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Cowboy Capitalism: The Art of Ping Pong Country in the New Berlin
Geoff Stahl*
Department of Media Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: geoff.stahl{at}vuw.ac.nz.
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Abstract |
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This article draws on recent discussion regarding changes in city life by focusing on specific cultural spaces and social relations found in contemporary Berlin. "The Art of Ping Pong Country"—the union of ping pong and country music as a series of events bringing together artists, cultural entrepreneurs, and new media practitioners—highlights the temporal, social, spatial, and semiotic distinctions of the city’s current scene, particularly as a manifestation of the overlapping contexts of work and play in a "culturalized economy." Ping Pong Country is made up of a complex set of relationships that reveals the way artists and entrepreneurs in Berlin construct individual, group, and urban identities; how a particular relationship to flexible work patterns and urban lifestyles is negotiated; and how the city acquires and maintains its specific character and semantic force by evoking a particularly attractive structure of feeling as manifest in its deliberate "playfulness."
First published on July 16, 2008, doi:10.1177/1206331208320483
Space and Culture 2008;11:300.
A more recent version of this article appeared on November 1, 2008
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