Issue 1
Summer 2015

How can we account for the pervasive sense that contemporary art is not moving forward, is spinning its wheels? At a time of unprecedented attention for visual art, not to mention a perpetual market boom, why the endless nostalgia?
Editor's letter Buy issue

Essays

The Value of Reflection

by Elisabeth Lebovici

It took five decades, but at last Joan Jonas has won the recognition she deserves for her intricate installations and videos. A pre-Venetian chronicle of the woman who held up the mirror — and refashioned art in the process

Anchor Song

by Zachary Woolfe

Don’t let MoMA’s Björk fiasco mislead you; music has its place in the museum. How an art world beyond technical skill listens to Beethoven, and Beyoncé

Declaration of Dependence

by Laura McLean-Ferris

Even the studio is no place to hide. Everyone knows everyone, everyone needs everyone; your relationships are as Instagrammable, and as shudder-inducing, as an ice bucket dumped overhead

Interviews

Luc Tuymans

“I’ve never made a mystery about the fact that I use imagery that exists, that comes out of a newspaper or anywhere else. Which I think is elemental as a question of freedom of speech. If you can’t do that anymore, in what way can you actually be contemporary? Imagine if I had asked the PR of Condoleezza Rice to make a painting of her!”

Marwa Arsanios

“You keep on trying. You know that most probably you’re going nowhere. But you keep on trying. This is a strategy — this is being an artist, actually. Trying, trying forever. It’s the opposite of a utopian model.”