Gray is trendy and stands for practicality and neutrality, but also for elegance and timelessness. While the screen worlds appear ever more colorful, more and more downright gray areas are emerging in public spaces. Is this trend towards the renunciation of color an expression of aesthetic impoverishment or a sign of a subtle color culture? What is the zeitgeist behind this leading achromatic fashion color, and what role does grey play in language, mythology and cultural history?
The feature gets to the bottom of the GRAU phenomenon. It goes to gray places in urban spaces and is a guest in the color archive of a trend scout, in the studio of a color psychologist or in a Japanese teahouse. It asks researchers and experts, artists and philosophers about our relationship to color and non-color under the sign of gray.
Author: Jörg Wunderlich
Director: Nikolai von Koslowski
Production: MDR 2015
(59 min.)
First broadcast Deutschlandfunk Kultur 2015
Rebroadcast 8.12. 21 MDR Kulturradio 22:00 Link to the feature MDR Kultur
