Contemporary Art and New Social Paradigms II

If our objective at the start of this year was to extend the scope of Maska and to think of it as a flexible crossing place for contemporary art practices (performing, new media and inter-media), philosophy, society, culture, science and technology; as a place to reflect upon and sometimes problematize these practices; then we continue to follow this guiding principle with the final issue of the year.

The integration of contemporary art into various frameworks, particularly into changing social, economic and technological ones, is the primary subject of the second part of a theoretical section entitled Contemporary Art and New Social Paradigms, edited by Janez Strehovec. The first part was published in the previous issue.

Not only is there a translation of an important late-1920s text by Siegfried Kracauer (sometimes been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory), which continues to readily communicate with our era and finally settles the Slovenian ‘debt’ in the address of a relevant theoretical text; the section also brings together four original pieces addressing various aspects of contemporary art and its socio-economic context.