STUDIO BONN. Listening to the Future

The Common Ground
CULTURE AND CLASS STRUGGLE (German with English subtitles)
Henrike Naumann, Andreas Reckwitz, Anke Stelling

STUDIO BONN moves into Henrike Naumann’s tilted post-’89 living room installation “Ostalgie” (2019). Sociologist Andreas Reckwitz (“The Society of Singularities”, Polity 2020), writer Anke Stelling (“Higher Ground”, Scribe US 2021) and artist Henrike Naumann discuss an escalated economy of valorisation and aesthetic displacement.

Digitalisation has taken the debate about what is culturally valuable out of museums and into everyday life. Everybody judges everyone else; everybody is an artist, a critic and a work. Some seek to assert themselves through the originality of their lifestyle, others by defending the putative authenticity of their roots. But if everything and everyone can become a cultural asset, what is the role of the work of art?

A conversation about the changing dynamics of what society deems valuable, the covert class struggle through culture and the connection between culture and populism.

Using Ebay furniture, Henrike Naumann explores German psycho-geographies after 1989. Anke Stelling's novels expose the delusion of self-realisation. In his book Society of Singularities, Andreas Reckwitz has developed a cultural theory that explains the rise of populism and that details the role the increased significance of culture plays in that rise.