books

My books deal with art, pop and digital culture and their social dynamics. Here you will find an overview of my previous publications and the central themes of my work.

Hyperreactive

Whether we share, quote, comment, or delete: online, reactions have long since ceased to be incidental gestures. They determine visibility, escalation, meaning; they are political, strategic, sometimes destructive. Hyperreaktiv shows how social media have turned us into turbo-interpreters, into participants in a culture war where every word, every gesture, every meme becomes a surface for projection.

A personal, incisive, and urgent look at the discursive power of users — and at a responsibility we would often rather not acknowledge.

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Cuteness

Cute art? For a long time that sounded like a contradiction in terms. Art could be many things, but certainly not sweet. While readymades, Pop Art, and Appropriation Art took up other motifs from consumer and popular culture as a matter of course, cuteness remained one of the last taboos in the visual arts. Yet globalization and social media keep challenging established conceptions of art and established forms of the artwork — including by pushing the cute into the territory of the visual arts. What does a critical, affirmative, or provocative artistic engagement with cuteness look like?

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Kein schöner Land

After an outing together to the Isar, four women and four men resolve to put contemporary German culture to the test. They are experts on fashion, literature, and art; on theater, food, and music; on politics, film, and television. They are the independent minds this country so urgently needs — and so rarely honors. What has emerged is a diagnosis of the present as entertaining as it is contentious, and unlike anything before it. Eight critical perspectives on a country at the threshold of a new twenties: Kein schöner Land is a boot camp against intellectual sluggishness, a break with German complacency.

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Unicorns

Unicorns? Unicorns! Few phenomena trace the history of the internet over the past twenty years as vividly: from queer safe spaces and startup culture to the rightward "vibe shift."

How did a mythical creature become an icon of the digital present and a screen onto which culture-conservative anxieties are projected?

Annekathrin Kohout sets off for Candy Mountain, explores the garishly colorful internet culture of the millennials and the unicorn as a consumer phenomenon with an Erasure soundtrack, and ends up in Silicon Valley, where investors are hunting for the next billion-dollar "unicorn startup."

An essay on the shifting appropriations of the unicorn — and what they tell us about the transformation of digital society.

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K-Pop

The "K" in K-pop does not simply stand for "Korean." It is a brand, a corporate design, an aesthetic trend with global reach. Alongside K-pop music and K-dramas, food, fashion, and beauty products all help constitute the so-called Hallyu, or Korean Wave. Just as there would be no Hollywood without cinema, K-pop is unthinkable without social media. In place of glamorous stars and screaming fans, we find savvy, well-connected participants. Yet critical voices mingle with the enthusiasm: the industry behind the phenomenon and the gender roles it circulates increasingly provoke contentious intercultural debate.

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Nerds

Nerds: unkempt young men in plaid shirts, high-water pants, and horn-rimmed glasses, interested in computers and not especially popular with women. Or so the story goes. In her book, Annekathrin Kohout traces a far more many-sided history, one that runs from the buttoned-up overachiever through the brilliant computer obsessive to the angry old white man — a fast-moving ride through popular culture and the age of the information society.

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POP

Pop culture connects the generations. This large-format visual journey through a century of the zeitgeist brings iconic figures, objects, fashion, music, design, and everyday moments to life in richly detailed panoramas. Each decade is given its own unmistakable visual language by a different illustrator. Accompanying thematic pages tell the stories behind the pictures and invite readers young and old to keep discovering something new. With illustrations by Marieme Ba, Anne-Sophie Engelhardt, Juliane Filep, David Huang, Stefānija Janovska, Vivi John, Yayo Kawamura, Laura Page, Pauline Pete, and Moritz Wienert. For children ages 5 and up, and for adults.

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Brave New Art World

Art that generates clicks. Careers that hinge on follower counts. Critics who would rather share a meme than an argument. Directors who avoid political statements for fear of a pile-on. Welcome to the brave new art world!

Social media have turned the art world on its head. They challenge prevailing conceptions of the artwork and reach deep into the infrastructure of a field that was always about the who's who as much as about the art itself. New forms of participation and democratization call traditional gatekeepers into question. The line between artistic practice and personal branding is dissolving. Influencer logics permeate creative processes, galleries, and museums. Art is going popular.

(With Wolfgang Ullrich)

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Ostflimmern

Prefab housing estates, defaced monuments, discount supermarkets: Philipp Baumgarten's photographs have prompted a dozen well-known writers to set down their experiences of the years after 1989. Their voices offer insight into a generation whose East German background often works like a phantom pain, and which remains present to this day in the mirror of the "West German gaze." Children of the 1990s, shaped on one side by industrial wastelands and on the other by American pop culture and global digital modernity, they look back on their childhoods and on the years since reunification with a critical eye — but also with forbearance.

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Netzfeminismus

Pink knickers, armpit hair dyed baby blue, pouting selfies: what sounds like male fantasy is, for women working as net artists, a feminist statement. With it they enter the contested terrain of the "right" image of women — a battle that plays out on social media in more than metaphorical terms. Does a woman act emancipatorily when she photographs herself breastfeeding, or does she reduce herself and other women to the role of mother? Does a "Girl Power" T-shirt confirm the part of the naive little girl, or call it into question?

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