News

Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, a new documentary on the infamous Nazi-era German director Leni Riefenstahl, has sold strongly internationally following its world premiere at the Venice and Telluride Film Festivals.

Beta Cinema, who are handling world sales on the film, locked down deals across Europe for the documentary, including with Arp for France, Filmin for Spain, Midas Filmes for Portugal, Edge Entertainment in Scandinavia, Against Gravity for Poland, Cirko Film for Hungary, Imagine in Benelux and McF for the territories of the former Yugoslavia. Longride Entertainment will release the film in Japan. Additional territories are currently in negotiation.

In Germany, Riefenstahl will go out via Majestic, with Italian distribution handled by the film’s co-producer Rai Cinema.

Veiel and Riefenstahl producer, the acclaimed German journalist and political talk show host Sandra Maischberger, spent six years pouring over more than 700 boxes of film, writing, audio and other documents from Leni Reifenstahl...

The first sculpture seen in Wim Wenders’s documentary Anselm is a wedding dress, its long train strewn over a massive bed of fallen leaves, perched in a lush forest on a cliff’s edge. All the while, the film cuts between intimate close-ups and long shots that take in the totality of the piece. More sculptures emerge across an expansive outdoor atelier in Croissy, on the outskirts of Paris, each subsequent wedding dress overflowing with harsh textures due to the various hard materials used within them. As if mimicking the experience of an in-person encounter with Anselm Kiefer’s confrontational work, the 3D camera glides past them all.

First glimpsed in the film cycling in his vast warehouse in Barjac, France, the seventysomething Kiefer appears as if he’s sprung from one of his enormous paintings. As Wenders’s mesmerizing portrait of the Austrian-German multimedia artist progresses, the experience...

Every so often, you’ll see a portrait-of-the-artist documentary that’s so beautifully made, about a figure of such unique fascination, whose art is so perfectly showcased by the documentary format, that when it’s over you can’t believe the film hadn’t existed until now. It feels, in its way, essential. “Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV” is like that. Directed by Amanda Kim, it’s a tantalizing portrait of Nam June Paik, the revolutionary Korean-born video artist who, in the late ’60s and ’70s, did nothing less than invent an art form.

When he was first becoming famous, about 50 years ago, you’d go to see a Nam June Paik installation at someplace like the Museum of Modern Art, and it would seem quirky and exotic — a tower of stacked TV screens, all flashing what looked like the squiggly visual equivalent of feedback. It was weird and kind of gripping,...

Dogwoof has picked up Amanda Kim’s documentary on the contemporary artist Nam June Paik for world sales, excluding North America and South Korea.

“Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV” is set to world premiere on Jan. 22 at Sundance as part of the U.S. Documentary Competition.

Paik, one of the most famous Asian artists of the 20th century, revolutionized the use of technology as an artistic canvas and invented the video synthesizer. He is credited with coining the term “electronic super highway,” which was the title of one of his most famous works that involved more than 300 TV sets.

The film will trace Paik’s life from childhood as he traveled across the world. He fled to Japan from his native Korea at the outbreak of the Korean War, before moving to Germany and subsequently to New York City where he settled in 1964.

The film will include...

Maverick artist Nam June Paik will be the subject of a new feature-length documentary that will highlight unseen footage and archival materials. The currently untitled production will be completed in 2022. Oscar nominee and “Minari” star Steven Yeun and hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy have joined the project as executive producers.

Paik is often referred to as the “Father of Video Art” and was a prophet of the internet, as well as a visionary and futurist. Adopting technology to transform the way we see the world, he was one of the first to use television as an artist’s canvas and invented the video synthesizer. In the 1970s, he coined the term “Electronic Superhighway” and predicted the future of communication in the digital age. He launched a series of the world’s first global satellite art events, bridging the gap between East and West, pop and avant-garde and all genres of art...

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit star Carla Juri in her Brooklyn sweatshirt in Iceland, on her role: “I was wondering, they describe her as a bit more difficult. Ha, Ha! I like difficult!”

Carla Juri has had a number of memorable performances since 2013, from David Wnendt’s adaptation of Charlotte Roche’s novel Wetlands to Frauke Finsterwalder’s Finsterworld, co-written with Christian Kracht, Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, and in 2021 Andy Goddard’s Six Minutes To Midnight and Caroline Link’s adaptation with Anna Brüggemann of Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.

The father Arthur Kemper (Oliver Masucci) reunited with his son Max (Marinus Hohmann), wife Dorothea (Carla Juri), and daughter Anna (Riva Krymalowski)

Carla Juri, Riva Krymalowski, Oliver Masucci (a Joseph Beuys look-alike in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away), and Marinus Hohmann star as the Kemper family, with a terrific ensemble cast, including Ursula Werner,...

A sensual, sexual and intellectual awakening proves mostly asleepening in “Capri-Revolution,” a nobly intended period saga from high-minded Italian filmmaker and playwright Mario Martone that rather buckles under the weight of its exhaustively footnoted ideas. Set in the anxious months preceding World War I, and mapping out a battle of wits and wills between two contrastingly educated men for the soul of a humble lady goatherd on the sun-blasted slopes of Capri, Martone’s film plants a flag for liberal philosophical progress and cultural blending in the face of insular, buttoned-up conservatism. Which is all well and good, but can’t patch over the tired misogynistic undertones of a premise that effectively hinges on gaseous male egos oppressively mansplaining a young woman into liberation. Though it implores audiences to look outward, this attractively appointed Franco-Italian production is unlikely to travel far beyond its own shores.

Bowing in competition at Venice...

In 1933 an exhibition of so-called “Degenerate Art” — as in art that the newly empowered Nazi party considered antithetical to its values — took place in Dresden. Transposed slightly to 1937, this show, complete with stiff-necked tour guide (Lars Eidinger) explaining the worthlessness of the paintings to a crowd caught between socially-mandated disapproval and private titillation, provides the perfect opening for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s return to the welcoming embrace of Germany’s historical past. Coming after a brief, best-forgotten dalliance with Hollywood with “The Tourist,” after “The Lives of Others” won the foreign-language Oscar in 2007, “Never Look Away” has already been selected as this year’s German Oscar hopeful. And it is all about the three-way tussle between art, history and politics, though in form, Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film, as classical and dignified a three-hour-plus, generations-spanning drama as you will meet, could not be less “degenerate.”

Visiting the exhibition are...

As a follow-up to the sensual gay coming-of-age story “Call Me by Your Name,” Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” — a bloody and relatively cold reimagining of Dario Argento’s 1977 horror movie, about a ballet school operated by a coven of witches — couldn’t be more different, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less personal. In fact, as the director told Variety, “I don’t know what I can do to be more connected to my roots as a filmmaker than going back to that film.”

What does the original “Suspiria” mean to you?

I saw the original movie when I was almost 14, but I had seen the poster when I was 11. Those two experiences marked me in my imagery very, very strongly, and I started to nurture a sense of obsession for the realm of this film.

Your version is equally inspired by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Why is that?...

Andres Veiel on contacting Eva Beuys: "I had Eugen Blume, the head of Hamburger Bahnhof, who curated the show of Joseph Beuys. He's a friend who really helped me a lot." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In the final installment of my conversation with Andres Veiel at Kino Lorber in midtown Manhattan, the director of Beuys gave me a fairy tale reference to explain what it took to make a film on Joseph Beuys - with or without the inclusion of his artworks. Beuys includes interviews with Caroline Tisdall, Rhea Thönges-Stringaris, Klaus Staeck, Johannes Stüttgen, and Franz Joseph van der Grinten, shot by Jörg Jeshel and was smartly edited with Stephan Krumbiegel and Olaf Voigtländer. The documentary includes archival footage of a playful Andy Warhol and begins and ends beautifully with clips from Lutz Mommartz' Soziale Plastik.

On the filming of Joseph Beuys by Lutz Mommartz in Soziale Plastik: "The camera is the spectator,...

Andres Veiel on contacting Eva Beuys: "I had Eugen Blume, the head of Hamburger Bahnhof, who curated the show of Joseph Beuys. He's a friend who really helped me a lot." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In the final installment of my conversation with Andres Veiel at Kino Lorber in midtown Manhattan, the director of Beuys gave me a fairy tale reference to explain what it took to make a film on Joseph Beuys - with or without the inclusion of his artworks. Beuys includes interviews with Caroline Tisdall, Rhea Thönges-Stringaris, Klaus Staeck, Johannes Stüttgen, and Franz Joseph van der Grinten, shot by Jörg Jeshel and was smartly edited with Stephan Krumbiegel and Olaf Voigtländer. The documentary includes archival footage of a playful Andy Warhol and begins and ends beautifully with clips from Lutz Mommartz' Soziale Plastik.

On the filming of Joseph Beuys by Lutz Mommartz in Soziale Plastik: "The camera is the spectator,...

Over the last handful of years, theaters across the country have been filled with documentaries of various levels of quality looking deep into the lives and work of various capital A artists. Be it the brilliant Tall: American Skyscrapers and Louis Sullivan or the insufferable Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait, the rise of biographical documentaries looking at influential artists has seen some genuine highs and some frustrating lows.

And then there are films like Beuys.

To most people, the name Joseph Beuys means little to nothing. A formative German artist, Beuys was a figure whose import range from political revolutionary to someone more at home in an asylum than an art gallery, and director Andres Veiel has a hell of a subject for his new documentary, and does his able best to introduce the viewer to the man and his work. Using primarily archival materials, much of the picture...

A German fighter pilot shot down over Crimea, rescued by nomadic tribesmen. A chronically depressed veteran, in near total isolation in the wilderness. A difficult pupil turned iconoclast pedagogue. Whether apocrypha or self-imposed legend, all these identities defined the persona of artist Joseph Beuys, arguably one of the most relevant and revolutionary forces in modern and post-modern art in the 20th century. A former soldier of the Third Reich, rehabilitated through a lifelong commitment to innovation, Beuys redefined the artist’s role in society as the ultimate act of public penance. From renowned pieces such as “How to Explain Pictures to […]...

"Art is total freedom and self-determination." Kino Lorber has debuted a new Us trailer for a documentary titled Beuys, profiling the life and work of radical German artist Joseph Beuys. You may not know his name, but you probably know some of his work. But this is also the perfect documentary to watch to give you a complete introduction and help you understand some of his mindset and mantras for creating such unique, innovative, radical art. I saw this film at the Berlin Film Festival last year where it premiered, and listed it as one of my favorite films of the fest. It's a fascinating and creative look at Joseph Beuys, and more than anything made me admire this great artist and feel deeply inspired by his work and his outlook on life. Here's the official trailer (+ poster) for Andres Veiel's documentary Beuys, direct from YouTube: Joseph Beuys,...

German Film in 2017 is alive and highly visible at film festivals such as Toronto, Venice, Cannes, Berlin and all the way to the Academy Awards. The best new German, Austrian, and Swiss Cinema will once again be celebrated at the American Cinematheque, during the 11th Annual German Currents Film FestivaL from Friday, October 13th — Monday, Oct 16th, 2017 at the historic Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.

Over the past decade, German Currents has offered a unique insight into German speaking cinema, bringing diverse and thought-provoking narratives, and “must-watch” documentaries to Los Angeles. German Currents once again features an impressive line-up of new German cinema during the four day festival, including U.S. and L.A. premieres, documentaries and films for children and families.

German Currents 2017 begins with an opening night gala and red carpet with some of Germany’s brightest stars on Friday, Oct. 13th.

In addition to film screenings, German Currents...

Laura Poitras’ Julian Assange film, a Jo Cox documentary, and a Walter Murch talk all feature.

UK documentary Sheffield Doc/Fest has unveiled its full 2017 programme.

This year’s closing night event will be the world premiere of Jo Cox: Death Of An MP, a BBC2 documentary that focuses on the investigation of the politician’s murder, including contributions from eye witnesses, Cox’s family, and people who knew her attacker.

As previously announced, the festival will open with a screening of Daisy Asquith’s documentary Queerama, featuring a live Performance From John Grant.

This year’s Doc/Fest grand jury will include American Honey director Andrea Arnold, as well as Indian documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan and ex-Channel 4 news broadcaster Paul Mason.

UK premieres in the programme this year include Laura Poitras’ Julian Assange portrait Risk, Whitney Houston doc Whitney: Can I Be Me, Ramona Diaz’s Motherland, Joseph Beuys doc [link...

The higgledly-piggledy format of this archive-based film offers little reflection or analysis about the charismatic art joker

The success of Asif Kapadia’s films Senna and Amy, which dispensed with talking heads in favour of generating narrative from archive footage alone, has opened up a new avenue for documentary. It is one along which the makers of Beuys proceed with some uncertainty.

They have at their disposal an abundance of material. After all, the groundbreaking German sculptor and performance artist Joseph Beuys, who died in 1986, was no shrinking violet. He staged numerous art happenings, such as the 1965 work How to Explain Paintings to a Dead Hare, for which he caked his entire head in honey and gold leaf and cradled the eponymous creature while whispering lovingly in its ear. Nine years later, an animal took a more active part when Beuys was placed in a room in New York with...

There’s little doubt that Joseph Beuys, the German performance artist and sculptor, deserves a feature-length movie that explores his fascinating and complex body of work and his unique position in not only 20th-century art history, but also in German history in general (his work could be very political and he was part of the country’s nascent Green Party). But the documentary Beuys, directed by Andres Veiel, doesn’t do much more than scrape together bits and pieces of archive footage and photos into a cacophonous collage without a real structure and without a clear aim.

In its current edit, the film...

Sales outfit is taking seven Berlin official selection titles to this year’s market.

Munich-based sales agent Beta Cinema has fleshed out its slate ahead of next month’s European Film Market in Berlin (Feb 9-17).

The company has three competition titles this year, as well as two in Berlinale Special, one in Panorama, and a TV series in Berlinale Special Series.

Having its world premiere in this year’s Berlinale Special programme, Beta has acquired In Times Of Fading Light, Matti Geschonneck’s historical drama starring Bruno Ganz (Downfall).

In Times Of Fading Light

Set in East-Berlin in 1989, the film is based on Eugen Ruge’s novel (which was translated into 23 languages) about an aging resistance fighter who celebrates his 90th birthday with his friends and family.

Also playing in Berlinale Special and now acquired by Beta is Julius Ševcík’s A Prominent Patient. Set in the build up to the Second World War, the film tells...

Patricia Cronin's work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Venice Biennale; Musei Capitolini, Centrale Montemartini Museo; Newcomb Art Gallery, Tulane University; Brooklyn Museum; and the American Academy in Rome Art Gallery. Her work has been included in group shows NYC 1993: Experimental, Jet Set, Trash and No Star, New Museum; Watch Your Step, Flag Art Foundation; and Sh(out): Contemporary Art and Human Rights, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Scotland. Cronin is the recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and two Pollock Krasner Foundation Grants. She has also received support from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and Anonymous Was A Woman. Cronin's works are in numerous collections including National Gallery of Art, Washington; Perez Art Museum Miami; and the Gallery of Modern Art and Kelvingrove Art Galleries and Museum in Glasgow. She is the author...

In the era of museum as theme park, every institution jumps at the chance to play DJ. On Saturday, the Guggenheim turned its Rotunda into an art-house disco with the spacey sounds of Krautrock, all inspired by the overlooked and largely forgotten Düsseldorf disco the Creamcheese Club. Despite its, well, cheesy name (after Frank Zappa’s Suzy Creamcheese), the fringe space served as a hangout hub for everyone and anyone that you would have wanted to meet in post-war Germany: Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, and Binky Palermo (who bartended for a bit) — all of whom exhibited work inside — as well as the Zero Group artists — Günther Uecker founded it, and Heinz Mack designed the bar — and, of course, the Krautrock kings like Neu!, Can, Cluster, and Kraftwerk, who all played many of their formative performances inside the basement bunker (and the latter demonstrated an amazing pull in...

Frauke Finsterwalder's Finsterworld co-written with Christian Kracht celebrates words of lore as well as colloquial rhythms and structures of non-communication.

In part 2 of my conversation with director Frauke Finsterwalder and co-sreenwriter Christian Kracht on Finsterworld, we go beyond Slavoj Žižek's The Pervert's Guide To Ideology, Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies, Berlin architecture, Joseph Beuys, Kubrick's The Shining, Adorno, the beauty of Margit Carstensen and the legacy of "Gesichtswurst".

Anne-Katrin Titze: Let's talk about Margit Carstensen. Did you take her work with Rainer Werner Fassbinder into account when casting her?

Frauke Finsterwalder and Christian Kracht on the legacy of Gesichtswurst: "Also, the image of that sandwich, that's a mutual obsession." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Frauke Finsterwalder: I was thinking of Fassbinder's TV movie Martha (1974). That's the one where she gets abused by Karlheinz Böhm. It wasn't released until much later. They have this abusive relationship and finally she escapes from him and crashes her car.

Michel Majerus Matthew Marks Gallery, NY "I create, you copy nature." Pablo Picasso, in conversation with Balthus "In the [19]90s painting didn’t repel criticism; it absorbed it… fake painting created fake criticism." Dr. Hope Ardizzone, The Death of the Death Motif in Post-Millennial Painting "Even the paintings looked dead…" Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale The audience has a taste for shit. The critics have a taste for shit. James Franco, Actors Anonymous "Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt" Joseph Beuys, Action, 26 November 1965 at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf

(image above, depressive neurosis 2000 Acrylic on cotton 102 1/4 x 177 inches; 260 x 450 cm)

James Franco's body was found yesterday in the toilet of a club called Cisboi, so we are at one of the Gagosian galleries tonight sitting shiv and waiting for Marina Abramović and Willem Dafoe to read excerpts from Franco's many books [James Franco: Dangerous Book Four Boys, A California Childhood, Actors Anonymous, Palo Alto: Stories] -- the "we" being Michael Lee Nirenberg,...

Bradley Rubenstein: I want to talk about your work, but first I want to mention your writing. I totally fucking love your daily, aphoristic pieces. You use Facebook like your own personal Little Red Book. You wrote one about your approach to the art world, I think, but it probably applies to pretty much everything: "If you aren't invited to the table, bring a chair. If they don't serve you, pack lunch. When the bill comes, wash the dishes." It's like a manifesto.

Dylan Neuwirth: Yes, this is this idea. I'm pretty sure it reads like a tweet-length thought, since that's where I spend most of my digital time. I also follow a fair amount of people no one has ever heard of who trade these kinds of thoughts. Within the beautiful limitation of 140 characters we can convey the most perfect idea without the trappings of aesthetics or decoration...

Dieter Roth. Björn Roth Hauser & Wirth Through April 13, 2013

Bruno Alfieri, one of the most outspoken writers on Jackson Pollock’s work, was not so impressed by an exhibition of Pollock's poured paintings. To Alfieri, the artwork seemed to be thrown together randomly, with little thought. In 1950, Time magazine's article "Chaos, Damn It!" quoted Alfieri on Pollock's work: There is "nothing but uncontrolled impulse. ... It is easy to detect the following things in all of his paintings: chaos; absolute lack of harmony; complete lack of structural organization; total absence of technique, however rudimentary; once again, chaos."” A cursory appraisal of the work of Dieter Roth, and his son Björn Roth, might initially elicit the same response.

This three-decade-long meditation on what Robert Rauschenberg called the "gap between art and life" is a collection of candy, clothes, and old workbenches (Grosse Tischruine [Large Table Ruin] [1978-1998]), as well as paintings, videos of the artist at work...

Cocking a snook at the Olympic torch procession two men have plotted their own epic journey – along the waterways from Hastings to east London in a giant fibreglass swan

'Ahoy there!" shouts film-maker Andrew Kötting to a dredging vessel on the Lee Navigation canal, just outside London's Olympic Park. The man on the boat gives us a grudging wave. Kötting explains that the same man wouldn't let him pass any further up the canal yesterday. Nor would the Gurkhas who guard the Olympic site.

This could have something to do with our mode of transport. I am sitting beside Kötting in a two-person fibreglass pedalo in the shape of a giant swan. Or it could have something to do with my co-pilot: Kötting is wearing mirrored shades and a shabby, dark blue suit on top of a cardigan embroidered with swans. He hasn't washed the suit for the past month,...

Michael Lee Nirenberg is an artist and filmmaker living in New York. His current documentary is Back Issues: The Hustler Magazine Story.

Bradley Rubenstein: Your most recent action, Redacted, involves overpainting your past works black, repeating this performance from canvas to canvas. Has the result of this performance series turned it into something like a trademark, a signature style based in old Suprematist methodology, a non-dialectical negation that might once have been witty but ultimately only guarantees its own recognition? A gimmick? Has it replaced your work as a filmmaker and documentarian?

Michael Lee Nirenberg: Originally the project began with the immodestly modest premise that, while my earlier paintings might not be worth preserving, the idea of my past history as an artist was. Therefore, by removing the imagery, as such, from the work, I was maintaining its conceptual integrity. In many ways I believe that this conceptual...

"I view art as an inspirational tool. People who put my paintings on their walls are putting their values on their walls." The words aren't those of Gerhard Richter or Joseph Beuys. They're not by Picasso, Mondrian, Malevich, or any other messianic modernist. They come from Thomas Kinkade, the epitome of sentimental, illustrational, conservative art, the self-described "painter of light," who died on Friday at 54. Kinkade, who made dreamy scenes of suburbia, classic cottages, pretty gardens, lighthouses alone on stormy shores, saccharine pictures of small villages, and Christian images celebrating Jesus, poses an interesting thought problem about kitsch and so-called "real art" to the wider art world.Even in the thirties, Clement Greenberg worried about kitsch, the split between popular and avant-garde taste. "The same culture produces a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover," he wrote, fretting that "real art would not stand a chance next to...

One of the most authentic and important artists of modern Britain opens at the Hayward, while Donatello's awe-inspiring power of illusion is unleashed at the V&A – all in your weekly roundup

Exhibition of the Week: Jeremy Deller

Art is alchemy. Who can say why one work of art lives and another dies? Why one artist can create images that take flight while another works assiduously at producing entropic stuff? Or why art that once seemed magical suddenly seems gross? Like I say – it's an alchemical process that defies logic.

The most alchemical British artist of my generation is Jeremy Deller. This curator of social happenings has none of the conventional attributes of an artist at all. He does nothing by the book – this is, for instance, the first proper gallery exhibition of his works. His most famous creations are events and performances that involved large numbers of people: a...

Jonathan Meese: Hot Earl Green Sausage Tea Barbie (First Flush) Bortolami Gallery Through December 23, 2011

Just in the nick of time Jonathan Meese has rolled up like a panzer division, bringing his ribald "Dictatorship of Art" to New York. Meese's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to exhibitions hasn't changed, and here we get paintings, bronze sculpture, video, and a performance, War "Saint Just (First Flash)."

Meese continues to explore depictions of power, specifically our fascination with historically abusive authority figures. In the past his work has focused on Hilter, Mussolini, James Bond's Blofeld, and Humpty Dumpty, among others. In this exhibition Meese presents a clutter-filled room of oversized painted plywood furnishings for world domination (desks, control panels, lecturns) -- except everything is a little rough-hewn and oversized. And the propaganda strewn throughout, a little wacky. He seems to be on a pogrom against 1. "My Pretty Pony," 2. Martin Heidegger, 3. Scarlett Johansson, 4. Walt Disney, 5. …well,...

On the eve of the release of his most personal film to date, This Our Still Life, the avant garde director talks to Sukhdev Sandhu

"Central heating is my biggest enemy," declares the film-maker Andrew Kötting. "I'm not a big fan of double glazing. Or the Shopping Channel. Or sweet-smelling perfumes. Vanilla living is always something that makes me physically sick." He pauses for thought. "Actually, the biggest enemy is often myself. I get angry with the voices in my head: I want to shut them up."

Coming from any other director, these words could easily sound abrasive or disturbing. From Kötting, they're absolutely normal, almost reassuring. In 2001, he issued a Dogme 95-inspired manifesto entitled eArthouse Declaration of Spurious Intent that not only urged "All film-makers to have spent time with their arms or feet inside another sentient being, alive or dead", but also that "The film should show signs...

Thurston Moore performed several songs for La Blogotheque in various rooms throughout his New York apartment, including the gorgeous, "Benediction." The song's off his latest record, "Demolished Thoughts," produced by Beck. Moore described first playing the song for him while "sitting in front of a Beck-wired microphone, its design informed by the cut of [German artist] Joseph Beuys' cerebellum."

Watch Moore jam out with his brilliant violinist, Samara Lubelski, between anecdotes about famous New York spots and personalities -- including one about following Joey Ramone on the street in the mid 70's and trying to give him a lift to Cbgb's.

"Benediction" plays at 8:44.

[Vulture]...

"At 11 minutes long, Tacita Dean's film Prisoner Pair (showing at the Common Guild gallery in Glasgow [through February 5]) is a svelte précis of certain tendencies in the English artist's haunting and haunted oeuvre," writes Brian Dillon in the Guardian. "Other contemporary artists have produced film or video updates of the traditional nature morte — Sam Taylor-Wood's Still Life of 2001 offers an accelerated view of a decaying bowl of fruit, for example. And Dean has made films before that look intently at objects and surfaces; her Darmstädter Werkblock of 2007 documents the walls and carpets around a permanent installation by Joseph Beuys. Prisoner Pair is not so much a consciously painterly move (for one thing, the film is shot from several different vantages) as an exploration of the metaphoric potential of its subject. At times the mottled pears resemble ageing, maybe dead, flesh, looking as if they're entombed or in suspended animation.... From...

Is Germany the greatest European art nation of the 20th century?

Which country leads Europe in contemporary art? Britain, of course, you answer. Look at all those people flocking to Tate Modern. Wrong. The best artists in Europe today are German. The towering geniuses Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer radically contrast in how they conceive art yet both, from their divergent perspectives, one super-cool, the other romantic, achieve a profundity that makes most British art look trite.

But to widen the question – which was the greatest European art nation of the 20th century? France? Wrong again. It was Germany. Only Germany has been at the forefront of modern art from the early 20th century right up until today. Paris declined as a creative capital after 1939, but German artists have been revolutionary for 100 years without missing a beat. The passion of expressionist painting and cinema, the fragmentation grenades of Dada, the...