Romantic Globalization: Martin Kippenberger's Metro-Net

This article proposes a conceptual framework for an emerging aesthetics of globalization by analyzing a sculptural installation created by Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997). Metro-Net is a global sculpture the elements of which can found in Germany, Greece, Japan, and the USA and which also includes segments without a fixed location. Consisting of nonfunctional subway entries, Metro-Net celebrates a global connectedness and simultaneously frustrates the visitor's desire to be elsewhere. These mutually contradictory modes of reception evoke the notion of Romantic irony which declares a nonconceptual truth to emerge out of the infinite back and forth between equally tenable positions, thus becoming fruitful for a concept of aesthetic globalization. (KH)