Löwenpalast

There was an opening at the Löwenpalast on Friday, Nov. 25, 2011, which reminded me of an exhibition Azade Köker made once with her students about 'identity and places'. Then the students showed their respective works in two places, first in the house of the German Trade Union, and second at the Löwenpalast. While the former was linked to work and hard social conditions, the latter was aloof since located in the rich area of Dahlem and as the name suggests, formerly a palace with all the high society gathering there. Even now it seems that certain places and areas in Berlin attract certain types of people. They are framed in this time of crisis by their distance from these as it seems for especially rich people trivial problems when others do not even know how to obtain any money either through their work or by means of a welfare state. Reflective of the cultural crisis in midst of all is the jargon of praise and of beauty which goes with an encompassing daring to lure people into believing what they see is art worthwhile to be bought. A talk show like master opened the exhibition that evening and gave very much the impression he was the 'Zuhälter', the protector and owner of his prostitutes. Art in that sense was sold as if an erotic sense of life with numerous in-betweens as explained by the talk show master. For the curator of the exhibition was herself a doctor from Austria. This has to be noted since a nation with still a high regard for the doctor title even though in times when plagarism has given many the title even though they did not bring it about by themselves, as was the case with the recent affair around Guttenberg who had to step down as Minister of Defense due to having been found out of heavily borrowing from others without so much acknowledging their contributions to his thesis, the instinct is to look at society highly artificial and only anxious about its appearance. One could take Watteau's feelings about human faces having become in such a society mere masks, that it creates the longing for seeing open faces after experiencing such a crowd at the opening. It marks all what German Expressionism was all about during the two World Wars for back then the city had become already a lie while the cigar smoking capitalist could not contain his look at the women walking past him and dressed up as if ready to do business. Such a business was closer to that of the prostitute than what could be still connected with the business of not merely making art, but using the approaching Christmas time to display art as if a bazaar where art becomes a commodity sold at arbitrary prices and which would be flavored by this kind of instigation of eroticism. The latter follows a presumption as to what people would like to hear and be provoked by even if they are not ready to admit that they have such a taste for things which look like art. No wonder when one of the commodities sold readily that evening where cushions with emblematic embroideries around them just as it was famous in the twenties to sell 'Nierentische' - kidney tables. That suggests when the high taste decends as if in a free fall, then the outcome will be noticable in a palace whose main exhibition room has been transformed by golden paper from floor to ceiling into a gilded space if not prison of art put on display one over the other, next to each other and besides still longing for more of the same from various students who participated in this exhibition thanks to their professor having contacts with this palace. The real danger in such an art for sale exhibition is that it does not go beyond cliches drawing the fine line between cheap entertainment and demanding participation in the receptivity of the arts.

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Löwenpalast