Art and Culture in the Media #19

VISUAL EXPERIENCE AT THE BERNINA PASS - The requirements for the guided tours must be met: good weather with good lighting conditions, wearing solid shoes, climbing 63 steps up a staircase and spending at least 15 minutes in the pitch dark. Once all this has been achieved, visitors to the Camera Obscura on the top floor of the salt and gravel silo experience a unique optical effect (until October): light falls through a hole in the wall onto the curved inner wall and reflects the Bernina region in an unexpected way. Wow effects guaranteed!

MUDAM, or Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, is the largest museum in Luxembourg for contemporary art across every medium. The extraordinary architecture alone, situated in the middle of a designed park, a combination of honey-coloured limestone with bold glass roofs designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei, is worth a visit.

EMM-ERR-EEH is the affectionate abbreviation for another extraordinary museum called Reinhard Ernst (MRE) in Wiesbaden, which the Japanese star architect Fumihiko Maki (1928-2024) realised in a dream architecture. Always committed to ‘people and their experience of culture’, Maki created an architectural experience with incisions, lines of sight to the city, roof terraces and exhibition rooms arranged around the inner courtyard, giving the private collection of abstract art a sensitive home.

MAKING ARTISTS FRIENDS is star curator Hans Ulrich Obrist's secret recipe for decades. In his new book “Ein Leben in Progress” (A Life in Progress) (2024), the successful author, curator, art historian and gallery director reveals that he began visiting artists' studios at the age of 17 and was soon also visiting architects, philosophers and poets. Night trains brought him conveniently to the places where he made contacts with (later famous) personalities and continues to do so to this day with boundless curiosity.

WHY DO WE NEED ART? Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021), one of the most important and influential philosophers of our time, asked himself this question in a lecture in 2017. Two years later, the book of the same name was published (by publishing house Walther König), co-edited with Carolin Meister, Professor of Art History (*1969). Exciting, thought-provoking and astonishing, it shows what art actually is - and that it always needs something: us.