There is an exhibition in prison. It is called CRACK.

Pierced until the End of Culture
Dr. Boris Buden
In the courtyard of the former prison, in a square space cordoned off by fences,
there is a ping pong table made of concrete. A metal plate divides the table in
two equal halves, replacing the net. Concrete and metal replace wood and string.
The sports equipment should be robust, not only because the court is outdoors.
The purpose it served was also robust- the re-education of young offenders at
the correctional facility in Weimar. But this was a few years ago. The empty cells,
corridors, meeting rooms, and official offices, like the courtyards of the prison,
are now occupied by artists. Two of them, Paloma-Sanchez Palencia and Ina Weise
turned the table tennis court into a work of art by installing a scoreboard on
the surrounding fence. The scoreboard showed two different terms, sometimes
conflicting, in pairs as if the table tennis match were between COMMUNISM and
PORN, SPRING and FREEDOM, TOMATO and SUCCESS, TIME and SCIENCE,
FEMINISM AND INTERNET and so on.
I can hardly imagine a better metaphor for the concept of culture. It is widely
known that the term “culture” encompasses anything from communism,
pornography, spring, freedom, feminism, success, even tomatoes. Even the most
disparate phenomena of human life are found in the concept of culture. It seems
to be able to reconcile the deepest contradictions and to integrate the strangest
experiences. Culture, Raymond Williams wrote in his Keywords in 1976 is “one of
the two or three most complicated words in the English language”. 1 Nevertheless,
he turned explicitly against any attempt to designate a “true” or “scientific” sense
of culture. He knew that the meaning of “culture” cannot be clearly fixed. Instead,
Williams advocated a permanent working process in which the levels of meaning
of the term expand and the relationship between them are reorganized. Actually,
that is exactly what is done in the field of knowledge production according to
Anglo-Saxon and German Cultural Studies. That's also what makes the conceptual
development and practical realization of the idea of “cultural education” possible
and plausible in the wider social space today.
Actually, the association of culture and education in the socio-historical sense is
a relatively old phenomenon. It was initially the Enlightenment, which brought
together these two terms from the outside. “The words enlightenment, culture, and
education are newcomers to our language. They currently belong only to literary
discourse. The masses scarcely understand them” 2 , Moses Mendelssohn wrote
already in 1784 in his essay “On the question: What is Enlightenment?” which was
published in the Berlin Monthly, an important journalistic institution taking part in
the German Enlightenment discussion. Like the more famous essay, “Answering the
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