26 Apr 2018

Quest-for-Meaning Bureau. The Culture of a Good Life at KUNSTSAELE Berlin

Welcome to the Quest-for-Meaning Bureau!

As specialists in contemporary art we're delighted to introduce you to the world's first ever interdisciplinary institution for a good life through culture. Everything on the pages that follow revolves around the criteria by which you decide whether you rate your own life or the lives of others as 'successful' or 'happy'.

We want to focus on four of the most impactful promises of meaning and purpose of our age: work and leisure as complementary spheres of life, and the striving for self-fulfilment, set against the need for a sense of social affiliation. On a chart featuring subjective factors of happiness with these two pairings as the X and Y axes, each and every one of you could, presumably, plot points of intersection. Some will hope for a job for life; others will conquer the highest summits as long as their strength and their money lasts; others still will seek answers to their own existence in their partners and families or in a club or religious community.

So, to represent the areas mentioned above, we have set up four field offices of partner institutions under one roof: The Research Laboratory for Labour and Education (LAB) will test your (bread-)earning behaviour and provide information on innovative alternative work models; the Schöneberg Banqueting Hall is the ideal venue for you to try out – or distance yourself from – various forms of affiliation; and, at Club Fortuna, every activity is about unconditional epicurean enjoyment. Finally, our self-help facility will deliberately frustrate your expectations of salvation through art in order to prepare you for a conscious life without meaning.

As culture professionals our most important task is to soothe your fears as best we can and to enable perfectly pleasurable encounters with this existential shortfall.


Yours,

Ellen Blumenstein & Team