Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
Editorial
Sotirios Bahtsetzi
The Time That Remains, Part One: On Contemporary Nihilism
The perverted, late capitalist version of such an engagement with art—the disinterested attitude, Kant’s definition of aesthetic experience—always demands its pre-validation not by the historical Other (for Kant the ahistorical, subjective-universal judgments posed by the genius), but by contemporary society’s proper neosovereign rule: that is, the globalized and institutionalized managers of taste, the individuals nurtured by a depoliticized and fiscalized society. It is through this perversion that the contemporary “homo aestheticus” is born.
Jalal Toufic
The Contemporary Is Still Forthcoming
There can be no museum of contemporary art since while now we can have museums but not contemporaneity, with the coming of the messiah we are going to have contemporaneity but no museums—there is going to be no need for a museum in the redeemed world, a world where one finds only what is willed to eternally recur.
Jan Verwoert
World as Medium: On the Work of Stano Filko
So, when it articulates a world, a diagrammatic drawing or simple gesture in principle has the same status as a fully designed room installation. Even the smallest thing can show the big picture. These are conditions of autonomy produced within a material practice: Filko creates the freedom to define the value of any artifact or sign according to his own terms, that is, according to the terms of the world systems that he constructs.
Antke Engel
Queer Temporalities and the Chronopolitics of Transtemporal Drag
This ethics remains bound to violence—the violence of crime and normalcy—and thus confronts the punk archive with the challenge of facing heteronormativity, postcolonialism, and the impossibility of remembering that these produce.
Joshua Simon
Neo-Materialism, Part Three: The Language of Commodities
The commodity entails not only the subjectivity of the people who took part in designing, making, delivering, and selling it, but also of those who use, clean, dismantle, and scavenge it. The commodity is the form in which things come to be in this world. Beyond any concept of alienation in relation to labor, we can see that the commodity’s material is constituted by our very social relations. This composition gives the commodity a subjectivity that is not particular to any one of us, but is rather one in which we all participate in forming.
Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall
Eupalinos and the Duck: Conceptualism in Recent Architecture
Today, skyscrapers are designed to be viewed not at 120, but at 500 kilometers per hour from an airplane. Whether or not they sing is of little importance, because they are too distant to be heard. Furthermore, they are less products of an architectural culture of late capitalism than they are the products of a few major capitalist players. Letters to the Editors: Responses to Jon Rich’s “The Blood of the Victim”
