One Hundred Years of Ambivalence: The Many Legacies of the Bauhaus
It’s been a hundred years of bent chrome furniture, and Germany is taking stock. On the centennial of the Bauhaus art school, new permanent…
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Archeology and Ambivalence at Austria’s Steirischer Herbst Festival
One morning in Graz, a woman carries a large portrait of Adolf Hitler on a bus through the center of the city. It’s an…
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Courting Exhaustion: Manifesta’s Dog Days
On the second day of Manifesta I’m flat on a bench amidst the splendor of Palermo’s Botanical Garden, head resting on my biennial tote…
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Against Tidy Memory: Anti-Fascist Memorials and the Horror of Kitsch
Like a catchy Schlager tune, rightwing populism in Germany has matured into a countrywide plague. Historical guilt, which had until recently stalled the nationalism…
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“Made in Germany”: Can the Artworld Have a Nation?
Like exotic flowers, international art exhibitions bloom in Berlin, Kassel, and Münster every two, five, or ten years, helping to establish Germany, alongside Venice,…
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Modernist Frederick Kiesler is “Rediscovered” Between Abstraction and Compromise
In 1990, Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz was a wasteland. German partition had sent the square back in time, making space for “The City of the…
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