There is no doubt: the virulence of the theme "nature" is also noteworthy in the current art scene and art business as well as the polyvalence of its discourses. For obvious reasons Vienna can be cited as an example. Whether “landscape”, “creation” generally, the digital metaphor of the “cloud”, “nature motifs” as a conceptual intermedial technique and visual rhetoric or “climate/deluge/visions” of nature in the field of tension between natural science and art1, a programmatic paradigm shift is taking place in an insightful way, which is being intensified by the current experience with Covid-19 …

A naked woman's body scantily covered with withered leaves, surely a sex crime, right? No, it's art but also not harmless and certainly not art that simply hangs decorously on the wall. The supposed crime scene photo, at the same time shocking and fascinating, inexorably cast its spell on me in a gallery not so long ago. It had itself lain in the open for a while defencelessly exposed to the weather and nature in turn strewn with earth and autumnal leaves, the picture (from the series Open-Air Pictures) trying to imbibe the image. …

Usually death is excluded from everyday considerations and is not talked about in normal conversations. The last journey is in most cases only discussed on a given occasion, almost as a rule when a relative or acquaintance dies a lonely death in a sterile clinic. The reason for this may be seen in the repression of death, which has its roots in the fading of the religious, loosening of family ties, dissolution of flourishing life nexuses, urbanization that leads to anonymization and in the withdrawal into individualism …

The old discourses are returning, but every repetition is as the philosophy of Jacques Derrida has shown us at the same time a variant if not a variation, which cannot recover what was varied. The countless publications on the subject of nature from the 1970s and 1980s that are likely completely unknown to the environmentally active youth of today are returning to the forefront. Books that deal with philosophy, society, ethics, aesthetics and cultural history in the context of questions about nature and that determined the social discourse of this time are returning …