1. The Grin and Smile of the Inanimate My three-year-old nephew plays with toy cars and model trains just like I did fifty years ago when I was his age. I recently wanted to give him a present, and so, thrilled with nostalgic anticipation, I walked into the toy department at a large store for the first time in decades. I was truly baffled by what I saw there: there was not a single car, not a single locomotive, crane, truck, construction vehicle, sports car, or tractor without eyes, a…

When the 2008 Berlin Biennale was being discussed, a mood of friendly disappointment prevailed among critics, which had less to do with individual works and the eternal problems of the Biennale than it did with a perceived absence of struggle and aggression throughout the Biennale in general. Critics found the young artists’ positions too well behaved. In the Tageszeitung, Brigitte Werneburg wrote: You draw your own conclusions as you leave the exhibition, in this case that…

1. Classical Music vs. Free Jazz When an adult in Berlin or Vienna wants to spend an evening with company, there are two basic options: one can have a cozy dinner with friends at a restaurant or someone’s apartment, or one can go out. The second option may not be a radical step into the unknown, as there are familiar signposts, but nevertheless, when we go out, we switch into an entirely different mode of experience. Now “going out” can mean all sorts of things: an art…

I. Music has no value. That is both the problem as well as the foundation for a broad stream of observations to follow here on the utopian character of music. The idea that music does not have—or has ceased to have—any value may be assessed in different ways; it may be regarded as good or bad. Of course, one may also legitimately object to the idea that music can even drop out of the economy at all, but this depends on whether the economic valuation of music is bound to an…