Essay | Culture people beware: your overproduction is unsexy

Who can still hear wind chimes or footsteps in the sand today? Brian Wilson could do it, 1970. Photo: IMAGO/mptv I'm listening to a finished radio play about Brian Wilson, the mastermind of the Beach Boys. After my collaborator made the final cuts on this independent production, I received the fifth final version. We did it, there's nothing to complain about. The only thing that bothers me is the wind chime at the beginning, which mixes with the footsteps of Californian beach tourists on the sand. There's a crackle, I think. And hold my ear close to the speaker for the 20th time, risking sudden hearing loss. I hear white mice, says my collaborator. There is nothing there, no crackling, no rustling, just the wind chimes.

Goethe says: "The highest thing to understand would be that everything factual is already theory." He is right. No one can save me from my white mice. I have to think practically about why works of art today have to be produced to the point. A theory of overproduction is needed - and why it is unsexy and risks hearing loss, so that I can accept our free production via Brian Wilson. A particularly dazzling example of overproduction comes to mind. The giant circular painting by the artist Yadegar Asisi, which years ago showed the Amazon on a screen in a gasometer in Leipzig and attracted 900,000 visitors. Immediately afterwards, Yadegar Asisi wanted to hang his giant cyclorama in the Amazon, Bild reported at the time. And that's where overproduction begins, I think.

Were the courtiers, those well-educated mistresses of important men in ancient Greece, masters of overproduction? And was the penchant for overproduction, i.e. an excess of formal means over content, passed on from the over-made-up courtesans at the court of the French Sun King? What reaches my ears today has perhaps been Western practice for many 1,000 years. Two other collaborators of overproduction come to mind. Friedrich Nietzsche elevated the Dionysian to the original principle of art, and Richard Wagner, whom he at times admired, staged his operas on the Green Hill in Bayreuth as total works of art produced to the point or beyond.

Today, every comment on We all see ourselves as cultural producers, which suggests overproduction due to the sheer number of players. The giant cyclorama is not enough; it must return to its place of origin in order to be perceived as a relevant production. If a Brazilian jungle inhabitant courageously cuts through the Western fetish with his machete, that might still be worth a post.

Today, every post is part of a production of horror and amazement that is intended to hide the fact that not much new is always happening behind the stage.

Of course my strategy is transparent. I adopt a culturally pessimistic tone to distract from the fact that I can't accept our radio play about Brian Wilson. I hear this crackling sound at the beginning. But maybe it doesn't come from the loudspeaker at all, but rather lies throughout our entire culture. Just white mice. How wonderful were the times when Brian Wilson, the only over-producer among Californian hippies, spent his nights away, manically examining every noise from the loudspeaker. No tweets or Facebook comments had to be made, the cinema reviews did not urge: “Watch it! Cult film! A must!” Today, on the other hand, we are like the courtesans and courtesans, who always had to fear competition from the rural parts of ancient Greece or France. Life punishes anyone who puts on makeup too late.

My collaborator and I position ourselves outside these absolutist palaces. This is a question of integrity, our free production about Brian Wilson proves it. Overproduction of glossy photo spreads, expert panels, and crime thrillers with a star cast is rampant in media outlets. The end of the day lets us see white mice, polished productions that increasingly revolve around a ridiculous occasion: the giant cyclorama is being transported from Leipzig to the Amazon. We are there live and have the good feeling that we are in constant media use. So those famous 15 minutes of fame that Andy Warhol spoke of will certainly not pass us by. Anyone who doesn't play in this constant lottery can't win anyway.

I remember a classmate whose family didn't have a television. This was already a serious violation of media hetaeraism in the 1990s, and the teasing did not stop there. I think she is brave today. What has the media brought me in recent years? The headline from the Amazon giant circular image in the Amazon. Germany's first water sommelier. Various experts for conscious walking and driving skills in advanced age. I could have thought of all this myself. The crackle of wind chimes I hear at the beginning of our radio play about Brian Wilson is my cultural inability to call it a day.

At this point, praise for B-movies and Danish dogma films. Praise for the spaghetti western that Quentin Tarantino is trying to revitalize culture. We should have underproduced our radio play about Brian Wilson. Yes, overproduction is unsexy and it ruins my evening. Every camera angle has to be perfect, every sound has to be crystalline sharp? Nonsense. Brecht and good taste speak against this. By the way, Aristotle too. Just take a harmless sentence from a fictional script: "I'm going to get cucumbers, darling." Of course, later in the film he would have been motivated by an opulent cucumber murder.

Overproduction leaves a damaged cultural landscape, I think, similar to the monoculture devastation in agriculture. The incalculable side effects are interesting. In the agricultural sector, monoculture leads to increased incursions of wild animals into cities. You will find a wider range of food there than in nature. What does this mean when applied to culture? In any case, with “Tatort”, the flagship of German-language television entertainment, you can see that grass no longer grows where it has been trampled on too often. New teams of investigators are constantly springing up, and the television inspectors resemble a collective of obsessive-compulsive patients on the hunt for white mice.

They would probably be better investigators if they weren't so perfectly lit. An underproduced “crime scene,” a “crime scene” by Quentin Tarantino or Lars von Trier, I think that would be nice. Nicht ohne Grund sagte Lars von Trier seine Wagner-Produktion bei den Bayreuther Festspielen einst ab. Like Quentin Tarantino, he prefers to shoot in Germany, which, as a country of mediocrity, invites refreshingly under-productions if you just look at the backdrop. With these thoughts I am certainly compensating for the failed listening to my radio play about Brian Wilson; after all, my collaborator is eagerly waiting for the call to approve the production.

But isn't it tempting to save culture in the same breath? I don't want to fall into the trap of overproduction again. The message sent out to all cultural workers is: "We're producing under production, baby!" One breaks into the office of the ARD television director and uses a Brazilian native's machete to chop up the "Tatort" concept paper, which says: "'Tatort' is the flagship of German-language television entertainment." Another prevents the giant Amazon panoramic picture from being hung in the Amazon. With this, I will tell my collaborator, a lot has been achieved. I'll tell him: The production is finished. Everything else would be white mice. A crackling wind chime at the beginning. So what?

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