Mousse is a bimonthly magazine published in Italian and English . Established in 2006, Mousse contains interviews, conversations, and essays by some of the most important figures in international criticism and curation, alternated with a series of distinctive columns in a unique tabloid format.

Mousse magazine number 36 including texts by Jens Hoffmann, Boris Groys, Anthony Huberman, Jessica Morgan, Alexander Nagel, Anna Colin amongst others.

Editor In Chief: Edoardo Bonaspetti
Art Director: Francesco Valtolina

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Metropolis M, #5: Survival.

For years, post-colonialism in art was dominated by a heavy, politically correct discourse, generally at a high intellectual level. The debate primarily took place in other countries, such as France and England, where important exhibitions were organized that played a large part in guiding how people think about their colonial past.

In the Netherlands, very little has been said about our colonial past, certainly in the visual arts, where museums and other institutions have seldom broached the issue with any seriousness. Only in the last few years does there seem to be a change in this, thanks to a new generation of artists and curators who have the courage to investigate the subject with a certain amount of lightness. Obtrusive moralizing is avoided, and although one is always still in search of confrontation, there is also space for keeping things in a different perspective.
This fall, De Appel and SMBA are devoting exhibitions and events to this question. Metropolis M also pauses to take a look. A society that is so imbued with its own past, as we are, cannot ignore the dubious side of its history.

This issue also includes a follow-up to the protests expressed in the previous issue. Where it loudly voiced objections to the decimated budgets in the cultural sector, we pause here under the title ‘Survival’ to examine the background of the cutbacks and look at how we can best respond to them. Strategic analyses are interspersed with tips about how to be stronger in moving forward, out of the crisis.

Finally, we are extremely pleased that Tirdad Zolghadr, an Iranian writer and curator based in New York, has agreed to write columns for us over the coming year. His beautiful first contribution immediately sets high expectations.
– Domeniek Ruyters

OPENING
dOCUMENTA (13) thinks ahead
by Domeniek Ruyters

COLUMN
Period Room
by Tirdad Zolghadr

SURVIVAL
Politicians without a party
Markus Miessen on ‘crossbench praxis’
by Domeniek Ruyters

Money isn’t everything
Interview with Matthew Slotover from Frieze
by JJ Charlesworth

FEATURES
The art of Wilfredo Prieto
by Inti Guerrero

The Netherlands in postcolonial perspective
by Alice Smits

‘Spectres’ by Sven Augustijnen
by Stefaan Vervoort

Discovery Channel
Kianoosh Motallebi, Maarten vanden Eynde, Edith Dekyndt
by Ilse van Rijn

Published by Stichting Metropolis M
Editor in Chief: Domeniek Ruyters

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Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism.
Published by Fillip and Artspeak.

Participants:
Jeff Derksen
Diedrich Diederichsen
Maria Fusco
Kristina Lee Podesva
Tom Morton
William Wood
Tirdad Zolghadr

Over the course of the past decade, we have seen unrelenting levels of market speculation in contemporary and historical art at the same moment that global conflict and war has escalated and world economies have begun to crumble. Concurrent to these developments, there has been a new wave of interest directed toward the efficacy and function of art criticism. Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism will engage with many of the key issues coming out of these conversations, specifically returning to the role of judgment and valuation in contemporary art writing.

Described by Joseph Koerner and Lisbet Rausing as the “troubled objects of criticism,” value and judgment are—and have always been—at the forefront of debates about the social function of the art critic. For many, the end of the twentieth century saw the mitigation of the importance of critical valuation established within high modernist discourses. Instead, many critics argued for a more open dialogue between texts and objects, pursuing modes of critique that allowed for the exploration of ambiguity and interpretation, thus detaching art writing from questions of quality.

With the start of the new millennium, a growing chorus of critics began to suggest that a return to judgment was a remedy to the cauterized state of contemporary art criticism. Yet can judgment operate within new modalities of writing that hold open a reflexive space for ambiguity and dialogue? How would these new forms read? If, as Boris Groys has claimed, critical discourse today is an attempt to “bridge the divide” between the “inherited older public office” of the critic who judged art “in the name of the public” and the “avant-garde’s betrayal of this office,” can new forms of criticism remake judgment anew, without explicit determinations of quality?

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