Rainald Goetz, Jule Lobo and the fun: beauty and real trashiness

It was the day after Trump’s election victory that the writer Rainald Goetz began writing his Instagram diary.

He posted the receipt from a book and newspaper store on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse; he had spent almost ninety euros on media products. Below he wrote the lines “the phone is ringing, years have passed”, also as a reference to his long abstinence from social media.

Since then, Goetz has uploaded a photo to Instagram every day, each with his own comments and text. For example, on a CNN screenshot with Trump: “Trump doesn’t have to go to prison.” Or a night view of Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin: “The dirt comes in buckets, we’re countering that. Right on, right on.”

Last weekend he took a closer look at the medium and tried to answer questions about storytelling on Instagram: “How much self is necessary, how much presence, how much world objectivity?”t

Goetz speaks of “weak acceptance” and “spontaneous affirmation in the eye-catching moment of initial reception”, of joy, which may then be followed by one or two thoughts. On Elon Musk’s

Goetz, he concludes, is looking for “the logic of an objectively beautiful succession,” and this daily search is pure “fun.” The thing with the beautiful succession and the “want to do things differently”, “the ideas that pictures celebrate”, as Goetz explains at the beginning, is of course noble, not to say art-religious, the demands, the socialization and the age of Georg -Büchner Prize winner.

Waste for all 2.0.

In fact, people had asked themselves why the writer had only now discovered the platform as a medium for himself, especially because he was ahead of his time with his internet diary “Waste for All” at the end of the 1990s, and he continued to do so over the course of his work Combine texts with photos or let photos tell the story entirely on their own.

His post from Saturday, January 18, 2025-LXXV, as it is numbered, explains this late entry, under a photo that shows Goetz photographing his counterpart with a small camera and clearly having fun doing it. Telling stories, not his anyway, is apparently impossible on Instagram, as he realizes; “The text principle of associatively constructed texts” is also too confusing for this medium, so all that remains is love, fun and beauty.

Private chef to three little boys

Nevertheless, one can be sure that the print fetishist that Goetz is will soon have his diary published on Instagram as a book, in his blue series of works as the seventh part of “Schlucht”, in the wake of Clemens Setz, who ultimately did this with his Twitter poems did too.

Goetz shouldn’t have missed the fact that telling stories on Instagram is different anyway and has its own rules. State of the art are stories and series of pictures, not “one picture, one word”. For example, randomly selected, the daily marital status report of a Jule Lobo, who, with almost 60,000, has twenty times more followers on Instagram than Goetz.

Lobo has a weekly news podcast with her husband, but beyond that she leads a fundamentally digital existence and reports every day about her everyday family life with her husband and, above all, the three very small children, who can correctly only be seen from behind.

“So,” Lobo says this weekend, as Goetz is trying to get to the bottom of his Instagram motivation, standing in her kitchen and telling what’s going on with her in her, it seems, newly published “Breakfast Vlog”: “ It’s five in the morning, I always put my makeup on right after I get up, that’s why I look flawless, but I feel like shit, please don’t let the look fool you. Our boys are three, two and one right now, it’s mostly like, I would say they eat forty percent of this breakfast and not the rest. That also has to do with the fact that I buy them macarons on the way to daycare, you shouldn’t do that, I’ll do it anyway, judge me, I don’t give a shit, I’m up at five in the morning and make my children breakfast, what do you want?”.

Afterwards there is a little berry picking, tips on how to keep them better, a yeast plait that is taken out of the oven, and the Jule Lobo story, the breakfast vlog, is finished. As Rainald Goetz described it, “Hello, I’m here, I’m here right now, I saw that, experienced that, ate it, celebrated it, it was great.”

To be continued, and it will be about food again, there will be almost 1000 likes and some enthusiastic comments. This sequel will be far from the beauty that Rainald Goetz imagines in the tradition of old masters. Art and social media are difficult to get along in their form.