Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

Peter Friedl

Collecting and conserving have led to a situation in which the depots are full and often eighty percent of the total collection inventory is withheld from audiences. There are collections without their own exhibition spaces, for example, the scientific collections of the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt, and others, which are their own memorials, such as Tawfiq Canaan’s collection of Palestinian amulets at Birzeit University, or the Museo Ettore Guatelli in Ozzano Taro.

Bruno Latour

Of course, both notions are indispensable for registering the originality of what is called “globalization,” an empty term that is unable to define from which localities, and through which connections, the “global” is assumed to act. Most people who enjoy speaking of the “global world” live in narrow, provincial confines with few connections to other equally provincial abodes in far away places. Academia is one case. So is Wall Street. One thing is certain: the globalized world has no “globe” inside which it could reside.

Mona Mahall

The latest attempts to reconcile culture and technology had been preceded—over the last 250 years—by antagonist attempts at playing them off: on the one hand, there was the pessimistic tragedy of culture in a technical world, and, on the other, the optimism of continuous scientific and technological progress. For some, this meant the antagonism of German culture and French civilization. Or, as the Swiss historian Siegfried Giedion put it, the split between feeling and thinking in modernity.

Lívia Páldi

At present, the descriptive term “Left-liberal” has been dislocated from its complex meaning rooted in a profound European historical tradition and imbued with highly negative connotations. In Hungary, the term now functions as a synonym for those believed to have benefitted under the former Socialist-Liberal coalition of the MSZP (Hungarian Socialist Party) and SZDSZ (Alliance of Free Democrats / Hungarian Liberal Party) parties.

Jon Rich

The assumption is that these revolutions’ hesitance in demanding radical change was due to the scarcity of ideas that motivated them. They aspired to shift the status quo to a more dynamic state but failed to reach beyond this formal demand to a deeper and more meaningful one. What does it really mean to want free elections in Egypt while asserting the army’s role in maintaining order and determining the country’s future? It is most likely an attempt to provoke a political and social dynamic on the surface of a stagnant sociopolitical order that maintains army’s hold over security. These changes can be looked at from the perspective of two givens: First is the fragility of democracy and its limited ability to deal with unforeseeable crises, which led these revolutions to ferociously invoke the American model of a democracy. The second given has to do with the weight and nature of the questions facing the region in view of the hegemony of modernity as the unique credible model.

Suely Rolnik

After all, totalitarian regimes do not impinge only upon concrete reality, but also upon this intangible reality of desire. It is an invisible, but no less relentless, violence. From the micropolitical point of view, regimes of this kind tend to establish themselves in the life of a society when the connections with new universes in the general alchemy of subjectivities multiply beyond a threshold, causing veritable convulsions.

Martha Rosler

In considering the role of culture in contemporary societies, it may be helpful to look at the lineage and derivation of the creative-class concept, beginning with observations about the growing economic and social importance of information production and manipulation. The importance of the group of workers variously known as knowledge workers, symbolic analysts, or, latterly, creatives, was recognized by the late 1950s or early 1960s.

Joshua Simon

In a world overburdened with stuff, these objects give an object’s account of what it means to be in the world. They suggest an understanding on the part of the commodity, rather than of humans, as a historical subject. This is no longer an object that the artist renders as art (i.e. readymade), but rather it is the exhibition format—as both the narrative display of artifacts and the institutional contract of that which is called art—that allows us to see these commodities as they truly are.