Cultural scene – One of them: Thilo Mischke

Artists are often idiots. There is no need for an unfavorable public for this verdict. Abyss opens up when you read in the diaries and notes of long-dead artists how they commented on their “dear colleagues”. Afterwards you know what envy and meanness feel like.

It is unimportant in which genre the creative professionals work. Anyone who has ever sat through a vernissage sober can then write a 30-page treatise on blaséness and arrogance. And the musicians are no better than the painters and sculptors. Egocentric people with insular talents seem particularly susceptible to idiotism and narrow-mindedness. The fact that many rock stars loved their guitars more than their fellow human beings is a joke.

But the writers are unrivaled. People who fail to deliver 8,000 books to a population of 80 million (that’s less than 0.01 percent) think their own words are immortal. A case of overconfidence in its final stages. Have I forgotten someone? Oh yes, of course: the theater makers. They are the senior teachers of the cultural scene. Their contempt for the public is expressed in the fact that they consider those who applaud them to be underexposed. They always emphasize the educational aim of their art (the audience should learn something when they go to the theater) and do not realize that even the boards that mean the world are, in the end, just boards – sometimes the boards in front of their own heads.

And yet we, those interested in culture, don’t want to do without many of these unpleasant people. Because in their best moments they manage to trigger something in us that would once have been described as “divine” and is now called “awesome”. What connects artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Robbie Williams, Hermann Hesse and David Lynch is that they make us see the world and our own lives afterwards through different eyes. This is how culture makes us smarter and wiser and sometimes even happier.

In return, we are lenient with our idols. We graciously overlook their character deficiencies. We have learned to accept that they suffer from a narcissistic disorder, which often manifests itself in megalomania. We know that Michael Jackson was a psycho and Alfred Hitchcock was a sadist. But that doesn’t stop us from loving their films and songs. Genius and asshole are close together.

It was possible to agree on this statement. Previously, no one would have thought to accuse Charles Bukowski of sexism. But its heyday was a long time ago. In today’s attention economy, art apparently also has to pass a moral inspection. Art may be as bad as the world in which it is created – but the artists should be nice people, that’s the new belief.

Which brings us to Thilo Mischke. He’s not an artist, but a journalist. Which, ethically speaking, makes no difference. This profession also produces pukes en masse. Anyone who writes a book called “Around the World in 80 Women” definitely qualifies for the Champions League of egomaniacs. Mischke would have fit in well in the artistic scene, in which narcissistic self-reflection and self-aggrandizement are basic requirements.

But he is not allowed to become the presenter of the most important ARD cultural program “ttt – titles, theses, temperaments”. After various protests, ARD announced on Saturday that it would “refrain from doing so” in order to “avoid further damage to the reputation of ‘ttt’ and Thilo Mischke.” He has been accused of sexism and racism in previous posts.

Mischke received an award for his reports on private television. He became known through his articles in the sometimes exciting, now defunct “Vice” magazine, whose work-philosophical basis was recently summarized by co-founder Gavin McInnes in an ARD documentary as follows: “Tell the stupid things cleverly and the smart things stupidly.” What a joke Hipster journalism, which can be productive, quickly becomes politically fatal, of which McInnes is the best example – he is now a right-wing radical and for Donald Trump.

The “Vice” makers have distanced themselves from McInnes. And in the documentary, Mischke retrospectively criticized the “pissiness” of “Vice”; an accusation that has now been turned against himself. That’s the irony that hipsters always want to claim for themselves. Puke in the fight against puke – discover the error!