“A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed,” JOHN GRAY tells HANS ULRICH OBRIST about the political and financial unrest in the “Post-American Age”; photographer STEVEN MEISEL reveals fashion’s cruel and beautiful in a rare interview with PIERRE ALEXANDRE DE LOOZ (plus a 14-page foldout madness of all his Vogue Italia covers); architect WES JONES illustrates Dubai and the effects of superabundance; artist ELAINE STURTEVANT tackles copy, copyright, and the ready-made; writer INGO NIERMANN portrays architect JÜRGEN MAYER H. as Germany’s greatest architecture hope since Bauhaus; art critic PETER RICHTER depicts artist RALF ZIERVOGEL’s world image in which someone exerts plausibility; artists ROTHSTAUFFENBERG stage a masquerade ball in the Grand Hotel gone bad in Mozambique; product designers ONKAR KULAR and NOAM TORAN present the MacGuffin Library; stylist JOE MCKENNA encapsulates the season’s best moments in fashion; photographers MAX FARAGO and ALASDAIR MCLELLAN bring on “THE NUDES”; entrepreneur and art collector JEAN PIGOZZI mixes glamour with getting to bed early; artist collective ASSUME VIVID ASTRO FOCUS consecrate a summer of love; the BERLIN REVIEW reflects on ten events, projects, and people from the past six months in Berlin; and so much more on 246 pages …
Contributors: Tabassom Charaf, Nick Currie, Roger Deckker, Max Farago, Oliver Helbig, item idem, Shanay Jhaveri, Alexey Kiselev, Onkar Kular, Holger Liebs, Joe McKenna, Alasdair McLellan, Steven Meisel, Tobias Moorstedt, Alex Needham, Ingo Niermann, Jean Pigozzi, Jones, Partners: Architecture, Sebastian Preuss, Sameer Reddy, Peter Richter, RothStauffenberg, Alice Ryan, Tobias Timm, Noam Toran, Clay Winston, Tobias Zielony, Ralf Ziervogel.
Berlin architecture office RAUMTAKTIK curates the German Pavilion at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale: architecture without building.
more – ‘Raumtaktiker’
A tomb for celebrity allure, JEAN PIGOZZI shows his photos at the Helmut Newton Foundation and talks about glamour mixed with getting to bed early. more – ‘PIGOZZI, no paparazzo’
Curbside grinds at the Neue Nationalgalerie and a book of photos to document it. ALEX FLACH gives us a look at street skating and debauched nights.
more – ‘ALEX FLACH. Berlin Calling’
20th-century masters team up at the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin: two monumental names with no monumental synergy: ALEXANDER RODCHENKO and MAN RAY.
more – ‘Man Ray/Rodchenko Rodchenko/Man Ray’
“The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over,” says JOHN GRAY. The prominent British philosopher and historian sits down with HANS ULRICH OBRIST to discuss the cult of belief, the death of utopia, and the enduring legacy of the last superpower. more – ‘Post-American Age’
ELAINE STURTEVANT’s entire artistic career over the past 40-plus years has consisted of making replicas of other artists’ works. Not by photographing or copying them, but by mastering the techniques behind them in the first place: painting, sculpture, film, performance, or in the case of Warhol’s “Flower” series, silkscreening. One story goes that asked one too many times about his process and technique, Warhol replied, “I don’t know. Ask Elaine." ELAINE STURTEVANT speaks with HANS ULRICH OBRIST about copy, copyright, and readymades. more – ‘Sturtevant’
How two Germans went to Mozambique with a suitcase full of masks and directed a period tragicomedy, threw a masquerade ball, provoked a riot, and interviewed a North Korean film director in Africa’s luxury hotel that never was. more – ‘Give him a mask and he’ll tell the truth: ROTHSTAUFFENBERG’
“Simultaneously sodomized by one of two sizzling pork skillets on a mobile hotplate, this one’s without further ado perforated by several rounds of cannon fire, served up by a guy admiring his own muscles.” It’s a startling leap to go from illustrating delirious narratives, to designing a monomaniacal cube that may become the world’s largest monument. But this is exactly the unexpected stride that artist RALF ZIERVOGEL is making in his move from 2D into 3D. more – ‘This Charming Man’
Fashion’s ultimate enigma has had Vogue Italia’s cover under his spell for the past twenty years, nonstop. Considered the world’s greatest fashion photographer, a rare interview gets us just that much closer to finding out:
Who is STEVEN MEISEL? more – ‘Who Is STEVEN MEISEL?’
