To a degree matched by hardly any other field, the visual arts have brought themselves to a conclusion. They have become aware of the infinite possibilities for aestheticization and have played out every last avantgardistic strategy. It's like good fun at a jolly gathering, which outdoes itself through further excesses and can always take on new forms until it collapses.

After this magnificent feast for the eye, one can say without a bit of put-on social consciousness that art's self-referential summersaults have in the face of real hardship become vanity. An art debate that merely serves as entertaining reading between two political outrages, such as cuts in subvention for disabled people and the ever-increasing cruelty of the laws on political asylum, is nothing more than a hand warmer for the self-satisfied bourgeoisie.