My new book Little Thoughts in Art is now available for purchase online. You can find it on the TFGC Publishing website. On July 15, I presented the book after a bus tour from the city center to Marzahn in the Studio Marzahner Promenade of the artist Charlotte Dualé.
So what is Little Thoughts in Art about? The book starts with a quote from Peril at End House by Agatha Christie:
"I have been thinking."
"An admirable exercise, my friend."
I like to listen to Agatha Christie podcasts. There's a lot of wisdom to be found in it. For instance, when somebody tells you that "you're looking particularly alive today," you probably won't look so alive tomorrow. So, like good old Hastings, I gave the admirable exercise of thinking a try and it resulted in little thoughts in art.
My last write-up wasn't so humble. It was subtitled An Art Philosophy for the 21st Century, which sounds quite megalomaniac. Since then I've gone more modest. Instead of century-spanning philosophies, I started writing short stories, flash stories, half thoughts - also known as literature's hand luggage. I must say I have a natural talent for short format writing. I even have a hard time writing long texts. For most writers, it's the opposite; they have to shorten their texts. For a freelancer writer, my disposition is actually rather unfortunate because I get paid by the character: so the more characters, the better I get paid. This makes that I'm often desperately looking for "Füllwörter" (expletives). Recently, I read a text by an author who had apparently the same problem and he solved it by reminding the reader of something he had said before: "Ich habe es eben angedeutet"; "wie ich bereits erwähnt habe." Anyway, I thought my "little thoughts" were quite humble until a colleague of mine asked me if the title was a reference to Walter Benjamin's Little History of Photography - a milestone in the history of photography writing.
Little Thoughts in Art doesn't propose a history though but tells flash stories inspired by my guided tours at the Museum for Contemporary Art. My favourite Belgian artist, Marcel Broodthaers, was also a tour guide at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. The Musée now likes to pride itself with Marcel Broodthaers. But when I met Broodthaers widow, Maria Gilissen, she told me that the museum only had asked him when somebody else fell sick. I myself don't have that problem. On the contrary, I get asked twice or trice a week to give a guided tour. I even get asked to give tours for VIPs - mostly the wives of presidents. But it's the director of the museum who gets to do the fun celebrities from Hollywood, like Brad Pitt. It's actually much more interesting to meet people who are or were time witnesses of famous people instead of the famous people themselves. With time witnesses you really get to talk. Like Danielle Ghanassia, who met Andy Warhol in the eighties in the Limelight in New York. He looked much smaller than expected, she told me, and he didn't answer her questions but just recorded them. After a while she felt transparent. The ultimate Andy Warhol experience!
The thread throughout the book is not so much my life as a tour guide but rather my experiences in the bookstore of the Museum of Contemporary Art. I have to wait a lot before or in between guided tours so I hang out a lot at the bookstore. The bookstore is like the backstage of the art world. It's the place where artists come to check out if their catalogues are doing well or where visitors of the museum come to vent their opinion about the exhibitions. Sometimes I pick up some wisdoms of the bookstore salespersons. For instance, once there was an exhibition of Martin Kippenberger. The visitors of the bookstore got very upset when they heard there wasn't a accompanying catalogue. They didn't believe it: "Du kannst mir ja alles erzählen!" (You can tell me whatever!) The bookstore salespersons told me that in such cases two answers are possible. One, you tell the customer that the computer broke down just when the curator wanted to send off the script. Customers love catastrophe stories. Or second, you tell the customer that there was no money for the catalogue. Customers have the utmost understanding for the money argument.
If you're not an online person, you can also buy Little Thoughts in Art at the bookstore. Which one? At the Museum's bookstore, of course: Walther König in Hamburger Bahnhof, where it finds itself in good company:
