘Islamophobia’ might not translate directly to racism we can’t also dismiss the fact that it often does.

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) seems to be much clearer. Its definition of ‘Islamophobia’ is based on the Runnymede Trust’s report but it does point at a plausible racial element: ‘Islamophobia’ is ‘the fear of or prejudiced viewpoint towards Islam, Muslims and matters pertaining to them. Whether it takes the shape of daily forms of racism and discrimination or more violent forms, Islamophobia is a violation of human rights and a threat to social cohesion’.

This definition draws direct parallels to another complex case – Judaism – and whether it is a race or can be treated as a race, when and by whom. Cora Døving at the Norwegian Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities asserts that there is a link between anti-Semitism in pre-Nazi Europe and ‘Islamophobia’ today. She cites that ‘among the concerns are imagined threats of minority growth and domination, threats to traditional institutions and customs, skepticism of integration, threats to secularism, fears of sexual crimes, fears of misogyny, fears based on historical cultural inferiority, hostility to modern Western Enlightenment values’. But what are Western values? Some might say freedom of speech but how can we talk about freedom of speech when in some European countries it is a crime to deny the Holocaust or to wear religious attire in schools? Even Charlie Hebdo fired the veteran French cartoonist Maurice Sinet in 2008 for making an allegedly anti-Semitic remark. Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that published caricatures of the Prophet in 2005, reportedly rejected cartoons mocking Christ because they would ‘provoke an outcry’ and proudly declared it would ‘in no circumstances… publish Holocaust cartoons’. And more recently David Cameron called for a ban on ‘non-violent extremist’ organisations and a restriction on associated individuals from appearing on TV, social media, or other public platforms. Does that mean that British Hollywood-actor-turned-social-campaigner Russell Brand could be legally silenced?

Recently in Germany, of all places, there has been a resurgence of this anti-other sentiment. A movement called Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) has been rallying the streets of (mostly east) Germany by the thousands (up to 25,000 according to the Guardian) uttering their discontent with the proliferation of Islam, although the area in which the movement came from and is the strongest only 0.2% of the population is Muslim. But when the individual protesters are questioned their concerns amount to ‘seeing too many Turkish people on the street’, or that ‘Africans sell drugs’, or that ‘refugees are parasites’. So these protesters are in fact using ‘Islamophobia’ to back up their antagonism towards all foreigners. On the day of one of many Pegida protests Khaled Idris Bahray, a 20-year old Eritrean refugee, was found murdered on the street not far from the flat where he lived with others. Three days before the incident a Swastika was daubed on the men’s second floor apartment. It was accompanied by the slogan “We’ll get you all”. It would be incorrect to blame a Pegida protester but to refuse to see a connection between the Pegida sentiment and these kind of attacks is negligent at best. Even if we stuck strictly to the Runnymede Trust’s definition there is no denying of racism in movements such as Pegida in Germany.

Much of the ‘Islamophobia’ discourse is also adopted by the media with its scaremongering tactics or plain ignorance – for instance Jihad is not a terrorist attack as the Daily Mail often implies, but a spiritual or physical struggle against the enemies of Islam.

We can also talk about racialising Islam through the depiction of Muslims with very specific stereotypical physical characteristics, which are mostly Middle-Eastern/North African: long hooked noses, brown skin; seen at least from the Charlie Hebdo caricatures. And of course if most of the Muslim population in countries like the UK or France are non-white, the divorce of race and Islam is highly improbable (at least in those countries).

As for the case of Houellebecq it serves him well that the word ‘Islamophobia’ is not seen as racist, obviously because as a self-confessed Islam antagonist, he doesn’t want to be seen as a racist, especially now that he’s published a novel about a France that adopts Islam as the national religion. Therefore he has many reasons to be biased towards denying that ‘Islamophobia’ is a form of racism, even if he’s not a racist himself, which was proved in court. I’ve read some of his novels, which are crude, witty and filled with characters who happen to be very bitter, a little like the author himself. He also brushes off the racism accusations aimed at him by stating that racism is elementary, whereas ‘Islamophobia’ isn’t. But as explored up to this point, there is nothing simple about racism or ‘Islamophobia’.

There are however proposed alternatives to the term, including ‘Islamoprejudice’ – which stresses discrimination; or ‘Anti-Muslimism’ – which emphasizes the antagonism against Muslims as people and not as a religion; or plainly criticism of Islam – which stresses the analysis of the Quran. But regardless of the chosen term, discussion must carry on so that we know when and if we are veering towards racism while debating Islam, or if we’re just using the word to halt criticism.

Image: Johny Pitts

[uebergangmagazine]

Postcapitalism is even worse than it sounds

In a Guardian article, Paul Mason recently argues that our new age of a failed left has given ground to a new kind of capitalism in which people gladly work for free, for the “right” causes. Are we back to stage one? Read the piece below: The red flags and marching songs of Syriza during the Greek crisis, plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above. For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse. Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left’s project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did. If you lived through all this, and disliked capitalism, it was traumatic. But in the process technology has created a new route out, which the remnants of the old left – and all other forces influenced by it – have either to embrace or die. Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I call this postcapitalism. As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started. Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.

Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely. Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue. Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the shattering of the old structures in the post-2008 crisis. You only find this new economy if you look hard for it. In Greece, when a grassroots NGO mapped the country’s food co-ops, alternative producers, parallel currencies and local exchange systems they found more than 70 substantive projects and hundreds of smaller initiatives ranging from squats to carpools to free kindergartens. To mainstream economics such things seem barely to qualify as economic activity – but that’s the point. They exist because they trade, however haltingly and inefficiently, in the currency of postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free stuff. It seems a meagre and unofficial and even dangerous thing from which to craft an entire alternative to a global system, but so did money and credit in the age of Edward III. New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”. Buzzwords such as the “commons” and “peer-production” are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself. I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do. And this must be driven by a change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: “This is no longer simply my survival mechanism, my bolt hole from the neoliberal world; this is a new way of living in the process of formation.” ... The 2008 crash wiped 13% off global production and 20% off global trade. Global growth became negative – on a scale where anything below +3% is counted as a recession. It produced, in the west, a depression phase longer than in 1929-33, and even now, amid a pallid recovery, has left mainstream economists terrified about the prospect of long-term stagnation. The aftershocks in Europe are tearing the continent apart. The solutions have been austerity plus monetary excess. But they are not working. In the worst-hit countries, the pension system has been destroyed, the retirement age is being hiked to 70, and education is being privatised so that graduates now face a lifetime of high debt. Services are being dismantled and infrastructure projects put on hold. Even now many people fail to grasp the true meaning of the word “austerity”. Austerity is not eight years of spending cuts, as in the UK, or even the social catastrophe inflicted on Greece. It means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up. Meanwhile in the absence of any alternative model, the conditions for another crisis are being assembled. Real wages have fallen or remained stagnant in Japan, the southern Eurozone, the US and UK. The shadow banking system has been reassembled, and is now bigger than it was in 2008. New rules demanding banks hold more reserves have been watered down or delayed. Meanwhile, flushed with free money, the 1% has got richer. Neoliberalism, then, has morphed into a system programmed to inflict recurrent catastrophic failures. Worse than that, it has broken the 200-year pattern of industrial capitalism wherein an economic crisis spurs new forms of technological innovation that benefit everybody. That is because neoliberalism was the first economic model in 200 years the upswing of which was premised on the suppression of wages and smashing the social power and resilience of the working class. If we review the take-off periods studied by long-cycle theorists – the 1850s in Europe, the 1900s and 1950s across the globe – it was the strength of organised labour that forced entrepreneurs and corporations to stop trying to revive outdated business models through wage cuts, and to innovate their way to a new form of capitalism. The result is that, in each upswing, we find a synthesis of automation, higher wages and higher-value consumption. Today there is no pressure from the workforce, and the technology at the centre of this innovation wave does not demand the creation of higher-consumer spending, or the re‑employment of the old workforce in new jobs. Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet. As a result, large parts of the business class have become neo-luddites. Faced with the possibility of creating gene-sequencing labs, they instead start coffee shops, nail bars and contract cleaning firms: the banking system, the planning system and late neoliberal culture reward above all the creator of low-value, long-hours jobs. Innovation is happening but it has not, so far, triggered the fifth long upswing for capitalism that long-cycle theory would expect. The reasons lie in the specific nature of information technology. ... We’re surrounded not just by intelligent machines but by a new layer of reality centred on information. Consider an airliner: a computer flies it; it has been designed, stress-tested and “virtually manufactured” millions of times; it is firing back real-time information to its manufacturers. On board are people squinting at screens connected, in some lucky countries, to the internet. Seen from the ground it is the same white metal bird as in the James Bond era. But it is now both an intelligent machine and a node on a network. It has an information content and is adding “information value” as well as physical value to the world. On a packed business flight, when everyone’s peering at Excel or Powerpoint, the passenger cabin is best understood as an information factory. But what is all this information worth? You won’t find an answer in the accounts: intellectual property is valued in modern accounting standards by guesswork. A study for the SAS Institute in 2013 found that, in order to put a value on data, neither the cost of gathering it, nor the market value or the future income from it could be adequately calculated. Only through a form of accounting that included non-economic benefits, and risks, could companies actually explain to their shareholders what their data was really worth. Something is broken in the logic we use to value the most important thing in the modern world. The great technological advance of the early 21st century consists not only of new objects and processes, but of old ones made intelligent. The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them. But it is a value measured as usefulness, not exchange or asset value. In the 1990s economists and technologists began to have the same thought at once: that this new role for information was creating a new, “third” kind of capitalism – as different from industrial capitalism as industrial capitalism was to the merchant and slave capitalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. But they have struggled to describe the dynamics of the new “cognitive” capitalism. And for a reason. Its dynamics are profoundly non-capitalist. During and right after the second world war, economists viewed information simply as a “public good”. The US government even decreed that no profit should be made out of patents, only from the production process itself. Then we began to understand intellectual property. In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free market economy the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights. He noted: “precisely to the extent that it is successful there is an underutilisation of information.” You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data, capture the free social data generated by user interaction, push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before, mine the existing data for predictive value – always and everywhere ensuring nobody but the corporation can utilise the results. If we restate Arrow’s principle in reverse, its revolutionary implications are obvious: if a free market economy plus intellectual property leads to the “underutilisation of information”, then an economy based on the full utilisation of information cannot tolerate the free market or absolute intellectual property rights. The business models of all our modern digital giants are designed to prevent the abundance of information. Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied/pasted infinitely. A music track or the giant database you use to build an airliner has a production cost; but its cost of reproduction falls towards zero. Therefore, if the normal price mechanism of capitalism prevails over time, its price will fall towards zero, too. For the past 25 years economics has been wrestling with this problem: all mainstream economics proceeds from a condition of scarcity, yet the most dynamic force in our modern world is abundant and, as hippy genius Stewart Brand once put it, “wants to be free”. There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance created by corporations and governments, a different dynamic growing up around information: information as a social good, free at the point of use, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced. I’ve surveyed the attempts by economists and business gurus to build a framework to understand the dynamics of an economy based on abundant, socially-held information. But it was actually imagined by one 19th-century economist in the era of the telegraph and the steam engine. His name? Karl Marx. ... The scene is Kentish Town, London, February 1858, sometime around 4am. Marx is a wanted man in Germany and is hard at work scribbling thought-experiments and notes-to-self. When they finally get to see what Marx is writing on this night, the left intellectuals of the 1960s will admit that it “challenges every serious interpretation of Marx yet conceived”. It is called “The Fragment on Machines”. In the “Fragment” Marx imagines an economy in which the main role of machines is to produce, and the main role of people is to supervise them. He was clear that, in such an economy, the main productive force would be information. The productive power of such machines as the automated cotton-spinning machine, the telegraph and the steam locomotive did not depend on the amount of labour it took to produce them but on the state of social knowledge. Organisation and knowledge, in other words, made a bigger contribution to productive power than the work of making and running the machines. Given what Marxism was to become – a theory of exploitation based on the theft of labour time – this is a revolutionary statement. It suggests that, once knowledge becomes a productive force in its own right, outweighing the actual labour spent creating a machine, the big question becomes not one of “wages versus profits” but who controls what Marx called the “power of knowledge”. In an economy where machines do most of the work, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be “social”. In a final late-night thought experiment Marx imagined the end point of this trajectory: the creation of an “ideal machine”, which lasts forever and costs nothing. A machine that could be built for nothing would, he said, add no value at all to the production process and rapidly, over several accounting periods, reduce the price, profit and labour costs of everything else it touched. Once you understand that information is physical, and that software is a machine, and that storage, bandwidth and processing power are collapsing in price at exponential rates, the value of Marx’s thinking becomes clear. We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could, if we wanted them to, last forever. In these musings, not published until the mid-20th century, Marx imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a “general intellect” – which was the mind of everybody on Earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody. In short, he had imagined something close to the information economy in which we live. And, he wrote, its existence would “blow capitalism sky high”. ... With the terrain changed, the old path beyond capitalism imagined by the left of the 20th century is lost. But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework – just as it created the framework for factory labour, sound currencies and free trade in the early 19th century. The postcapitalist sector is likely to coexist with the market sector for decades, but major change is happening. Networks restore “granularity” to the postcapitalist project. That is, they can be the basis of a non-market system that replicates itself, which does not need to be created afresh every morning on the computer screen of a commissar. The transition will involve the state, the market and collaborative production beyond the market. But to make it happen, the entire project of the left, from protest groups to the mainstream social democratic and liberal parties, will have to be reconfigured. In fact, once people understand the logic of the postcapitalist transition, such ideas will no longer be the property of the left – but of a much wider movement, for which we will need new labels. Who can make this happen? In the old left project it was the industrial working class. More than 200 years ago, the radical journalist John Thelwall warned the men who built the English factories that they had created a new and dangerous form of democracy: “Every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse.” Today the whole of society is a factory. We all participate in the creation and recreation of the brands, norms and institutions that surround us. At the same time the communication grids vital for everyday work and profit are buzzing with shared knowledge and discontent. Today it is the network – like the workshop 200 years ago – that they “cannot silence or disperse”. True, states can shut down Facebook, Twitter, even the entire internet and mobile network in times of crisis, paralysing the economy in the process. And they can store and monitor every kilobyte of information we produce. But they cannot reimpose the hierarchical, propaganda-driven and ignorant society of 50 years ago, except – as in China, North Korea or Iran – by opting out of key parts of modern life. It would be, as sociologist Manuel Castells put it, like trying to de-electrify a country. By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being. ... This will be more than just an economic transition. There are, of course, the parallel and urgent tasks of decarbonising the world and dealing with demographic and fiscal timebombs. But I’m concentrating on the economic transition triggered by information because, up to now, it has been sidelined. Peer-to-peer has become pigeonholed as a niche obsession for visionaries, while the “big boys” of leftwing economics get on with critiquing austerity. In fact, on the ground in places such as Greece, resistance to austerity and the creation of “networks you can’t default on” – as one activist put it to me – go hand in hand. Above all, postcapitalism as a concept is about new forms of human behaviour that conventional economics would hardly recognise as relevant. So how do we visualise the transition ahead? The only coherent parallel we have is the replacement of feudalism by capitalism – and thanks to the work of epidemiologists, geneticists and data analysts, we know a lot more about that transition than we did 50 years ago when it was “owned” by social science. The first thing we have to recognise is: different modes of production are structured around different things. Feudalism was an economic system structured by customs and laws about “obligation”. Capitalism was structured by something purely economic: the market. We can predict, from this, that postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society. But we can only begin to grasp at a positive vision of what it will be like. I don’t mean this as a way to avoid the question: the general economic parameters of a postcapitalist society by, for example, the year 2075, can be outlined. But if such a society is structured around human liberation, not economics, unpredictable things will begin to shape it. For example, the most obvious thing to Shakespeare, writing in 1600, was that the market had called forth new kinds of behaviour and morality. By analogy, the most obvious “economic” thing to the Shakespeare of 2075 will be the total upheaval in gender relationships, or sexuality, or health. Perhaps there will not even be any playwrights: perhaps the very nature of the media we use to tell stories will change – just as it changed in Elizabethan London when the first public theatres were built. Think of the difference between, say, Horatio in Hamlet and a character such as Daniel Doyce in Dickens’s Little Dorrit. Both carry around with them a characteristic obsession of their age – Horatio is obsessed with humanist philosophy; Doyce is obsessed with patenting his invention. There can be no character like Doyce in Shakespeare; he would, at best, get a bit part as a working-class comic figure. Yet, by the time Dickens described Doyce, most of his readers knew somebody like him. Just as Shakespeare could not have imagined Doyce, so we too cannot imagine the kind of human beings society will produce once economics is no longer central to life. But we can see their prefigurative forms in the lives of young people all over the world breaking down 20th-century barriers around sexuality, work, creativity and the self. The feudal model of agriculture collided, first, with environmental limits and then with a massive external shock – the Black Death. After that, there was a demographic shock: too few workers for the land, which raised their wages and made the old feudal obligation system impossible to enforce. The labour shortage also forced technological innovation. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradeable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method). Present throughout the whole process was something that looks incidental to the old system – money and credit – but which was actually destined to become the basis of the new system. In feudalism, many laws and customs were actually shaped around ignoring money; credit was, in high feudalism, seen as sinful. So when money and credit burst through the boundaries to create a market system, it felt like a revolution. Then, what gave the new system its energy was the discovery of a virtually unlimited source of free wealth in the Americas. A combination of all these factors took a set of people who had been marginalised under feudalism – humanists, scientists, craftsmen, lawyers, radical preachers and bohemian playwrights such as Shakespeare – and put them at the head of a social transformation. At key moments, though tentatively at first, the state switched from hindering the change to promoting it. Today, the thing that is corroding capitalism, barely rationalised by mainstream economics, is information. Most laws concerning information define the right of corporations to hoard it and the right of states to access it, irrespective of the human rights of citizens. The equivalent of the printing press and the scientific method is information technology and its spillover into all other technologies, from genetics to healthcare to agriculture to the movies, where it is quickly reducing costs. The modern equivalent of the long stagnation of late feudalism is the stalled take-off of the third industrial revolution, where instead of rapidly automating work out of existence, we are reduced to creating what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” on low pay. And many economies are stagnating. The equivalent of the new source of free wealth? It’s not exactly wealth: it’s the “externalities” – the free stuff and wellbeing generated by networked interaction. It is the rise of non-market production, of unownable information, of peer networks and unmanaged enterprises. The internet, French economist Yann Moulier-Boutang says, is “both the ship and the ocean” when it comes to the modern equivalent of the discovery of the new world. In fact, it is the ship, the compass, the ocean and the gold. The modern day external shocks are clear: energy depletion, climate change, ageing populations and migration. They are altering the dynamics of capitalism and making it unworkable in the long term. They have not yet had the same impact as the Black Death – but as we saw in New Orleans in 2005, it does not take the bubonic plague to destroy social order and functional infrastructure in a financially complex and impoverished society. Once you understand the transition in this way, the need is not for a supercomputed Five Year Plan – but a project, the aim of which should be to expand those technologies, business models and behaviours that dissolve market forces, socialise knowledge, eradicate the need for work and push the economy towards abundance. I call it Project Zero – because its aims are a zero-carbon-energy system; the production of machines, products and services with zero marginal costs; and the reduction of necessary work time as close as possible to zero. Most 20th-century leftists believed that they did not have the luxury of a managed transition: it was an article of faith for them that nothing of the coming system could exist within the old one – though the working class always attempted to create an alternative life within and “despite” capitalism. As a result, once the possibility of a Soviet-style transition disappeared, the modern left became preoccupied simply with opposing things: the privatisation of healthcare, anti-union laws, fracking – the list goes on. If I am right, the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not coincide. ... The power of imagination will become critical. In an information society, no thought, debate or dream is wasted – whether conceived in a tent camp, prison cell or the table football space of a startup company. As with virtual manufacturing, in the transition to postcapitalism the work done at the design stage can reduce mistakes in the implementation stage. And the design of the postcapitalist world, as with software, can be modular. Different people can work on it in different places, at different speeds, with relative autonomy from each other. If I could summon one thing into existence for free it would be a global institution that modelled capitalism correctly: an open source model of the whole economy; official, grey and black. Every experiment run through it would enrich it; it would be open source and with as many datapoints as the most complex climate models. The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next.

[uebergangmagazine]

Has Art Become Irrelevant?

Andres Serrano with his damaged work, 'Piss Christ'. Picture: Craig Borrow

Recently in Commentary Magazine, Michael J. Lewis wrote about how art has become irrelevant. Do you agree?

The other day in my kitchen as my flarmate boiled water and oil a wasp came in and flew straight into the saucepan. This and other happenings led me to think that perhaps everything in the whole world has become irrelevant, or is it.

Below an excert for quick digestion.

In 1971 the performance artist Chris Burden stood against the wall of a California art gallery and ordered a friend to shoot him through the arm. That .22 rifle shot was the opening salvo of a movement that came to be called “endurance art”—an unnerving species of performance art in which the performer deliberately subjects himself to pain, deprivation, or extreme tedium. Try as he might, Burden never quite matched the shock of his spectacular debut (and he did try, once letting himself be crucified onto the back of a Volkswagen Beetle).

As fate would have it, I had just shown my students at Williams College the grainy footage of Burden’s shooting when we learned of his death in May. Curiously, the clip did not provoke them as it had their predecessors in my classrooms in decades past. No one expressed any palpable sense of shock or revulsion, let alone the idea that the proper response to the violation of a taboo is honest outrage. One student fretted about the legal liability of the shooter; another intelligently placed the work in historical context and related it to anxiety over the Vietnam War.

Placing things in context is what contemporary students do best. What they do not do is judge. Instead there was the same frozen polite reserve one observes in the faces of those attending an unfamiliar religious service—the expression that says, I have no say in this. This refusal to judge or take offense can be taken as a positive sign, suggesting tolerance and broadmindedness.

But there is a broadmindedness so roomy that it is indistinguishable from indifference, and it is lethal. For while the fine arts can survive a hostile or ignorant public, or even a fanatically prudish one, they cannot long survive an indifferent one. And that is the nature of the present Western response to art, visual and otherwise: indifference.

In terms of quantifiable data—prices spent on paintings and photographs and sculptures, visitors accommodated and funds raised and square footage created at museums—the picture could hardly be rosier. On May 1, New York’s Whitney Museum moved from 75th Street to the Meatpacking District and reopened in a $422 million building. The move first seemed inexplicable when it was announced several years ago, but it has proved to be a brilliant stroke. Relocating to a hotter and more fashionable neighborhood abutting the wildly popular High Line Park is one of those gambits that instantly transforms the logic of the game board, like castling in chess. The new Whitney was designed by the furiously prolific Renzo Piano, and while it will not please everyone (its boxy swivel of platforms distressingly recalls the flight tower of an aircraft carrier), it swaggers with brio and panache and is fast becoming one of the world’s best-attended museums.

Equally robust is the art market, to judge by a Christie’s auction on May 11 that set several records, including the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of art: $179.4 million, paid by an anonymous bidder, for Picasso’s Women of Algiers (Version O). One can expect more such record-breaking in the next few years as the art market is increasingly roiled by Hong Kong dollars, Swiss francs, and Qatari riyals. (The buyer of the Picasso was subsequently revealed to be the former prime minister of Qatar.)

But quantifiable data can only describe the fiscal health of the fine arts, not their cultural health. Here the picture is not so rosy. A basic familiarity with the ideas of the leading artists and architects is no longer part of the essential cultural equipment of an informed citizen. Fifty years ago, educated people could be expected to identify the likes of Saul Bellow, Buckminster Fuller, and Jackson Pollock. Today one is expected to know about the human genome and the debate over global warming, but nobody is thought ignorant for being unable to identify the architect of the Freedom Tower or name a single winner of the Tate Prize (let alone remember the name of the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature).

The last time that artists were part of the national conversation was a generation ago, in 1990. This was the year of the NEA Four, artists whose grants were withdrawn by the National Endowment for the Arts because of the obscene content of their work. Their names were Tim Miller, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Karen Finley—the latter especially famous because her most notable work largely involved smearing her own body with chocolate. As it happened, their work was rather less offensive than that of Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, who had been the subject of NEA-funded exhibitions the year before. Serrano’s photograph of a crucifix immersed in a jar of his own urine was called “Piss Christ.” Mapplethorpe’s notorious self-portrait featured a bullwhip thrust into his fundamental aperture. Even the New York Times, a stalwart champion of Mapplethorpe, could not honestly describe that photograph, let alone publish it, referring to it with coy primness as a “sadomasochistic self-portrait (nearly naked, with bullwhip).”

That controversy ended with a double defeat. In a case that was heard by the Supreme Court, the NEA Four failed to have their grants restored. But Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Newt Gingrich likewise failed in their determined effort to defund the NEA (total budget at the time: $165 million). And the American public—left with an impressionistic vision in which urine, bullwhips, and a naked but chocolate-streaked Karen Finley figured largely—drew the fatal conclusion that contemporary art had nothing to offer them. Fatal, because the moment the public disengages itself collectively from art, even to refrain from criticizing it, art becomes irrelevant.

This essay proposes that such a disengagement has already taken place, and that its consequences are dire. The fine arts and the performing arts have indeed ceased to matter in Western culture, other than in honorific or pecuniary terms, and they no longer shape in meaningful ways our image of ourselves or define our collective values. This collapse in the prestige and consequence of art is the central cultural phenomenon of our day.

It began a century ago.

For most of human history, works of visual art were the direct expression of the society that made them. The artist was not an autonomous creator; he worked at the behest of his patron, making objects that expressed in visible form that patron’s beliefs and aspirations. As society changed, its chief patrons changed—from medieval bishop to absolutist despot to captain of industry—and art changed along with it. Such is patronage, the mechanism by which the hopes, values, and fears of a society make themselves visible in art. When World War I broke out in 1914, that mechanism was delivered a blow from which it never quite recovered. If human experience is the raw material of art, here was material aplenty but of the sort that few patrons would choose to look upon.

When I went to Germany to study architecture in 1980, it was still common to see wounded veterans from both world wars. The first seats on buses or subways were reserved for them and were usually occupied. One day a fellow student and fellow history buff chanced to remark that the worst cases were from World War I, but of course one never saw them.

“They never show their faces?” I asked, naively.

“Mike,” he said, “they have no faces to show.”

He was speaking of the Verstümmelten—the mutilated, those who lost jaws, cheeks, and noses in the shambles of the trenches, where a raised head was the target of choice. They had been so wounded, brought to a nearby field lazaretto and put together as much as possible, that they would spend the rest of their lives seen only by the family members who tended to them. “There is one,” my friend said—I can still picture the expansive gesture he made—“in practically every street.”

Not until then did I properly grasp the unbearable intensity of German artists such as Ernst Kirchner, Otto Dix, and George Grosz, who created their most memorable work during the war or just afterward. The human body—dynamic, beautiful, created in God’s image—had long been the central subject of Western art. It was now depicted in the most tormented and fragmented manner, every coil of innards laid bare with obscenely morbid imagination. Kirchner and Dix depicted the gore. Grosz, who refrained from showing actual injuries, was even more disturbing. He made collages of faces out of awkwardly assembled parts, like a jigsaw puzzle assembled with the wrong pieces, suggesting those sad prosthetics that would have been an ubiquitous presence in 1918.

Christianity had introduced the motif of beautiful suffering, in which even the most agonizing of deaths could be shown to have a tragic dignity. But things had now been done to the human body that were unprecedented, and on an unprecedented scale. The cruel savagery of this art can be understood only as the product of collective trauma, like the babble of absurd free associations that tumble from our mouths when in a state of shock. That kind of irrational expression was the guiding principle of Dada, the movement that came about at the end of the war and that was made famous by Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated urinal turned upside down and named Fountain. Even the name Dada itself was a quintessential absurdist performance, selected at random from a French-German dictionary (the word is French baby talk for “hobby-horse”).

Dada applied unserious means to a serious end: the search for an artistic language capable of expressing the monstrous scale and nature of the war. But the absurdist moment was short-lived and quickly superseded. The toppling of Europe’s three principal empires and the Russian Revolution seemed to confirm that the West had entered into a radical new phase of cultural history, the most consequential since the rise of Renaissance humanism half a millennium ago. There was a general sense that a world radically transformed by war required an equally radical new art—an art of urgent gravity. While modern art had certainly existed before the war, there now came into being a comprehensive “modern movement” that was active in all spheres of human action, not only in art but in politics and science as well. In its wake, Pablo Picasso rose from being a mere painter with a quirky personal style to a world-historical figure whose work was as important to the future of mankind as Einstein’s or Freud’s.

All this gave the modernism of the 1920s its tone of moral seriousness, which became even more serious once the Great Depression began. One sees this high-minded seriousness most strikingly in the architects of the modern movement. They saw their mandate as the solving of the central architectural challenge of modern life—how to use new materials and means of construction to make housing affordable and cities humane. Today the lofty principles that motivated them seem quaint, such as that German fixation on the Existenzminimum. This was the notion that in the design of housing, one must first precisely calculate the absolute minimum of necessary space (the acceptable clearance between sink and stove, between bed and dresser, etc.), derive a floor plan from those calculations, and then build as many units as possible. One could not add a single inch of grace room, for once that inch was multiplied through a thousand apartments, a family would be deprived of a decent dwelling. So went the moral logic.

We may shudder at the thought of so many identical families penned into so many identical boxes, but at root this idea was an expression of a humane and humanistic view of the world. It took for granted that the mission of architecture was to improve the human condition, even as modern artists assumed that theirs was to express that condition. To accomplish this, they did not require the traditional patron. The prestige and power of those patrons had been diminished by the war, and with that diminution went their ability to dictate to artists. That became even more pronounced after the stock-market collapse in the late 1920s, especially in the United States. When the Museum of Modern Art introduced European modern architecture to America in its celebrated 1932 exhibition of the International Style, it dismissed the traditional capitalist client with remarkable highhandedness. A half century of robust artistic and architectural patronage by the industrialists who had ruled American life since the Gilded Age was written off with a sneer by the exhibition’s organizer, Alfred Barr: “We are asked to take seriously the architectural taste of real-estate speculators, renting agents, and mortgage brokers.” In other words, the making of art was far too serious to be left to sentimental clients who might mistakenly desire a narrative painting with a clear moral message, or a facsimile of a villa they had admired in Tuscany.

After World War II and the introduction of the atom bomb, it seemed pointless to try to preserve the confused traditions of a civilization that had brought the world to the ledge of oblivion. Instead, the artists came to believe they had to dispense with the entire accumulated storehouse of artistic memory and the history of the benighted West in order to begin anew.

The 1950s painter Barnett Newman summarized this line of thought pretentiously but accurately:

We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of western European painting. Instead of making “cathedrals” out of Christ, man, or “life,” we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.

[uebergangmagazine]

Is Richard Prince a Genius Troll, or a Lazy Sexist?

As of last week much has been said about Richard Prince’s most recent, highly controversial new work “New Portraits” – a series of blown-up screenshots, taken straight from his Instagram feed, each on sale at Frieze Art Fair New York for $100,000 a piece. The fact the artist is profiting hugely from appropriated photos of semi-naked girls without their permission is, understandably, causing quite a stir. However, in my eyes the real outrage is the art world’s insistence on championing lame art by unimaginative celebrity artists.

Prince’s “New Portraits” series, which were first shown at Prince’s own Gagosian gallery in New York last year, are exact copies of unauthorised images, jet-printed on six-foot canvas with added salacious remarks in the comments thread. Some of the images were taken from celebrities’ profiles, including Pamela Anderson and Taylor Swift, but many of them were taken from the account of SuicideGirls, a community of alternative pin-up models.

The controversy itself is dividing opinions, with New York Magazine’s art critic Jerry Saltz defending the works as “genius trolling”, while The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl concluded they made him “wish he was dead”. Paddy Johnson, meanwhile, openly called Prince out on his crass sexism and inability to understand youth culture. There were also mixed reactions from the Instagram account owners themselves, with sex writer Karley Sciortino admitting she felt honoured, while SuicideGirls founder Selena Mooney claimed the installation felt like “a violation by someone who doesn’t get it.”

In an effort at retaliation, Mooney started selling prints of the images for $90 with the proceeds going to charity. Commenting on the affair, she wrote: “If I had a nickel for every time someone used our images without our permission in a commercial endeavour I’d be able to spend $90,000 on art. I was once really annoyed by Forever 21 selling shirts with our slightly altered images on them, but an artist? Richard Prince is an artist and he found the images we and our girls publish on Instagram as representative of something worth commenting on, part of the zeitgeist, I guess? Thanks Richard!” Prince tweeted later that he thought it was a smart move.

Regardless of how amusing this circus might be, let’s get one thing straight: Prince’s latest attempts at creating something of artistic merit are tired and desperate. Prince started his career in the 1970s with appropriation. He shot to fame by re-photographing Sam Abell’s photograph of a cowboy, and later caused more controversy by appropriating photo of a nude Brook Shields aged 10 with the pretext of highlighting how American culture sexualises children. So, his formula is a medley of barely legal themes, with a bit of added flesh and a hefty price tag, all working as a critical portrait of society. And, 40 years on, he’s still relying on these “shock tactics” for attention, although this time he’s using images from “ordinary” people as opposed to those of major corporations or celebrities. Really, is there anything more tame than a one-trick pony celeb artist?

“IG [Instagram] is a bedroom magazine,” he wrote about the series on his blog. “I can start out with someone I know and then check out who they follow or who’s following them, and the rabbit hole takes you on an outer body experience where you suddenly look at the clock and it’s three in the morning. I end up on people’s grids that are so far removed from where I began, it feels psychedelic.” Prince is a joker with a one-dimensional sense of humour, who behaves as if he’d only just discovered the internet. But this type of art is not really funny, because a rich artist using an old trick to make thousands at the expense of other people’s Instagram photos is not funny or clever, is just eyeroll inducing.

Across all its dimensions, there’s absolutely nothing new to find in this “New Portraits” series. We can trace the practice of appropriation in modern art back to Marcel Duchamp, who utilised day-to-day objects entirely as they were and called them art. His most iconic work is undoubtedly the urinal-turned-sculpture “Fountain” (1917), which spawned the era-defining quote: “It’s the artist’s choice. He chooses what is art.”

Since then, Duchamp’s legacy has been followed by many great artists, among them Andy Warhol, Mat Collishaw and Tracy Emin. Warhol in particular took the practice further, and in the ’60s he conceived the series “Flowers” consisting of other photographers’ images which he then silk-screened, leading to him having to pay a sizeable cash settlement to each artist.

Using unauthorised images found online is also by no means a novelty. In 2012 artist Marc Adelman exhibited “Stelen (Columns)” (2007-11), a collection of more than 100 photos culled from gay dating site profiles. It caused agitation when the work was featured in New York’s Jewish Museum, and one of the photos’ owners threatened legal action if his picture wasn’t taken down.

Last year in Berlin, “Wanna Play?” – another similar artistic experiment – broadcast live private chats taken from the dating app Grindr in the middle of town. It also caused outcry, many claiming that the artist was violating the safety and privacy of users and exploiting the gay community. At the time, Haus der Kulturen der Welt curator Ashkan Sepahvand called it “sloppy artistic practice” and the whole installation was abandoned after just five highly controversial days, so why is it that Prince’s sloppy work is being celebrated at millionaire’s art fairs?

What Richard Prince did skirts exploitative territory, but exploitation is sadly nothing new, and all-too-often its perpetrators find themselves celebrated in the worlds of ultra-expensive fashion and art. So, it’s no surprise that an older, white, privileged male art critic stepped up to back Prince (who’s now in his mid-60s) and his latest exhibit. NYMag’s Jerry Saltz argues that, in this day and age, images are “materials, and artists use materials to do what they do.” He contends that these images were in the public domain, and thus fair game for use, yet fails to explain why he believes this trite move is “semi-revoluntionary” in any respect. Perhaps that’s because there’s nothing revolutionary about it at all.

Yet, regardless of your opinions on the art itself, the question many were asking is: are Prince’s actions legal? The somewhat frustrating answer is: probably. Previously, Prince has been embroiled in a long-running legal battle with photographer Patrick Cariou over his unauthorised use of Cariou’s work – a battle he partially lost, leading to the destruction of several works in the collection (although by no means the majority of it). By now he’s more than familiar with the legal definition of so-called “fair use”, and has likely positioned this work just enough on the side of the law to make it stick, should a case ever be brought against him.

Prince knows that, provided he alters an image just enough to call it “original,” he’ll get away with it. As such, his own sleazy additions to the pictures like, “Nice. Let’s hook up next week. Lunch, Smiles R” – a comment left under a photo of a girl in a swimsuit – might actually save his bacon. However, copyright is murky legal territory that’s only truly navigated with the aid of highly-paid lawyers, and should anyone bother taking the artist to court they will only be able to claim the market value of the images themselves – which, for the likes of SuicideGirls, wouldn’t be very much. Ultimately, Richard Prince knew exactly what he was doing when he picked them as his target, and that’s what makes the act all the more deplorable.

Still, despite all this there are those who claim Prince’s work is culturally valuable for the issues it raises in the global conversation. But let’s examine those issues a little closer. If, in fact, it was his aim to raise the issue of narcissism in the digital age, such a move would be no better than sanctimonious finger-wagging akin to the mother who shamed her daughter on video for posting sexy snapshots on Facebook. Thanks, Daddy Prince, for the moral lesson, but there’s zero cultural value in a rich man seizing and exploiting a woman’s image for his own financial profit, even if she is supposedly “fame-hungry” (and if, in the end, the image is returned).

Perhaps, instead, he’s trying to use his art to bring attention to how corporations like Facebook (which owns Instagram) have the power to monetize our images, despite not owning them. Yet, far from critiquing the practice, Prince’s actions simply play the role of such corporations, which is something only a hypocrite would do.

Regardless, there is perhaps one good thing about Prince’s sad spectacle, which is that the publicity stunt has (whether or not intentionally) unleashed a web-wide debate on art, copyright, appropriation of women’s bodies and our behaviour online. It has perhaps ignited a similar conversation to that of Miley Cyrus’s VMA performance, when she columbused twerking to mainstream audiences, instigating fervent analysis of white privilege and the indiscriminate appropriation of Black culture. At least that’s some small payback.

It’s long been apparent that the internet is up for grabs, and for that reason there are no shortage of people desperately trying to control it. It’s widely known that Mark Zuckerberg and Co. are selling our data to companies (and perhaps one day to governments), and Prince’s  work is a reminder that our rights in these matters are painfully thin. Yet, in its lack of imagination, it feels very much inconsequential.

[uebergangmagazine]

It Smells Like Stink Spirit

It’s been scientifically demonstrated that body odor plays a huge part in sexuality and attraction between humans, and thus should not be underestimated. I, learned that my peculiar way.

One of the first guys I had sex with said he was really into my smell, so much to the point that he dumped his wife and kids and moved countries to live with me. Months into our relationship he kept saying that he was addicted to my smell, that it made him go crazy and it shot him to the Moon and Mars. Months later nothing had changed, and it got so bad that he started cheating on me for fears that he might have actually been ‘hooked’ on me, you know, like crack. As you could already predict the whole affair started following a psychopathic pattern and so I fleetly dumped him. Olfaction is not only the most primitive of all senses; it also reaches the emotional part of the brain faster than sight. So the same way that it might be the deal breaker in dating, by working as a repellence filter, it will also make it harder to fall out of love with someone, even if they happen to be abusive assholes.

Our bodies’ scent is created by human leukocyte antigens (HLA), the outward manifestation of immune-system genes, together with fluctuating asymmetry (FA), which affects body symmetry. We tend to be more attracted to genetically dissimilar HLA types and that’s why we don’t usually fancy shagging our siblings. And FA, which affects our body size and stress tolerance, is the reason why we smell differently when we’re under pressure. Months’ worth of dating went by without one single incident of someone being specifically attracted to my body odor. But one day the roles reversed. However, I wasn’t drawn just to body odor; I was into the real stink. The day I was awoken to the pleasures of strong body odor was one time at Pork, a party in Berlin. I was dancing, concealed in the sweaty and oppressive walls of the sex club called Ficken 3000. The dance floor was not very full and some sort of electroclash anthem was on. Slowly a whiff came travelling into my nostrils. I couldn’t figure out what it was. Minutes later it became obvious that it was some very strong armpit sweat or a mixture of feet, bum crack and armpit sweat. I looked around me to figure out where it came from. There was topless guy who had his arms up and it became clear that the stink came from him. What I did not know was whether that was disturbing me. I was not supposed to like a scent that ‘stank’, I guess I had never been asked that question. The scent of his body challenged my olfactory receptors and the more I tried to figure out what was happening, the more I, liked it. It didn’t take long til I was dancing around him and took even less time to start snogging and hugging and sniffing him: his neck, pits and crotch. The cocktail of body odor was almost repulsive but for some reason it really turned me on. The guy in question had light brownish body hair and looked like what we’re supposed to think punks look like: tattoos, piercings, green hair, suspenders. I was completely absorbed by his scent, I couldn’t get enough of it, but I also didn’t dare lick him - he definitely didn’t smell and look like he washed very often.

The second stage of my infatuation was when I started noticing that my olfactory nerves had been shock activated: I behaved like a hound dog whenever I went out and there was sweaty people around me: the barman, the cloakroom girl, the kebab seller, the stinkier the better. And their scents made me shit horny. The third stage was when the smell of my own sweat made me horny. I sniffed myself while masturbating. I was horrified! Scientifically that was not supposed to happen! But that cooled off. I then noticed that not all type of sweat turned me on. It had to be the right amount of stink and the right amount of say, deodorant. I tried different amounts of deodorant and came up with the right recipe: half roll of Dove roll on deodorant for men. And bang, I suddenly started looking at the Perfume (novel and film) in a totally new light - I was the protagonist. That, had been my personal discovery. But of course smelly bits have been a fetish for some time. In the last five years or so there’s been a growing wave of gay blogs (I’m still yet to find an older blog) dedicated to men’s feet and feet attire more closely connected to sneakers’ fetishes. This one is quite particular because it revolves around sneakers (trainers) that working-class sporty European young men normally wear: Nikes with soles that bounce being one of the most idolised (judging by the frequency of online appearances). There are also gay parties for sneakers’ fetish only. The dress code keywords being sneaker, skater, chav (UK), proll (Germany), scally (UK) or soccer. Feet fetishes are often associated with old men perving on women’s shoes but this sneakers’ fetish has a huge following of young European pseudo-working-class gay men. Jordan Fox, the french porn star being its biggest bastion. On dating sites If I mention I’m into sneakers then I get asked what kind of (white) socks I wear: colour variation, brand, and how strongly they smell. But this part doesn’t turn me on so much as I find it difficult to get aroused by coordinates devoid of emotion. Stink, like pretty much with anything else that gets fetishised can be taken to the extreme, codified and commodified. There are so-called guys with web shops who sell their dirty socks and you even get to choose the type of socks from a catalogue and how long they need to be worn for. Does that mean that they have to wear five socks or more on top of each other if demand is really high? I never got into that. But once my devotion to stink led me to play feet slave with someone whose smell I really loved. He had lots of dark hair and wore full on sports attire. At his place he ordered me to sniff and lick his dirty socks and feet. I wasn’t as ardent as he hoped so he stomped my face. I called him a cunt for doing that, and he said that wasn’t part of the game, so we swapped roles. I was wearing Adidas high tops (I know..) and he started licking them passionately. Very passionately. He took the left shoe and sock off and, no joke, he stuffed them with his face at least ten minutes. I guess that was the second time someone got enamoured with my body odor, even if through my shoes (I suppose my FA and HLA are that powerful, it’s genetic, can’t help it). He didn’t come back for the second pair; or anything else for that matter. He was lost in scent. After a few more minutes I got bored. Was the sex ever going to start? Surely my smelly shoe was just an expedient to get the rest of my smelly self. But before I could panic his mouth seized my foot, leg and thigh, slowly like a feline, and we had the smelliest and wettest sex. Soon I began to realise that the thing of scent doesn’t need to make sense; there is no formula to it, so there should be no expectations, regardless of science.

Text: William Paz

Originally published in https://dandydicks.com

[uebergangmagazine]

Opportunities of the Right

In the last few weeks and months I’ve seen small and big events that prove times are tough and and shifting towards a scarier period. There are new conservative movements parading on the streets, random gay bashing in plain daylight and brutal killings that only feed yet more madness. But it’s also these times that offer a chance to come to our senses.

I’d like to start with Pegida, the Dresden movement claiming to represent the patriotic Europeans against the islamification of the West. Up to 18000 people including whole families and even gays rallied the streets to remind the rest of Germany that Islam is a threat to their German way of life. In the surface they may only be concerned citizens afraid of a religion and asylum seekers but we only need to scratch it a little bit to find out that these are extremely frustrated people on the look out for scapegoats. Saxonia, Dresden’s state has one of the highest unemployment rates in Germany and was once referred to as the Valley of the Clueless for not being able to receive West German TV stations; and this combination, is naturally a hot bed for right-wing groups. Just like it happened around 80 years ago, they start with religion and move on to any other ‘undesirable’ minorities; homosexuals included. But this open antagonism is only part of a wider increase in mindless freedom of expression; everyone wants to have a voice and feels their opinions are valid even if they are harmful, and these are expressed both verbally and physically. This is not only happening in small cities and towns or isolated communities; this is happening in Berlin, London, Paris; in 2015. Friends of mine and I are constantly being gay bashed in public, even on the streets of Kreuzberg. More recently my London friend Matthew and his boyfriend talked back to yobs who mocked their hair colour, only to be brutally attacked to the point of ending up in hospital. And in Paris the murder of cartoonists by disturbed so-called islamists has also lead to Mosques being set on fire and further intolerance among ordinary people. The rise of extremism is not limited to the extreme right, left, or religious groups; it’s becoming part of a society increasingly embittered by the political class, the lingering financial crisis, capitalism, socialism. However, I think this could also work as the great catalyst for reflexion, to rethink the meaning of community (if there was ever one), for people to get together and to bring back the solidarity that’s been diminishing since the first gay right movements. Just because gay marriage and other rights are slowly being yielded doesn’t mean we’ll get to keep them forever; laws change back and forth. I constantly hear stories of opportunism, exploitation, backstabbing and bitchy jealousy among LGTB people. Two good examples are the Wanna Play? performance art experiment consisting of exposing private Grindr chats, whereby from the outset it was clear that there was a prevailing lack of concern, respect and empathy towards the community that was being challenged. Many of the parts involved, artist included, were in it for self promotion, bastardising the already weak bonds and trust within the “community”. And the JesuisCharlie movement serve as a good example exposing many facets of our current take on community - superficial, blind, and binary. Superficial because changing a profile picture on facebook doesn’t equate real and active support or change. Blind because people haven’t taken the time to think that because we want to condemn the killing of racist cartoonists we don’t have to condone their poor work. And binary because it encourages people to take sides: love one, hate the other. We need to put ourselves and lives into perspective. These latest happenings are a good reminder that we’re not as free or as equal as we thought we were and in this wave of extremism if we’re at least aware of who we should really be against, we’re already half way there.

Text: Will Furtado

Image: Cristina Guitian

[uebergangmagazine]

office memo

i shouldn’t have sent that email

               changed my facebook status

                  commented on her photos

                  painted my teeth with whiteout

                          made paper cuts between my fingers

          put binder clips on my nipples

          my ass on the copy machine

(30 copies of my erection in each mailbox)

                     asked you to come to my office.

                 lock the door

                 cut my hair with blunt scissors

                 stab me in the eye with a letter opener

                 tie me to my desk

                 pour hot coffee down my back

                 wrap that extension cord around my neck

                 slam my face against the keyboard

                 shove the mouse up my ass

                          why did I ask you? i don’t even like you!

               my secretary’s voice over the intercom

               my wife on line 1

               pull the cord tighter

               i can’t breathe

               her voice grows more distant

               the fluorescents begin to dim

               my feeble orgasm

               a final gasp

                       (    darkness     )

Text by Marcos Rosales

[uebergangmagazine]

I felt so toxic.

My face was hurting.

When I woke up,

my hair was all over

because of the transpiration.

But I felt good.

I felt really fucking good.

I felt like I won a battle.

Against what?

Against who?

My body.

My ugly body.

My lazy body.

My stupid body.

My impotent body.

I corrected that...

for a day and a night only,

but still I did.

I don’t care to die as a vegetable.

I just don’t want to be a vegetable now.

I know I’ll lose the war,

but I won a battle and not the last.

Text by Nicolas Dagenais

Illustration by: Darkam

[uebergangmagazine]

TO NO ONE

These streets

     belong to no one

Just a few sidewalk

     cafés yet open

           a bakery

A flower vendor’s

     stall on an

           isolated street

Dark windows of

     apartment buildings

Black eyes staring

     into the night

& those sleeping

     in recesses of the old

           train station

Those unrolling beds

     sharing a nightcap

           beneath bridges

Text by Lorraine Caputo

Ilustration by: Ella Rieser

[uebergangmagazine]

Some apology to Berlin

Berlin. Wake up from your slumber. The third summer of love is now dead, buried, a mystery. It's a jealous footnote to those who weren't there and a nauseating pit of nostalgia for those that were.

Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe it was the music. Maybe it was the history and that sense of standing on the precipice which sends the alluring shiver of expectation down the spine of everybody who passes through the city's gates. Or maybe not.

Whatever it is, there can be no denying that the sensation has changed. Maybe it has watered down, or maybe it has disappeared altogether, but the search for the hit is getting harder. It's something that cannot really be quantified. Because of that, it may no longer be found again and we cannot tell if 2013 will be a fourth.

So I'd like to apologise because there may be some portion of blame to be doled out for the demise.

I apologise for my curiosity, I apologise for my naïve quest for the authentic and I apologise for every other person, Ausländer or Deutsche, who is here doing the same thing.

The City.

Berlin is the most authentic place on Earth. History has made that the case. There simply was never any time for bullshit. Never was and never will be. This city is like the ugly, pretentious older brother who, no matter how much you try and disbelieve them, is right when they say they've seen it all.

In 2011, with the flood of ever richer, ever younger, ever more disenfranchised and dysfunctional people fleshing out the districts of note (Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain, Neukölln), the (3rd?) summer of love happened. The music was great, the parties, the drugs, the people. Pure Hedonism. No apologies. And, in the spirit of so many platitudes, the party died.

In its place, hubris, followed by doubt, followed by anger and finally a flaky kind of cynicism has taken root. Now you justify to yourself and others why you are here, living space feels like it's at a premium (almost just as much as the need to be believed).

‘How long have you been in Berlin?’ is constantly, consistently leveled.

‘How long is enough?’

We feel gagged now. We are lost.

Is the party still in Neukölln or has it (whisper it) moved to the West? What the fuck happened to Kreuzberg? Remember Wedding? When will richer people stop bitching about the quest for authenticity when there is no authentic experience that can be bought with your wallet (except, of course, for all those powders)? Let me now, as an outsider, blame the outsiders for the lack of anything to focus on. This city's transient nature is dizzying. And let me blame the drugs. Because that's easy. And because they're never as good as they once were.

The city is afraid to look to its future almost as much as it's afraid to look to its past, since we know that nothing good ever comes from a fixation on what has passed

The Reader.

At least, I think that is the case and I think that that is true. Because I wasn't there; because I am not here… I am living in the past and I've chased a dream like everybody else, in love with the Berlin of 2010/2005/2000/1995 ad nauseum. Dreamy images I've lusted after from history books, films and from computer screens, planting the foundation of our generation's constant affliction: the incessant need to 'be there'.

Perhaps that dream is now dead. It seems that against the dying face of winter, on the sliproad into 2013's summer, nobody really knows where it's at.

And how can you trust me? The fact that this is in English should speak volumes. Yes cities change and you cannot, should not, attempt to pin international forces on individual people. We're all playing the game and this city is the perfect playground. But one still has to be sensitive to it. Do not be threatened into thinking that you should 'know your place' but definitely never take what this city has, and what it offers you, for granted. History walks the streets as much as you do and the present can be blown away in an instant.

Out-priced today, it may be the Turks, but you can be sure that tomorrow it'll be your artistic collective under the hammer. Be under no illusions. But equally, don't take any shit.

--

So grow bold Berlin. Feel stronger in yourself. Charge up my smartphone and be sure to ignore the krusty punks, with all their quasi-social-fascism and suffocating cultural pontificating. Shrug off too the cynicism of the panda-eyed dying ravers, pink skinned and sensitive to the morning light, as innocent as newborns. Perhaps build a wall around the redneck anti-Schwabians (but be sure to keep those rich southerners in there with them too).

But most of all: reclaim and protect your identity; from the freemarketeers, from any group that thinks it owns you and from people like me who try and understand you.

Times are hard so revel in your latest reincarnation. It is the only thing you can do. Because if we weren't all partying, we'd probably all be crying.

Text by John Medlock

[uebergangmagazine]

VOO

Der Voo Store ist der einzige Concept Store in Kreuzberg. Ein Laden, den man eigentlich eher in Mitte vermuten würde. Seit der Eröffnung vor zwei Jahren hat Voo sich als feste Adresse in der Berliner Modeszene entwickelt. Wir sprachen mit Yasin Müjdeci, Besitzer von Voo und Mitbetreiber der Luzia, über den Charme des Kottbusser Tor, spießige Hausbesetzer und die Frage: wie kann sich ein Laden in der Nachbarschaft integrieren?

Was macht das Kottbusser Tor so besonders in deinen Augen?

Das Kotti ist so echt. Echter als die anderen Orte. Es gibt hier Hip-Hop, während es woanders OldSchool-Hiphop-Parties gibt. Ich höre selber keinen HipHop, aber meine Beobachtung ist, dass die Leute hier Parties machen und mit ihrer Musik versuchen eine Atmosphäre zu transportieren. Hier gibt es authentischen Hiphop. Das finde ich am Kotti sehr sehr gut. Interessant, oder? Die Leute geben sich so wie sich normalerweise geben würden.

Nicht so, wie in Mitte, um mal ein Klischee zu bemühen...

Ich will jetzt nicht Mitte bashen und mit diesem Vergleich kommen, aber in Mitte geht es mehr um Party. Aber hier leben die Leute das. Deswegen mag ich Kreuzberg. Du kannst hier zum Beispiel nicht die beste Pizza essen, oder den besten Cocktail trinken. Aber wenn du hier eine Pizza kaufst, dann ist der Pizza-Mann echt. Er will dir nicht klar machen, dass er der beste Pizza-Mann sei. Vielleicht schimpft er auch, aber es stört niemanden.

Du bist in der Türkei geboren. War das Kottbusser Tor deine erste Adresse, als du nach Berlin gekommen bist?

Ich war zuerst in Mainz an der Johannes-Guttenberg-Universität um Politikwissenschaften zu studieren. Das war super langweilig, das ganze Deutschlandklischee... Sehr ruhig, ordentlich und sauber. Das wollte ich nicht. Also bin ich nach Berlin gekommen. Die ersten drei, vier Jahre war ich gar nicht in Kreuzberg. Ich habe Kreuzberg gehasst, weil ich gedacht habe, ich komme gerade aus der Türkei. Ich hatte einfach keine Lust auf Türken. Eigentlich bin ich Ex-Mitte-Bewohner. Danach habe ich irgendwie bemerkt, ok, in Kreuzberg gibt es mehr als Türken. Deswegen bin ich nach Kreuzberg gekommen.

Aber es brauchte ein paar Jahre, bist du dich an Kreuzberg herangetraut hast?

Ja, drei vier Jahre. Ich habe hier in Kreuzberg meine erste Bar gehabt und trotzdem in Mitte gewohnt. Dann habe ich gesagt, scheiße ich bezahl so viel für das Taxi, für das Geld könnte ich eine richtig gute Wohnung haben.

Wie siehst du die Entwicklung in Kreuzberg in den letzten Jahren?

Man kann das jetzt positiv oder negativ sehen, aber es ist viel passiert. Aber nicht nur in Kreuzberg, ganz Berlin hat sich geändert. Ich glaube ich kam genau an dem Punkt die Leute keinen Bock auf den Osten gehabt haben. Sie haben ihre Häuser für wenig Geld verkauft, damit sie in den Westen gehen können. Als ich herkam, gab es den Euro schon, und die Leute haben gesehen, es gibt gute Sachen im alten Osten, die Oranienburgerstraße zum Beispiel. Orte, die vorher für nicht wertvoll befunden wurden, waren plötzlich wertvoll.

Wenn ich die Oranienburgerstraße sehe, oder Kreuzberg als ganzes, dann hat sich super entwickelt. Der Mix ist immer noch da. Der Mix hat sich geändert, aber die Idee ist immer noch die gleiche.


Welche Idee meinst du?

Dieser Geist: Ok, wir kommen aus vielen verschiedenen Ländern. Es ist immernoch multikulturell. Vielleicht nicht mehr so „orientalisch“, jetzt ist es vielleicht mehr skandinavisch, amerikanisch, oder sonstwoher. Aber es ist immer noch super multikulturell und die Leute leben diese Multikulturalität nicht mit ihrer Nationalität. Sie sagen zwar: ja, wir sind unterschiedlich, aber nicht „Ich komme aus Spanien“. Die Menschen sind ohne Flagge, das ist das wichtigste. Die coolsten Leute, meiner Lebenserfahrung nach, sind so, dass du nicht auf den ersten Blick siehst woher dieser Mensch kommt. Sie zeigen nicht ihre typische Nationalität oder ihr typisches Geschlecht. Du verstehst nicht unbedingt, dass eine Frau unbedingt heterosexuell ist. Sie ist einfach eine Frau. Gleiches gilt für die Männer hier.

Ist das etwas, dass Leute nach Kreuzberg zieht? Oder etwas, das Kreuzberg mit diesen Leuten macht?

Ich glaube die Leute wissen, dass es hier so ist und deswegen kommen sie hierher. Kreuzberg ist so gebrandet (lacht). Wenn du so bist, kommst du nach Kreuzberg und keiner stört dich. Viele Leute kommen mehrmals her. Stell dir vor, du gehst an einen Ort als Tourist und du hast dort Freunde! Ich kenne so viele Leute, obwohl sie hier nicht wohnen, haben sie Freunde hier. Und irgendwann ziehen sie hierher.

Wenn du von authentisch sprichst, gilt das auch für den Voo Store? Ist Voo so authentisch wie Kreuzberg?

Wenn ein Produkt erfolgreich ist oder erfolgreich sein soll, muss die Identifikation mit der Marke passen. Klar, das bedeutet nicht, dass ich alle Klamotten hier anziehen kann. Wenn du so einen Kommentar machst, hat man keine Ahnung, was man eigentlich mit Voo kommunizieren möchte. Es ist offen für alles, das widerspiegelt, was ich bin. Es ist mir wichtig, dass du dich wohl fühlst, wenn du bei Voo bist. Du fühlst dich nicht so eingeengt und keiner macht dir Stress, wenn du nichts kaufst. Du kannst einfach vorbeikommen und einen Kaffee trinken. Es ist ein Ort an dem du dich gut fühlen kannst ohne jegliche Konsumabsichten.

Wie integriert ist Voo in der Nachbarschaft?

Wir haben nicht unbedingt die beste Beziehung zu unseren Nachbarn, aber dafür gibt es zwei Gründe. Erstens, habe ich am Anfang nicht so gut kommuniziert. Das ist mein Fehler. Ich dachte ich gehöre hierher und habe nicht mit den Nachbarn gesprochen. Die Events und so weiter, sie haben das nicht ganz verstanden. Zweitens, die haben keinen Bock mehr. Das Außen ändert sich so schnell, sie haben Angst gehabt. Scheiße, was passiert hier? Klar haben die Nachbarn auch Vorurteile.  Wenn sie hier reinkommen und uns kennen, sagen sie: oh, ihr seid gar nicht so schlimm. Viele kennen uns noch gar nicht. Und wenn jemand herkommt, habe ich noch niemanden gesehen, der uns danach immer noch nicht verstanden hat.

Du glaubst also, dass Voo einen Integrationsprozess mit der Nachbarschaft durchlaufen muss?

Ja, das muss allerdings auf Gegenseitigkeit beruhen. Die Nachbarn sind nicht so richtig offen dafür. Wenn du dir die besetzten Häuser, die es in Kreuzberg noch gibt, anschaust, wie in der Manteuffelstraße zum Beispiel: Die damaligen Besetzer haben die Häuser gekauft und renoviert. Mittlerweile sind sie alt und haben super große Probleme mit dem, was um sie herum passiert. Da denkt man sich: Hey! Du bist selbst Teil einer großen Veränderung gewesen und jetzt willst du das alles so bleibt? Das ist menschlich, die wollen alles erhalten. Das finde ich schade. Mittlerweile sind die Besetzer Rechtsanwälte und Ärzte... Und sehr konservativ. Das ist schade.

Hast du Angst, dass Voo irgendwann auch mal spießig werden könnte?

Natürlich wünscht man sich das, aber ich glaube das nicht. Mit der Luzia ist uns das zum Beispiel nicht passiert. Der Laden hat uns viel gegeben, aber wir haben uns dadurch nicht verändert. Am Anfang war es schwierig, aber jetzt sind wir ein wichtiger Teil der Oranienstraße.

Stimmt, man kann sich Kreuzberg ohne Luzia gar nicht mehr vorstellen.

Genau, aber am Anfang war das nicht so. Die Leute haben uns einen „Mitte-Yuppie-Laden“ genannt. Es war unglaublich, keiner wollte uns da haben in den ersten drei Jahren. Wir waren die einzige Bar in der Oranienstraße. Jetzt ist die Luzia Teil des Straßenbilds. In ein paar Jahren wird es mit Voo genauso sein. Da bin ich mir sicher.

[uebergangmagazine]

widerstand

ihr seid 100 mit einem plan und kapital

die kunst lebt lebt länger als das kapital ihr nehmt uns nicht das tacheles und ihr nehmt uns nicht die liebig

bevor euch der profit ausgeht, während euch der profit ausgeht nachdem euch der profit ausgegangen ist sind wir da

wir sind das unkraut in eurem leben und überwuchern euch im schlaf während ihr dem großen geld nachweint

ihr seid die pest ihr stehlt die grundlagen und seht euch selbst als messias

kapitalterroristen, politikfinanziers mit porsche, anwalt, maßanzug berliner blackwater kommandeure

wir sind der widerstand wir sind euer gewissen wir sind der vorschlaghammer in euren köpfen wir sind die farbbeutel an euren hauswänden wir sind die flammende leidenschaft vor eurer nächtlichen haustür wir sind der basaltstein, die durchschlagende kraft

unsere waffen sind die kunst, die unbestechlichkeit, die liebe und die geduld auf euer ende

wir überschwemmen bringen die große flut prangern an eure kunst- und bücherverbrennung kapital stirbt, nicht aber die kunst.

Mario El Toro

Photography: Ella Rieser