We were sent a link to an interview by a certain "Londoner in Berlin" - with some young artists in Berlin, talking about the city and why they chose live and work there. Their answer: lots of galleries and artists. We couldn't believe how narrow their perspective was or how anyone could think this might be interesting. Was their world so self-referential? Did they really move in a reality constructed solely of galleries and artists? Had they need of nothing else? Wasn't there anything else which made Berlin an interesting place?

we pondered the theoretics of the banal and of the pedestrian, and what vulgarity would mean today.
some troubling facts remained.

In fact, there did seem to be nothing but Art Galleries in the middle of Berlin. Art Galleries and Fashion Shops. These particularly fetishized commercial spaces were materializing as in a chain reaction, stacking up next to and on top of one another, first obscuring then obliterating every other form of urban life, imposing their own limited and suffocating aesthetic regime over our fild of vision.

new urbanism seemed to have made possible nothing more than an exchange of signs as empty as that of the suburbanism it had sought to escape.