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Max Beckmann Benefit Auction a Great Success
Over 200 art lovers and collectors attended the Max Beckmann benefit auction at the Villa Grisebach on the evening of November 30. The auction brought a total of € 1,000,000* and witnessed nearly all 29 pledged artworks being sold. The proceeds will help fund the American Academy’s Max Beckmann Distinguished Visitorship. Auction highlights included artworks on offer by Tacita Dean,...
read more >>The American Academy in Berlin / Villa Grisebach Fall Art Auction
A German–American bridge: A benefit auction held on November 30, 2012 at the Villa Grisebach saw celebrated contemporary artists from both countries pledge outstanding artworks to help fund the American Academy’s Max Beckmann Distinguished Visitorship. The American Academy wishes to express its enormous gratitude to contributing artists and to the Villa Grisebach for supporting...
read more >>Vansittartism Revisited
Hans Vaget's November 21 lecture re-examined one of the most divisive issues in the debate over the antecedents of the Third Reich and the appropriate future shape of post-war Germany. "Vansittartism” – named after Lord Vansittart's whole-sale indictment of Germany in his radio addresses, "Black Record" – has been almost universally condemned as a kind of...
read more >>Finance and the Good Society
It goes without question that the reputation of the financial industry has suffered severely in the painful aftermath of the recent financial crisis, brought on as it was by the high-finance vehicles of credit-default swaps. Robert J. Shiller, the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics at Yale University, and a fellow at the International Center for Finance at the Yale School of Management,...
read more >>White Canvases and Silent Music
The nineteenth-century notion of poésie pure -- or poetry without any prosaic elements -- led to a general attempt to "purify" art. Daniel Albright, the Ernst Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, and a Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the Academy this fall, believes that the belief that art is independent of any material medium (pigment, stone, word, musical...
read more >>Election Night!
On the occasion of the 2012 US Presidential Election, the American Academy in Berlin teamed up with Google to host two prominent Google+ Hangout session discussions in the lounge at the Deutsche Telekom Hauptstadtrepräsentanz, which hosted the largest party in Germany on the occassion of the 2012 United States Presidential Election, joined by Ambassador Philip D. Murphy.
The American...
read more >>The 2012 United States Presidential Election
On the occasion of the 2012 US Presidential Election, the American Academy in Berlin is associated with two election-night events: One at the Bertelsmann Repräsentanz, and the other at the Hauptstadtrepräsentant Deutsche Telekom. The Academy and its partners will be tracking the latest developments during the elections and, through live discussions and roundtables, emphasizing the role of...
read more >>Law as the Public Conscience
Dean Moyar's November 1 lecture looked at how G.W.F. Hegel both agrees with and diverges from the conceptions of law and conscience that Thomas Hobbes presents in The Leviathan. Many scholars hold that Hegel endorses the view that the positive laws simply take the place of the individual conscience in public action, but, says Moyar, this is a serious misconception. Rather than the...
read more >>The Poetics of Kitsch
"Historically, kitsch is a word put in to use by the modernist elite -- and used by the cognoscenti ever since -- to name certain kinds of artifacts associated with mass culture which are seen as trivial, sentimental, imitative, stereotypical, and therefore illegitimate." But because the word "kitsch" is usually used in derisive or contentious ways, continues Daniel Tiffany...
read more >>I, Me, Mine: Self-Consciousness and the First Person
Béatrice Longuenesse's October 23 lecture dove headlong into some aspects of self-consciousness and self-reference. When we use the pronoun "I," she notes, we are using a word that does not just refer to ourselves -- because all English-speaking people use that same word to their own selves. Our given name refers others to what we should be called (after all, they don't call us...
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