Contemporary art and the system that it built overtime within which to establish itself currently make up one of the most powerful global devices to capture and understand our time. But what is this art that defines itself as contemporary? What are the conditions in which it is created, and what are the circumstances in which it is produced, exhibited, imposed, commercialized and globalized? Which mechanisms ensure its symbolic, institutional and fiduciary legitimacy? These subject matters are analysed in issue 14 of Electra magazine, in a dossier which, based on a perspective of art criticism and art sociology and economy, contemplates aesthetic questions and artistic forms, as well as the functioning of that same system and its definitions. This dossier includes contributions from artists and theorists such as Camille de Toledo, Yves Michaud, António Guerreiro, Paul Werner, Jovan Mrvaljevic and Gregory Sholette.
French philosopher Didier Eribon is this edition’s interviewee and talks about his memoir Returning to Reims, but also about subjects such as social determinism, gender studies, the state of politics, and figures like Michel Foucault, Georges Dumézil, Hervé Guibert, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Annie Ernaux.
Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen prepared a set of recent and unpublished images for this issue, which demonstrate both the traits that have made her unique as an artist, and her current stage of visual creation. Her work is accompanied by an essay by curator and writer Josseline Black.
In Electra 14, essayist and curator Juan Manuel Bonet, former director of the Reina Sofia Museum, analyses the pieces that poet Octavio Paz, Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote on art; Italian philosopher Dario Gentili discusses a quote by Robert Musil taken from The Man Without Qualities; on the 200th anniversary celebration of Baudelaire’s birth, Ana Rocha, music critic and researcher, evokes the author of The Flowers of Evil in the context of his relationship with Wagner’s music; Carla Baptista and Paulo Pena discuss political journalism and the relationship between journalists and former American president Donald Trump; and writer Rui Manuel Amaral describes the city of Porto, both its real and imaginary versions.
This edition also includes an exploration by Spanish architect and editor Moisés Puente about a new way of understanding architecture, based on architecture images and photography; art historian Gillian Sneed writes about the work of Portuguese artist Gaëtan based on the critical methodologies in queer theory; curator Julia Albani reports on the 17th edition of the Venice Biennale of Architecture; essayist João Oliveira Duarte talks about the new Portuguese edition of Hölderlin’s complete poems; and diplomat Bernardo Futscher Pereira discusses the word “bazooka”.
