The freeport method of art storage presents its critics with a problem. Is it something new? Or something old? What could be less surprising than an international aristocracy hiding treasures in a cave someplace? The CEO of the Geneva Freeport might have overcharged his Russian Oligarch, Dmitry Rybolovlev, by one billion dollars for thirty-five paintings, according to Sam Knight’s recent, riveting account. Rybolovlev had himself acquired a large slice of the collective ownership of the means of production in 1992, when he was twenty-nine, in the form of Uralkali, a mining company developed by the State Planning Committee of the USSR in 1926. He sold his stake for five billion dollars in 2010. These sums feel like numbers from a different era, when boys regularly played with liquid money made from melting down some residual kingdom…

Editorial
Editors

The Truth of Art
Boris Groys

Agitprop!: A Conversation with Martha Rosler, Nancy Buchanan, and Andrea Bowers
Saisha Grayson

Freeportism as Style and Ideology: Post-Internet and Speculative Realism, Part I
Stefan Heidenreich

Big Business, Selling Shrimps: The Market as Imaginary in Post-Mao China
Jane DeBevoise

Geopolitics and Contemporary Art, Part II: The Nation-State as the Possible Container for Global Struggles
Irmgard Emmelhainz

The Cracked Ming Cup
Luis Camnitzer

Walid Raad’s Spectral Archive, Part II: Testimony of Ghosts
Alan Gilbert

Factories of Resurrection: Interview with Anton Vidokle
Arseny Zhilyaev