„Kunst ist eine Lüge, die uns die Wahrheit erkennen läßt.“
~ Pablo Picasso
This piece is meant to be a caricature of the capitalist dynamic of profit accumulation and its manifestation at the top. Put simply, the system is divided into three main parts, the managers, the bankers and the owners. The purpose of the managers is to manage the workforce, public opinion, politics, etc., basically all parts of a Marxist conception of the proletariat. They ensure that people are employed, not anti-capitalist, and always find someone else to blame for the various forms of material, social and emotional exploitation that the profit imperative constantly imposes on people. The bankers are the guardians of wealth, constantly busy finding ways of enriching those who are already rich and finding various ways of accumulation, while making sure that the have-nots don’t find ways of benefiting from the system the haves have set up and manage the money flows without paying taxes or being held accountable in any other way. The owners or the owner class is self-explanatory, consisting of those very few individuals that the bankers call UHNWI (Ultra High Net-Worth Individuals), those who are capitalists in a Marxist sense. The parallel with the Christian Trinity I see is that they are very interdependent on each other to enforce and maintain the established order of plutocratic capitalism. For the faces, I chose Warren Buffet as the owner, simply because he embodies the investor class and is much more popular than, say, the Rothschilds, the Warburgs or the Rockefellers; Lagarde as the banker, because of her very close involvement with the ECB and the IMF; and Jeff Bezos as the manager, who is a prime example of how to make the lives of his employees a living hell in the name of the profit imperative. The picture of this trinity is the altar of the emblematic church of capitalism, where the priest is Olaf Scholz, which is a purely German perspective, but which I found quite fitting given his closeness to Warburg Bank and CumEx etc. The church people are a picture of a trading floor, where the traders are emblematic of capitalism’s most convinced worshippers. Also on the top left you can see a group picture of the G30, the lobby of the most influential banker being an allegory of a clergy ensuring the compliance of the faithful and the power of the real powerful masters of the religion, here metaphorically the owners.
This is a piece that is supposed to embody human development, especially in relation to the modern and post-modern age. The person, who could be classified as a businessman, is supposed to be a symbol of the modern age of early capitalism with real markets and the hope of prosperity and profit for most, but as the green dollar signs in his eyes signal, he is blinded by the lust for profit above all. This leads to a further step, the figure turned in the opposite direction, symbolising Generation Z, faced with insurmountable consequences from which it is helplessly trying to run away, and in fact turning away from further progress or evolution, in a kind of going backwards in terms of progress or otherwise put in terms of the evolution of humanity. In particular, he is dressed in a high-fashion Balenciaga hoodie, pop-culture-iconic Nike shoes, Playboy earrings (which are difficult to see due to the quality of the images on this website), a nose ring, a YSL cap and is looking at a mobile phone with the Instagram logo on it. This is a commentary on escaping into the hyper-real entertainment worlds of fashion and social media, aware of the imminent prospect of the end of humanity, but so busy being captured and entertained by the superficial world of consumerism that it is unable to cope with what everyone knows, at least unconsciously, to be reality, but avoids by constructing a surreal version of reality in which this knowledge is not consciously influential.
This piece comments on the inability of capitalism in its current form to transcend the profit imperative, even when the happiness of the general public is severely compromised by its reckless pursuit of profit. The x-axis is to be understood as an axis of time. The y-axis is to be understood as a measure of, on the one hand, the collective happiness in a capitalist system in green and, on the other hand, the profits of the few real profiteers of the same system in pink. You can see three marked points on the x-axis, xSOC, xeff and 2022. xSOC is as in economic graphs usual the social optimal, which gives a point of the maximum in terms of social use. xeff is the equilibrium point of monetary and social utility of the equation. The point 2022 is on the opposite side of the social optimum, which is symbolic of the worsening impact of capitalism, which follows only a profit imperative, on both individual and collective happiness. I would like to draw special attention to the fact that the x-axis is continuous. This is a metaphor for the inevitable decline of collective happiness in a capitalist system as we have had it since at least 1980, based on the profit imperative in the case of business as usual. The title comments on the fact that a capitalist system as we have it today is inherently flawed and inherently incapable of correcting itself.
This piece is a commentary on the supposed freedom of information media with its wide variety of sources and perspectives, which are in fact often owned by a very small number of corporations. Here I have chosen the two „queens“ of the German media, Springer’s Friede Springer and Bertelsmann’s Liz Mohn, who control much of the most influential news and political influence of the German media. These women, for example, have the power to end a politician’s career, especially Friede Springer with Bild or Liz Mohn with Bertelsmann, who have the power to influence or effectively write laws like the Hartz IV reforms, which are the basis of the largest low-wage sector in Europe and the whole take on managing the German unemployed. The dollar sign in the eyes of both is again a symbol of a blind pursuit of the profit imperative, which both are seen to be guilty of, without regard for the future of humanity, a functioning democracy or collective well-being.
In ancient Chinese philosophy, yin and yang is a Chinese philosophical concept that describes how apparently opposite or opposing forces in the natural world can actually be complementary, interconnected and interdependent, and how they can lead to each other as they interact with each other. Here I want to shed light on how one leads to the other in this system of capitalism. I have chosen two images that are not obviously related. On the one hand, a highly materialistic depiction of partying, extravagance and a distinctly Western mode of happiness and success, juxtaposed with an image from the „Collateral Damage“ video released by WikiLeaks, which shows the American military killing unarmed civilians, rescuing injured people and an unarmed journalist. Both images, although they don’t have an obvious connection, are, as I would like to argue, interconnected, as both are symbols of the American way of life, an overuse of natural resources fuelled by a purely materialistic definition of the meaning of life, which essentially forces the US to militarily seize the resources of other countries, especially oil, which is desperately needed to fuel the economy that is itself the basis of its way of life.
In this piece I comment on the EU’s attitude to human and asylum rights and its obviously hypocritical differentiation between western citizens and citizens of the global south. The image in the centre is Raphael’s School of Athens, a symbol of Athenian democracy, which Europe’s Eurocentric self-image sees as the birthplace of modern democracy and a progressive and free society. This plays on the notion that Europeans tend to see themselves as morally superior to other societies with alternative forms of society, and have a strong, almost naïve belief in the freedom of their own contemporary political systems as long as they appear to be governed by democratic principles, in the case of the EU, regardless of the sheer number of corruption and lobbyism cases. The heads of Plato and Aristotle in the collage are replaced, in an almost caricature-like manner, by the heads of Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Commission, and Mario Draghi, former head of the ECB and former Italian prime minister, who is a symbol of the Group of 30 and its enormous influence on the European Union and the nation states that are part of the eurozone, as a metaphor for the transformation of the conceptually so enlightened and democratic European idea into the festival of lobbyism and monetary interests that Brussels is today. The school in Athens is surrounded by barbed wire fences of the kind that are now used on Europe’s external borders to stop people seeking asylum in the EU. And below that, a real picture of a boat with refugees on the verge of drowning in the Mediterranean on the left, and a picture of a refugee woman being gassed by Polish police at the Polish border as she tries to exercise her right to enter the EU in search of asylum. Between the two images are two agents of the highly controversial European border security agency Frontex, which Amnesty International says is involved in illegal pushbacks and other actions that are in fact illegal and harmful to people in desperate need. The title „In the Name of the People“ reflects the fact that in a genuinely democratic state or union, everything that happens is de facto done in the name of its subjects, so if a state or union of states begins to help drowning people and illegally denies them help, leading to the probable killing of people in desperate need, then if that society is genuinely democratic, all people who do not strongly and rigidly oppose this abuse of state power are complicit and thus guilty of these crimes against humanity.
This piece is my comment on the USA as a hegemon and so to speak world police, or in simpler terms the West as the good rightful side in pursuit of democracy and freedom, as many of western society believes. Being the only state to ever have used an atomic bomb on other human beings and still using atomic bombs and other as devastation weapons of mass destruction as reassurance to world domination without being internationally and morally convicted for it.
In this piece I want to highlight the ignorance of not acknowledging one’s own culpability for the catastrophic state the 20th century generations and their reckless pursuit of profit have left the planet in, arguing that technological progress and rising prosperity are more important. The figure on the right is meant to be a metaphor for a typical white American male of the baby boomer generation, who on average is probably the biggest beneficiary of the destruction of the Earth’s climate. Greta Thunberg on the left is a symbol for the generations of the 21st century who will be most affected by climate change, symbolised by the burning earth in the background and a forest fire.The gesture of handing over the keys symbolises the change of generations and the state in which the actions of the generations of the 20th century have left the planet, which the following generations of the 21st century will have to inhabit and deal with. This should remind everyone of Bonhoeffer’s quote that the final test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children.
What we are supposed to know we are shown in the Media, but what we want to know we read in books. With this piece I want to comment on the message the average consumer of mainstream news gets about the state of affairs. The theatre acts as a metaphor for the extravagant, in terms of resource consumption, point from which we live our lives without being particularly happy, helpful or considerate about world affairs. Which, it could be argued, isn’t primarily the fault of the individual, but the fault of trusted news outlets that are supposed to keep us informed in an unbiased and truthful manner, which are also the deciding factor for any individual to believe in their power to change the world in their own interests, for better or worse, but not to feel powerless and insignificant. On the stage there is a wildfire, a symbol of the state of nature that is becoming more and more the norm, and in the middle of it a picture that every German knows, the state-run prime time news programme „Tagesschau“, which for many Germans is the main source of news every evening. The text is the message, I would like to argue, that „Tagesschau“ same as most news programs subliminally conveys to their audience.
Fire, what fire? Haven’t you heard what Putin did?
This piece is as simple as it is pointed. Here I use the burning house metaphor for climate change, where the house is the earth and the people are the careless people sitting at the table reading the newspaper or scrolling through their phones, somewhat aware that their house is burning but in such denial that it just doesn’t seem to matter. The large speech bubble is filled with some of the issues that the German media at this point in time (April 2022) consider to be the most important things in the lives of German citizens, such as Corona, vaccinations, Germany’s Next Top Model, or the economy, etc. It doesn’t really matter what is used today to keep people from thinking about real change and the future, only that it works. While the adults are talking about what they think are the most important issues, they are completely unaware of the burning house that is threatening their lives, their child’s life and their entire livelihood. Only the little child in the bottom right corner notices – I’m leaving the metaphor here – and asks one word: Future?
I would like to comment here on the exploitation of workers, often minors, in the industrial zones of third world countries. In many of these countries, workers are forced to work often inhumanely long shifts in often unsanitary and inhumane conditions. As a consumer of the goods produced in these economic zones, one has the real power to starve the companies that profit from this kind of labour exploitation of often underage workers of the demand that motivates them.
This piece comments on the complete and utter disregard of presidents in the nature of Donald Trump, who although only one of many, is arguably the most impactful on the future of humanity and the wonderful planet we live on. By abusing their positions of power, given to them by the people they are supposed to represent, for their own and others‘ material gain, they are sacrificing the future of humanity. Here I choose a more sacred depiction of the end of humanity by depicting a hellish hole in the earth into which Trump is putting the earth.