International papers 27.02.2007

In the Washington Post, historian and journalist Anne Applebaum writes an op-ed on the multiculturalism debate in signandsight.com and Perlentaucher.de. Although Ayaan Hirsi Ali has now left Europe, Applebaum writes, "she continues to provoke Europeans, sometimes without saying anything at all.... Curiously, what seems to rankle Europeans most is the enthusiasm with which Hirsi Ali has adopted their own secularism and the fervor with which she has embraced their own Western values. Though this continent's intellectuals routinely disparage the pope as an irrelevant dinosaur, Hirsi Ali's rejection of religion in favor of reason, intellect and emancipation seems to make everyone nervous."

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 28.02.2007

Birgit Sonna takes a look at the exhibition of the photographer Andreas Gursky at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The Düsseldorf-born photographer and student of Bernd and Hilla Becher (more here) is best known for manipulated photographs of mass phenomena. "It's precisely this artificial consolidation of mass bodies with globalised technical skills that gives the work a human note. Seen close up, the pictures seem coarse-grained – also a result of manipulation. Individual facial expressions and aberrations in the system can be made out in the collective of the rhythmic masses. In this Janus-facedness between the smooth perfection of the surface and the concessions to the individual fate at the level of detail lies the brilliance of Gursky's pictures. Of course, one can debate whether the auction records of over two million dollars for a Gursky picture are reasonable. But what other photographer has been able to come up with a major new view of the world every few years?"

In Hong Kong's Kom Tong Hall, a museum has opened for Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), politician and ancestral father of the Chinese Republic, who serves as a partial inspiration for the current Chinese leadership, writes Urs Schoettli: "Sun Yat-sen's legacy also gives an important political message to the elites who lead China at the beginning of the 21st century. Sun's commitment to democracy and the constitutional state has not lost in topicality. Liberal-minded Chinese are aware today that, apart from the social, economic and technological modernisation there must also be a fourth, political one."


Die Welt 28.02.2007

Gerti Schön reports on the New York Times Center, the skyscraper that will house The New York Times newspaper in a few weeks' time: "The 52 storey tower designed by star Italian architect Renzo Piano is the pride of the publishing company, and its architectonic impression is meant to reflect the paper's philosophy. The shining glass facade is to represent the aspiration to transparency and the search for truth, boasts the paper. But in fact the move to the new locale heralds a departure into uncertainty. The noble morals of the paper and its publisher family, the Ochs Sulzbergers, are the butt of jokes among the paper's less benevolent competitors: 'Just like in the paper itself, you can feel an almost exhibitionistic high-mindedness, a fervent need - and desire - to embody those virtues that are the most important among our contemporaries' taunts the conservative New York Sun."

Eric Schlosser, whose "Fast Food Nation" (both book and film) about the American fast food industry has been cause for much discussion, compares the diets of yesteryear and today. "Food today looks and tastes much as it did a generation ago, but it is often completely different. Fast food, which millions of people eat every day, is more like an industrial resource than something that can be produced in one's kitchen. Fast food is produced in enormous factories, with chemical flavour enhancers from another factory, frozen and then sent to restaurants which heat it up. Nobody in the past ate anything like it."