There was a lot of ancestor worship at Gallery Weekend Berlin this year. Showing the likes of Gordon Matta-Clark (at Galerie Thomas Schulte), Philip Guston (Aurel Scheibler), or Lynn Chadwick (Blain | Southern), it seems, not only promises economic success but assures something like conceptual solidity, while at the same time offering the appeal of DIY materiality and an art-historical frame of reference. The late Friedrich Teepe (1929–2012), with his monochrome canvases and soft sculptures—he called them padded objects—was another of these elders, but something of an exception to the

The always-increasing pace of technology has left us adrift on an ever-stormier ocean of digital imagery. How do we stay afloat? By training ourselves to become more attentive, proposes Katja Novitskova, who was born in Tallinn, Estonia, and lives in Amsterdam and Berlin. After all, this is what has enabled human survival since time immemorial. When there’s a branch on the ground, we tend to see a snake: We err on the side of caution. But how to do this today, amid a flood of digital images? Novitskova is interested, she says, in how “media actively redefines the world and culture, and everything,”

One of the highlights of this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin was the discovery of drawings and paintings by Julian Beck (1925–1985). An artist, poet, actor, and director, Beck is mostly known for cofounding, with his wife, Judith Malina, the Living Theatre in New York. One of the most radical theater companies of the twentieth century, it was inspired in part by Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. Uncompromising in their confrontation with all aspects of human existence—social, political, religious, sexual—the Living Theatre’s performances had a reputation for being challenging