How cute,” I thought. “It must be dad.” There was an older gentleman with a ring of gray hair standing in a run-down gallery in Hamburg-St. Georg, looking at the pictures of a young painter. His favorite subject was celery: whole bulbs, cut celery, celery in black and white and pastel, organic celery and discount celery. There was beer for one euro, the art wasn’t much more expensive either, and I lingered in front of each work for a long time. Nobody was there, except for a couple of art student buddies and the older gentleman.
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How do I know you again?
At some point someone whispered devoutly in my ear: “Sigmar Polke is standing over there.” I had taken one of the most important representatives of contemporary German art for a concerned father who was considering how he could persuade his under-talented son to pursue a solid career in the civil service. Or at least a job in the grocery store. Sigmar Polke has since passed away. But I have to think of him every time the most important representatives of German riot TV announce a new season of their “jungle camp”. After all, Polke, the slug Micaela Schäfer and Daniela’s professional mom Iris Katzenberger have something crucial in common: somehow incredibly famous, but I wouldn’t recognize any of them in the vegetable shop.There are just too many nail designers singing these days: “I want to be a star, bring me in here!” Not even my ten-year-old niece can keep up.
We’re all a little famous these days
That’s how it is with the limelight in the age of the webcam. Anyone who’s uploaded a New Year’s Eve karaoke clip to Facebook thinks they’re a rising star. And anyone who has even said a sentence in front of the running TV camera (“No, I don’t like the environmental pollution and stuff…”) can have a stack of autograph cards printed just in case. Could it be that Stefan Raab uses the sentence for the next summer hit. On the other side of the celebrity scale, there is a group of artists squatting in an ivory tower, who can descend at any time to fill up gas, see a doctor or go to the on-board bistro without being recognized by anyone.
When Martin Walser recently forgot his notebook on the train, why didn’t anyone rush after him? That’s how it is with celebrity in 2013: true stars remain invisible, only the second, third, fourth guard constantly sticks their nose into some camera lens. Sigmar Polke was able to stroll unnoticed through Hamburg’s galleries, Martin Walser is allowed to board the Interregio from Constance to Singen unmolested, and when the new chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic, Lorin Maazel, buys a pound of yellow sausage at the Viktualienmarkt, no market woman starts to stammer (“Mr. Maazel ! May it be a slice more?”). Oh, and by the way: no one has ever approached me blushing and with a raised pulse about my Tolfioow columns. Or even behind my backwhispered (“Tell me, isn’t that Carl? DIE Carl?”). “Jungle camp”, home story in the “Gala”, breakfast television: all without me. I used to worry about that sometimes. Today I know: That is real class.
