Gespräche mit den Autorinnen und Autoren von Suhrkamp und Insel. Jeden zweiten Donnerstag.

Marcel Duchamp was also a pioneer of the most productive image machine of the present day pornography.

“Where the precarious turns into invulnerabilty seems to be the exact point that Anne Imhof is continuously working on.”

Above all this lies a hazy gold, a powdery calm after the sandstorm, post-catastrophic and shimmering. An artificiality that is not clean and perfect, but knows the broken. Butt, puddle, construction fence, no parking. At some point Neven Allgeier says: Stand there.

During “Black Lives Matter” wealthy white art-flippers make a lot of money with African artists without really being interested in black lives. Amoako Boafo’s paintings clearly have the capacity to increase in value. Not only are they well done and distinctive in style, but they also process and refer to European art history. This makes them connectable in a twisted way.

“I wouldn’t say my work is particularly political. I am. I’m interested in social coding. I don’t find it any less peculiar that the bun costs 2.50 euros, or that everyone calls the stone ‘stone’ or follows a political direction. The indicator is the same, which is that you learn: this is what it's like.”

I then thought of George Mallory, who wanted to be the first to climb Mount Everest. When asked why he was going to do something so crazy, he said, “Because it's there”. The way Cyprien Gaillard looked at his mountain, which he had created only for being there, remains as a monument to all art for me.

What do you say when collectors want exactly the same work that has already been sold elsewhere?
Every good art dealer is afraid of asking the artist to do the same work again. Artists instinctively know when a series is over. That moment is always before the demand is over. Otherwise, it’s design, not art. When you’ve designed the perfect chair, keep building it. If you’ve designed the perfect piece of art: leave.

„One Insult Per Page.“
Artist Aleksandra Mir and art critic Tim Griffin have collaborated with 150 artists to produce a comprehensive book spanning six decades of Bad Reviews.

Is there any evidence that better conditions could make the countryside more attractive than the cities again?
Absolutely. On one of our research trips, we asked Kenyan students whether they would prefer to live in the city or return to the countryside with improved infrastructure. Sixty percent were in favor of going back to live in the countryside.
The word “countryside” or “rural” seems inadequate when you consider that it is supposed to mean 98 percent of the land area on earth.
It has always been defined from the city.

For the first few years, she slept in her studio in a downtown Manhattan office building, cooking up fish leftovers to fend off the hunger, and painted. Huge dark-primed canvases on which she draws small arcs with white paint like the meshes of a net.

In the 1960ies, while Warhol is still Velvet Underground, Bayrle is already Kraftwerk. With his cloned cell bodies, his loops and meandering structures, his flatly organised “mille plateaux”, he anticipates ways of thinking which a language will only be found for much later.

Apparently one has just shrunk, a bewildering Alice in Wonderland effect. Now you pass through the rabbit hole into a brightly coloured, beautiful bar, where Neff is already standing behind the counter as a dazzlingly happy king of hearts, pouring Diet Coke into Calvin Klein wine glasses.

When he died on the Maldives at the age of 34, two large monochrome surfaces must have been in view, divided by a horizontal line: the Indian Ocean and the sky.

He steals, he lies, he passes off other people’s works as his own, and once he even buried a living person. Maurizio Cattelan, like every sinner, denies everything. And he who is without sin, the Bible says, cast the first stone. Cattelan threw it at the Pope.

“Rehberger’s sculptures often have deficits or leaks. In his house, too, an allusion or deliberate absurdity always guards against the too perfect.”

You say that art has no price. What do you mean?
You’re brought up to believe that an icebox costs 890 euros, and you can’t sell one for 900. But paintings cost what they say they do. Of course, it is important that the claim must have rhyme and reason.