Unbearable Lightness of (Artistic) Freedom

This issue of Maska features a substantial section entitled Unbearable Lightness of (Artistic) Freedom, which explores the status of art and artistic strategies in neo-liberal capitalism.

The issue opens with French philosopher Alain Badiou’s fifteen theses on art, which aptly introduce the topic, followed by wide-ranging analyses by Marina Gržinić, Rastko Močnik and Alexei Monroe. Gržinić, Močnik and Monroe discuss the local and the broader European climate, in which the logic of the visibility of money shapes the investments in art as well as the conditions pertaining to artistic practices and the compromises made, more or less consciously, by artists and cultural establishments. In these conditions, artists and their works readily become commodities, maintains Amelia Jones in her contribution to the issue; specific artistic forms are bogged down even more by fishing in the troubled waters of post-transitional societies, argue Rok Vevar and Katja Praznik in their analyses of the phenomenon of contemporary dance and its youngest generation in Slovenia. Maska, as always in a bilingual, Slovenian–English edition, also features two lengthy interviews; German theorist Boris Groys tackles the issue of the subject becoming ready made, while French philosopher Jacques Rancière discusses democracy as an ineluctable scandal.