Based on Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Author as Producer,” an array of theorists have developed approaches towards an aesthetics of production. The texts of this issue investigate how Benjamin’s arguments may serve as a ground for reflecting and theorizing current art practices. What are the consequences of political art’s function of “supplying the capitalist production apparatus, not changing it”? How can artistic methods subvert cooptation following Brecht and Tretyakov? Where are there new models of artists/intellectuals as producers and “specialists” rather than experts for the universal?

The reader presents a cross-section of the voices that populate the ongoing debate about, on the one hand, how and in what terms curating functions as a critical cultural practice, and on the other, what methodologies and histories exist with which we can critically analyse curatorial work today. This collection of essays was first published in 2007 by Revolver, in Frankfurt am Main and ICE, Institute for Curatorship and Education as the first ICE Reader…

It is April now, which T. S. Eliot once called the cruelest month. In Eliot’s April, lilacs rose from the ground as if to mock the dead of World War 1. Today, as the pandemic rages on, many lives are on pause, while many others end. And yet, the flowers bloom. We might say that this issue of e-flux journal asks how Covid-19 preys on existential vulnerabilities through essays written well before the current crisis, and others in response to it. If Covid-19 has merged the biological and the political, how then do we reconcile the strengthening of national borders to ...

We have never completely understood poetry. As a contemporary art publication, there’s no shortage of affection, admiration, or affinity for poetry, and e-flux journal has certainly published a few memorable poems over the years. But it always felt like a stroke of luck or a gift from the ether when someone brilliant would send us a poem. You won’t be surprised that this didn’t happen often. But now is the time to change that, and we’re honored to welcome Simone White as e-flux journal’s first ever poetry editor. Simone is the author of the collections or, on being the other ...

One common explanation for why intellectual property makes no sense in an era of file-sharing uses the example of what happens when you copy a file on a computer. Copy-Paste: a second file has been produced, but the original is unaltered. Now it has a sibling, a partner, a twin. And if they keep reproducing themselves in this way, no problem. Which is to say that, at least in the digital domain, the entire calculus of scarcity is very different from the material domain. The difference between a single entity, two entities, or a billion is almost nil. Under these ...

Previously in e-flux journal, we asked: In ten seconds, how many synonyms can you think of for the word “power”? And then, just when you thought that you finally got the hang of how the power structures around you function, they seem to be coming undone … What is feminism, precisely? What are feminisms today? To examine these questions and myriad others, the previous and present issues of e-flux journal have been dedicated to feminism(s). It has been a particular pleasure to embark on an exploration and an unfolding of the many complex realities and iterations that feminisms can accommodate. Not one feminism, ...

This publication accompanies FUTURE LIGHT, including the exhibitions “Escaping Transparency” at the MAK Vienna, “Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Loving, Repeating” at Kunsthalle Wien as well as four off-site commissions within the framework of the VIENNA BIENNALE 2015: IDEAS FOR CHANGE (11 June−4 October, 2015).

Worldmaking is based on a talk by Maria Lind, a curator, writer and educator from Stockholm, currently serving as a counsellor of culture at the embassy of Sweden in Moscow. In her contribution she states out the unique force of Marion von Osten when it comes to cultural production including curating. Via the photo-based collage work The Glass of Petrol by artist Agnieszka Polska, Maria Lind talks about the macro- and microlevel of climate change and the agency of art in relation to a revitalized and accelerated understanding of the art’s own relevance and its imaginative and projective qualities…

The symposium Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?, organised by the Kunsthalle Fridericianum and the Zurich Postgraduate Program in Curating (Institute for Cultural Studies, Department of Cultural Analysis, Zurich University of the Arts), attracted an international audience to Kassel on 26 and 27 March 2010. The two-day discussion was opened with the provocative question in how far it is possible to exercise institutional critique by curating exhibitions…

Love with Obstacles (Amor Rojo) brings together Spanish artist Dora García’s collaborative research on the life and legacy of Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952)—a revolutionary, socialist, feminist, activist, and intellectual. From 1922 to 1945, Kollontai was a Soviet ambassador in various countries, including Mexico. She was a key agitator for the sexual and social emancipation of women; as the only female member of the first Soviet government, she also managed to implement many measures women continue to fight for today, including the legalization of abortion and the protection of women’s rights. Already at the end of the 1920s, Kollontai’s texts had been ...

The present issue of On Curating contributes to a critical re-engagement with New Institutionalism. This conceptual framework is used to encompass a series of curatorial, artistic and educational practices that, in various places around the turn of the Millennium, developed concrete ideas to change art institutions, their mandates and formats: art institutions were to function as sites of research and socially engaged spaces of debate. The fact that discussions about the function of and demands for change within art institutions have become increasingly topical in the context of the controversial and much criticized revised Swiss cultural policy for 2012-2016, and ...

Pilot for an experimental virtual lecture, talk show, and Sunday sermon, with a dose of group karaoke thrown in! Using Prem Krishnamurthy’s P!DF, v.6.0.0 as a score, this episode focuses on the idea of ‘bumpiness’ as a form of productive friction and features a number of special guests including Baseera Khan, Connie Samaras, Doug Ashford, Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Karel Martens, Konrad Renner, Jason Dodge, Maria Lind, Marlene McCarty, The Rodina, Wong Kit Yi, WORKac, and others. ——