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Cities make people neurotic. They're loud - and they're restless. Still, ever since Charles Baudelaire's day, cities have been celebrated as the creative centers of modernity. This month's edition of db-art.info, titled "Tomorrowland," is dedicated to the promises, problems, and various life models that go hand in hand with contemporary urban life. And what about contemporary art? Is the city a juggernaut or an El Dorado of creativity for artists? "When I first moved to New York, I'd walk out my door and two blocks away I'd have this anxiety attack and go home. Ever since, I've wanted to make spaces that were private, where I could breathe." In an interview with Cheryl Kaplan, the New York artist Andrea Zittel describes the concept of her Living Units, which made her world famous in the 90s. Today, Zittel lives in a model settlement in the California desert, because "in an anti-urban environment, you don't need everyone to clock-work." ++++++ In Japan, the women of the future are dynamic, even in their old age. At least that's how the Kyoto-based photo artist Miwa Yanagi portrays it: the company boss in a rabbit costume, the supermodel who's turned a marble gravestone into a fashion runway, the aged bike chick gripping the bars of her Harley. Yanagi digitally alters both people and spaces; her work portrays the city as a hermetically sealed space, as a mirror image of a fantastic dream world dictated by consumerism, uniformity, labels, and clothing. ++++++ "Mental Maps" are what the Berlin-based painter Franz Ackermann calls his drawings, psycho-cartographies he made of his travels around the world. Ackermann's cities are images of a globalized landscape in which the conflict between the center and the periphery is drawing closer. ++++++ The future of the city is the theme of the conference "New Forms of Governance in the 21st Century," initiated by the Alfred Herrhausen Society for International Dialogue. Mayors of 16 major European cities will be meeting in Barcelona to discuss with urban sociologists about improving concepts for the urbanization process ++++++ When it comes to the connection between city life and creativity, Ulf Poschardt is skeptical. To him, the trendy urban neighborhoods have already turned into cozy villages of modern Bohemian life.
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