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“Sweet sleep! You come like pure good fortune, unasked for, most readily when not implored.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe).
Poets of all ages have sung the praise of sleep. Sleep puts us in a kind of limbo where without any agency of our consciousness, our minds process what we have experienced, order and react to it. Sleep is indispensable and precious. And yet for a long time I’ve had a feeling that in our modern culture sleep is not given the importance it deserves so that some people even consider it as wasted time. As though our lives only consisted of one single reality.

When I booked my trip to New York where I hadn’t been for quite a few years, I had no idea that I would be there on exactly the weekend the UN Climate Action Summit was taking place where Greta Thunberg delivered her impassioned angry speech. Yet I was thinking about the state of the Earth and the way we are living on it when I visited the exhibition on American Native Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And some of these thoughts I'd like to share with you today.

18 minutes – that’s all the time speakers have to present their ideas and thoughts at TED. The range of speakers includes scientists, artists, kids, people like ‘you and me’ and even the occasional former president of the United States. To be invited to speak you must have done, experienced, developed or discovered something that’s interesting and important for other people, and that they would never have heard about if it wasn’t for TED. Obviously, there's a preselection process but in principle no subject is out of bounds. And the talk should be engaging and innovative, motivating and entertaining. Ever since a friend of mine told me about TED some years ago, I never want to be without this fountain of positive thinking.

OUBEYs life took an abrupt and brutal ending 15 years ago on 2 August 2004. He was sitting unsuspectingly in his smart car by the side of the road when a 40 tonne truck came up behind and without breaking smashed into him at 90 km/h. OUBEY did not survive the impact.
The man with whom I’d spent 21 wonderful exciting years, with whom I’d shared so many thoughts and feelings, that man I was so close to and with whom I lived in such harmony was no longer there from one moment to the next. And his dream of exhibiting his pictures again, after 12 years of withdrawal and seclusion, looked irretrievably lost.
Was everything now over?

The Atelier des Lumières in Paris is housed in what used to be an old iron foundry. Since last year it has been used to present the works of world famous artists – in moving over-dimensional pictures projected on the 10 m high walls and the floor of the hall. It is currently featuring the work of an artist particularly close to my heart - Vincent van Gogh. When I saw some examples of what they were showing on the internet I was spellbound.

When I was recently in Paris walking down the rue de Rivoli on my way to the Louvre, there was a group of three people in front of me – they could have been a mother with her two teenage kids. And each of them was holding up a selfie stick and filming themselves as they made their way down the street. I had never seen anything of the sort before. Now in a city like Paris you can see the excesses of the current selfie mania on every street corner. It’s only outsiders who seem able to enjoy the many wonderful views the city offers without resorting to the smartphone for a selfie that immortalises them in the scene.

The story of the creation of the OUBEY MINDKISS Book is without doubt one of the host of extraordinary stories that the MINDKISS Project has generated so far. Perhaps you’ve already seen this book somewhere and can remember its dramatic white slipcase that looks more like a sculpture than what you’d normally associate with a book’s slipcase. 

On 21st July 1969 American astronaut Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon. 50 years after this milestone in human history, NASA has recently announced that starting in 2020 it will be offering commercial flights to the International Space Station (ISS). And there’s no lack of takers for these tourist flights in space – even though the ticket for the flight checks in at a cool $ 58 million – not including board and lodging which costs a few million extra. So what brings people to invest a huge fortune for a flight in space? Some deep-seated yearning that’s in all of us?

That the art world is less interested in art than it is in its own well-being, and that it’s little more than a profiling platform for insiders is nothing new. At least that's what I thought. Imagine my surprise then when I read a recent article in Monopol Magazin about the Venice Biennale which proclaimed “The Death of Art in Venice”. All this could raise in me was a weary smile. But it did lead me on to ask where nowadays can we actually find spaces which allow art to live and breathe.

Cool! For some years now, this word like no other has re-emerged to become our common currency for describing what we find good or great, for describing what moves us. Yet most of the time we ourselves are anything else but cool. We’re living in a touchy-feely time, a time of emotional extremes as Wolf Lotter puts it in a recent issue of brand eins, and I would certainly agree with his diagnosis. Yet how does coolness shape up with emotional extremes? For many people authenticity is the magic word that makes all contradictions vanish. Yet does its magic really work?

Recently I read that the Tate group of British art galleries, which includes the prestigious Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London, will no longer be accepting any gifts from one of its wealthiest sponsors, the Sackler family in the USA, because their money comes from the sale of the contested prescription painkiller, OxyContin. This is a remarkable decision which gave me a new slant in my thinking about dependencies in the arts sector in general and sponsorship of the arts in particular.

The internet is now one of the most vital sources of information for people all over the world. News spreads at breath-taking speed across the platforms of social media. One single click is enough to agree with someone else’s opinion or forward information to others. The split-second speed at which such decisions are taken generally doesn’t leave much room for careful consideration. All too often such speed comes at the detriment of diligence and quality.