The real value of newest contemporary arts

the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility!

The emperor's new clothes.

poetry conference (poem)

complaint conference
(the future of poetry)

silence please

the poets are talking

the poets are talking inside

the poets are talking inside the building

please silence they are talking about the future of poetry

silence please

the poets are worried

the poets are worried a lot

the poets are worried about poetry

the poets are worried about the future of poetry

but the truth is they are worried about the future of the poets

outside the building no silence at all

the traffic runs through the streets with a roaring

a taxi driver is buying flowers for his girl

an old woman is saying a prayer

a grey bird is praising the sun

and the young man at the sidewalk

is loudly singing his favoured pop song

may be I am not a poet

but I am not worried 

about the future

of poetry

The silence of the world before BACH

Die Stille der Welt vor Bach

Es muss eine Welt gegeben haben vor
der Triosonate in D, eine Welt vor der a-moll-Partita,
aber was war das für eine Welt?
Ein Europa der großen leeren Räume ohne Widerhall
voll von unwissenden Instrumenten,
wo das Musikalische Opfer und das Wohltemperierte Klavier
noch über keine Klaviatur gegangen sind.
Einsam gelegene Kirchen,
in denen nie die Sopranstimme der Matthäuspassion
sich in hilfloser Liebe um die sanfteren
Bewegungen der Flöte gerankt hat,
wie sanfte Landschaften,
wo nichts zu hören ist als die Äxte alter Holzfäller,
das muntere Bellen starker Hunde im Winter
und Schlittschuhe auf blankem Eis wie ferne Glocken;
die Schwalben, die durch die Sommerluft schwirren,
die Muschel, in die das Kind hineinhorcht,
und nirgends Bach, nirgends Bach.
Die Schlittschuhstille der Welt vor Bach. 

(LARS GUSTAFSSON, dt. V. Reichel)

Cosmic Jazz - A SECRET MESSAGE FROM Johann Sebastian BACH!

time - the animated film (by xkcd)

JONI MITCHELL is a POETRY GODESS

Watch her story here ...

and listen:

Heavy little!

                                                                     ...don't miss that!

Poetry on stairs

During the Brasilian FLUPP literature festival some young people of the favela Prazeres in St. Teresa/Rio de Janeiro wrote poems on their public staircases - amongst them also my poem "festival of seconds (sekundenfest)". Thank you guys for this amazing idea! Look ...

My recommendation: Visit fascinating Rio de Janeiro and look for this!

Playing PIANO GODS - Jazz @ the Berlin Philharmonic

On tuesday, Dec 12 / 2012, three young gods of European piano jazz gave one of the best concerts I have ever witnessed in the last years: Leszek Możdżer (PL), Michael Wollny (D) and Iiro Rantala played a benefit for UNICEF at the Kammermusiksaal of the Berliner Philharmonie - on two grand pianos (one Steinway of the legendary piano master Alfred Brendel) and a Wurlitzer organ. I can only hope that they took a film or at least a recording of this evening! It was undescribably good... Each of them played some own composition, each of them played together with the others, at last all three played together. And I really mean PLAYed - every combination between zero an six hands, every combination you can imagine between 3 instruments and 6 arms of master musicians. It was even sporty and acrobatic sometimes (as they changed their positions husteling around on stage while playing together), but always highest state of the art. Actually, the best was when the masters played their own music in the focussed atmosphere of the philharmonic chamber music hall. A few standards (Bach) and great improvisation were given in a style that was really condign the idea of jazz at the venerable Berlin philharmony. Listen here, at least, to Iiro Rantalas piece "Thinking of misty" that opened that unique and really terrific concert...    

THE SOUND OF (the unseen)

The Italian composer Domenico Vicinanza (who is a scientific physics researcher as well) took the mathematical data of the CERN research center concerning the legendary Higgs Boson (the famous elementary particle they believe to have found this summer) and worked it out into an amazingly interesting piece of music! Listen to the DANCE OF THE HIGGS BOSON.

The ugly question of Kitsch

Beauty is the point at which the two meanings of the word “sense” come together, the body-sense of cognition and the mind-skill of understanding the meaning of signs. When we leave the sensual aspect to beauty and start to think about it in the abstract terms of logic, we arrive at the science of aesthetics as the modern science of cognition. This science tries to find out what we mean, when we say “beautiful” or “ugly” and why. The main question is: Are there any universal and timeless criteria for beauty? If we watch an old Greek sculpture or an Indian mandala, a Japanese garden or a Russian icon, we begin to suspect that there could be. But as we all know, every time has its own taste. And after a while every aesthetic fashion returns - as a retro-revival! (No matter, whether this means columns at the house entry or gothic tales.) But this magic power of our universal beauty instinct leads us directly to the urgly question of kitsch... (a German word with universal meaning).

 The human ability to spontaneously recognise natural beauty demonstrates to us the problem of KITSCH (a non-translatable German term that means simple aesthetic stereotypes, trashy art-clichés that do not exist in reality). When we, me and my younger sister, were children (at the age of 8 or 10 years), my father, a teacher for arts and history, had a simple but wise system to teach his students to distinguish “real beauty” and “Kitsch”. He gave us a wild mixture of art-postcards with reproductions of famous paintings and kitschy pictures that we had to arrange into two piles: art and kitsch. We always managed our work very well without saying a word: The pile with the postcards that we children liked was Kitsch, what we did not like was “real art”. Our beauty instinct was infallible. We never made any mistake! Kitsch is simple, easy to understand, it shows a simple, symmetrical order, something we love in an ideal state – how beautiful! It is completely international because it is the answer to the lowest level of our beauty-instinct. In his famous essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry the German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) gave a warning not to take the pleasant already for the beautiful and not to mix up a “cute mind” with the beauty of the soul. He explained that “cute minds” become banal when they have to work on or write about a complex and huge object, the easy-going paragons of virtue turn to the materialistic, but only the truly beautiful soul becomes “sublime”.[1]

  We have to consider: There are two kinds of beauty – the natural beauty of our senses and the aesthetic beauty as a construction of our mind. (The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, father of Critical Philosophy, distinguished between beauty and the sublime: A landscape, a flower or a body can be beautiful; a poem, a painting or a cathedral are sublime.) In modern and post-modern art (including literature), the low-level art of Kitsch fortunately is no longer discriminated against as worthless. It is, on the contrary, integrated (as trash or pop) in the collage of our aesthetic concept! Nevertheless, it is useful for every professional artist to know the difference between “real art” and Kitsch. (If you are in doubt in which category your own work belongs, ask some children whether they like it…) Here we have, surprisingly, found a path to the bridge between the aesthetic category of beauty and our fascination for horror…

---

[1] „Wie in dem handelnden Leben, so begegnet es auch oft bei dichterischen Darstellungen, den bloß leichten Sinn, das angenehme Talent, die fröhliche Gutmüthigkeit mit Schönheit der Seele zu verwechseln, und da sich der gemeine Geschmack überhaupt nie über das Angenehme erhebt, so ist es solchen niedlichen Geistern ein Leichtes, jenen Ruhm zu usurpieren, der so schwer zu verdienen ist. Aber es gibt eine untrügliche Probe, vermittelst deren man die Leichtigkeit des Naturells von der Leichtigkeit des Ideals, so wie die Tugend des Temperaments von der wahrhaften Sittlichkeit des Charakters unterscheiden kann, und diese ist, wenn beide sich an einem schwierigen und großen Objekte versuchen. In einem solchen Fall geht das niedliche Genie unfehlbar in das Platte, so wie die Temperamentstugend in das Materielle; die wahrhaft schöne Seele hingegen geht eben so gewiß in die erhabene über.“ - Friedrich von Schiller: Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (quotation: www.gutenberg.spiegel.de/schiller/naivsent/ naivsent.htm).