Tobi Müller

Tobi Müller is a journalist for arts and culture and an author in Berlin with a Swiss background. He writes about pop and theater, develops theater and film projects, moderates panels and curates conferences. He spent the 2000s in Zurich as an editor for print newspapers and TV stations. Since 2009, he has been living in Berlin, freelancing for print, radio and television. Over the past few years, he developed four theater plays and realized a documentary film. Together with the journalist Jens Balzer, Müller hosts the monthly “Popsalon” at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. In January 2017 he curated, together with Sarah Harrison of Wikileaks and in cooperation with the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung a three-day conference titled “Sensible Data: The Art of Surveillance” at the Münchner Kammerspiele. And in May 2018 his play “Die Akte Bern – Ein Theaterbericht zwischen Fichen und Facebook” premiered in Bern.

Popsalon: “Where I am is where the top is, should I ever be at the bottom, then the bottom is the top”

Date: Day 1 – 20:00
Location: Nivre Studio, Weimar
Language: German

Where does one find the high and the low in popular music? Isn’t pop music necessarily lowbrow, because it originates in the context of commercial exploitation? But if pop is a low art, then it would have to be understood by everybody, because being low implies plainness of contents and direct accessibility. In fact, however, pop was never so difficult to understand as today, so fragmented, ambivalent, and baffling. If that, in turn, means that pop is today’s true high culture – why then is pop, regarding itself as high culture, always of the lowest level? These and other questions will be discussed in a cheerful session of cultural analysis, crossing different forms of expertise, dilettantism and autodidactic efforts. The panelists will watch old and new music videos, asking themselves, what they might mean and at what heights of aesthetic existence they might be positioned.