Most large cities will have a Goethe Institute showing a variety of interesting movies or hosting talks. I suggest you look it up in your own city and see their event listings. It's mostly German media (great if you are learning) and cultural events.
Biography if Goethe (the related part) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe#Eroticism
The fact that Goethe eroticised childhood in his work is not really that well known. But our protagonists know all of this stuff because they do their homework.
Goethe Institute hosted many artists in 2014 to ponder post-wall Germany. I picked out the biographies of the artists we know. The entire document is very interesting. Since our inquiry looks at how people present themselves, I scour the web for artist statements, biographies and interviews. They also thanked Joseph Wills and Scott Cummings (most likely for fabrication work.)
As a refresher, Nilay Lawson is an artist who publishes PandaHeadMagazine and Oliver Miller is the owner of Dr. Pong in Germany (said to be an inspiration for Comet Ping Pong). He also co-owns another restaurant close by with with James Alefantis. Scott and Joseph are the metal workers who created the metalwork structures inside Comet Ping Pong. All of them are listed on the Friends of Comet Ping Pong page.
Here is the PDF of the event.
http://www.goethe.de/ins/us/was/pro/wall_in_our_heads/faltblatt.pdf
Oliver Miller
(American, 1972–)
Trained as an architect and artist, Oliver Miller builds functional
environments of social collectivity and historical reflection in post–
Wall Berlin. He first visited the city in 1993 while crisscrossing Europe
by train. Amidst the swirling currents of historical change, Berlin’s sites
of mundane transformation and its subtle pockmarks particularly
intrigued him. Miller later studied architecture at Princeton University,
influenced by Professor Alejandro Zaere-Polo. As a Masters student,
, which Recreating Recreation Miller pursued a final project called
would help him shape a leitmotif for many of his future undertakings
on the interplay of cultural exchange and social practice aesthetics.
Returning to Berlin in the early 2000s, Miller began holding
unsanctioned ping pong parties in abandoned spaces in the former
East Berlin, a common practice amidst other cultural activations in
forlorn ruins and unoccupied structures. Under the moniker Dr. Pong,
Miller fused theory and his architectural training with an intervention
into the evolving landscape of the city. He set up shop in an
abandoned grocery store near the former Wall on Eberswalderstrasse
in Prenzaluer Berg. He marked the entrance for those in the know with
a makeshift sign on the door, using vinyl letters from an American
hardware store. After gaining a sizeable following, Miller decided to
remain in Berlin full-time as an expatriate. He eventually applied for a
business license and gained the lease to the Dr. Pong property. Miller
views his negotiation of German bureaucracy in the Wende period
as part of his creative exploration of the city. He recalls, “Speaking
German is for me a game and an experiment, a game that I want to
win at, but an experiment I expect to learn the truth from through a
process of trial and error.” Miller continues to live in Berlin, where Dr.
Pong sustains as a cultural mainstay, currently located within footsteps
of the popular Mauerpark flea market. In 2010, Miller extended his
own work on post-Wall Berlin in a special issue of the architectural
journal Disko, co-edited with Daniel Schwaag and Ian Warner. The
trio focuses on the area of the “new death strip,” in a series of critical
essays on the infamous and now redeveloped middle fault line of
the city. Miller and his colleagues weigh the overlay of historical
haunting and newly sprouted architecture (some spectacular, some
banal) in the former death strip of the Berlin Wall.
Nilay Lawson
(American, 1980–)
Born in Würzburg, West Germany, to an American serviceman and
Turkish mother, Nilay Lawson was raised on and around U.S. Army
bases throughout her childhood. Working across a range of media,
including paint, sound, and video installation, she draws on her
personal history of Cold War transnational crossings. She aims to
render intimate exchanges and critical musings on matters of public
expression and identity. Here, Lawson sets out to mark the moment
in her third grade classroom when she encountered a piece of the
Berlin Wall during a session of “Show and Tell” – at once her final
encounter with the Wall known to her as a consequential force of
her upbringing and her first experience with it as a souvenir. Lawson
recalls, “He stood directly in front of me with that chunk while talking
about how he acquired it from his father. I was aware of the great
impact of the Wall coming down through the intense reactions of
all the adults around me and the inherent feeling of fear of living in
Europe through the Cold War.” Lawson recreates the moment of her
classmate’s reveal in a painted reformulation of her memory. Further,
Lawson searched through her family’s VHS tape archive from before
and after 1989, a mode of retrieval that she imagines as central to her
creative process. She selected highlights out of this trove of home
video footage, including a family performance with her sisters in which
they all wear American military garb, and several other intrusions of
geopolitics into her home space. She offers these edited clips as a
projection onto her painted wall chunk, and intersperses them with
glimpses of the mundane walls that she views on daily walks near
her studio in Los Angeles. She contends, “This combination of video
and painting recreates the magic of cinematic projection. That magic
seals the weight of what it was like to be present and alive as a child
during that unsteady time in global history.
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Orange_Circle ago
He was a ruthless pedophile that was heavily involved in the art world. When his crimes were exposed (namely molesting his own step-granddaughter her whole life) he was fiercely supported by many in the art world and his wife was accused of "just being jealous" of her 9 year old granddaughter.