Consumption for a Better World: Utopia.de

Consumers have power. The Internet portal Utopia.de means to show how they can use this power so as, if not to save the world, then at least effectively to improve it by ?intelligent? consumption. In the meantime businesses have begun to sit up and take notice.... more more

GoetheInstitute

Summer of political art

Thursday 21 June, 2007

Both the Venice Biennale and the Documenta in Kassel have taken the dark side of modernity as their theme. Looking at how the two mega-exhibitons do battle, Hanno Rauterberg prefers Kassel's investigation of evil to Venice's concession to it. (Untitled, from the series Spring-Sow-Plum-Scene, 1996, mask 6, 2003. © Aoki Ryoko)
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Art to the rescue

Wednesday 6 June, 2007

In a disused dockyard in Rostock, the "Art goes Heiligendamm" initiative has put the final touches to its G8 intervention. The preferred topic among the artworks is borders and overcoming them. Aside from that they deal anything that's good: information, documentation, irony, utopia, anti-consumerism. By Irene Grüter
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The unofficial documenta list

Thursday 3 May, 2007

Probable, silent, public, inofficial - there are many categories of participant in this year's documenta. What's lacking are the official ones. Because the exhibition organisers are keeping tight-lipped about what artists have been invited, we are left to guess, speculate, hope and dismay. By Ludwig Seyfarth
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Smiles permitted, grins less welcome

Thursday 29 March, 2007

The art of glimmer and of deception. Seminal works show the roots and origins of the Op Art movement in an exhibition at Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle. The dynamic of black and white fields meets snuffling electric motors. And a bachelor machine makes jokes and winks. By Ulf Erdmann Ziegler
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Bodily finesse

Monday 5 March, 2007

Much of the work of the Renaissance sculptor Conrat Meit has been lost over the centuries. The Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich has pulled together a goodly collection from around the world which proves Meit to be a master of the pot-bellied feminine ideal of the day. By Birgit Sonna
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The island of Enlightenment

Friday 20 October, 2006

Berlin's Museum Island is perhaps the most important museum complex in the world. It was embellished this week with the reopening of the Bode Museum, housing the finest display of European sculpture anywhere. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, takes us on a first-ever tour of European history in three-dimensional form.
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Modern art in Utopia

Thursday 27 July, 2006

Zamosc, the "Padua of the North," planned as an ideal city in the 16th century, is a remote town in the Polish provinces. Until the international art scene came to stay, that is. Now Sabrina van der Ley and Markus Richter have enticed a group of artists to come create works on the theme "Ideal City - Invisible Cities." By Birgit Rieger (Image: Jaroslaw Flicinski, Up, up and away, 2006)

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Shadows of the East

Thursday 15 June, 2006

"Humanism in China" is a reproduction of an exhibition of over 600 photographs that toured the People's Republic and has now opened in Frankfurt's Museum of Modern Art. No other contemporary exhibition has managed to get this close to the ordinary life of the nation that makes up a quarter of the world's population. By Tilman Spengler
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Art with free beer and sausages

Wednesday 14 June, 2006

The Grässlin family is opening an art space in Sankt Georgen, a tiny town high up in the Black Forest. Their collection of sculptures and installations is scattered throughout the locale, to the amazement of the international public and the locals alike. By Ulrich Stock
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Sphinxes from the sea

Tuesday 16 May, 2006

The exhibition "Egypt's Sunken Treasures" opened in Berlin's Martin Gropius Bau on Saturday. This is the first showing outside Egypt of some 500 statues and artefacts discovered off the coast of Alexandria by Franck Goddio and his team. Sonja Zekri reports.
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Melancholy and abstraction

Wednesday 12 April, 2006

Now showing in Berlin, "Melancholy: Genius and Madness in Art" is the foremost exhibition of its kind. But what makes a work melancholic? Melancholy is difficult to catch red-handed, and scarcely easier to repress. Eliminate it here, and it crops up over there, tough as any weed. Everything testifies to the presence of melancholy. Yet the more you look, the more it eludes your gaze. By Laszlo F. Földenyi
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In the slush puddle of existence

Monday 3 March, 2006

Far from the over-exitement of today's artworld, the 4th berlin biennale for contemporary art wallows in the dark depths of things jettisoned and biographical, offering the art pilgrim twelve stations along Berlin's Augustraße. By Hanno Rauterberg
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The last lamp

Friday 23 December, 2005

On Christmas Eve, the most exciting exhibition Berlin has seen in years will open to the public in the Palast der Republik, the former East German people's palace. This ad-hoc show will last exactly nine days and then the building will be torn down. But the Palast is just the art museum the city needs, says Christina Tilmann.
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Ball magic

Thursday 3 November, 2005

The soccer exhibition in Berlin's Martin Gropius Bau, "Rundlederwelten" lends new meaning to what we thought was just a sport. By Thomas Medicus (Fussball © Markus Lüpertz)
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Project Migration

Monday 24 October, 2005

Walking, walking, walking. Projekt Migration is an extensive exhibition with film and music programmes telling the story of migration from the perspective of those in motion. By Katrin Bettina Müller
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