A New Format for a Continuing Editorial Philosophy

The “studio visit” label for conversations with global artists was gone along with other familiar visual cues, replaced by a new strikingly contemporary format suited to the magazine’s new subheading “Striking Ideas + Moving Images + Smart Texts.” The first issue in the new format began with a report on a Chicago conference on art criticism and ended with “Istanbul Biennial 2005: Art and Politics on the Edge of Europe,” continuing the magazine’s historic focus on alternate centers of art production with an on-location visit with Eve Sussman during the making in Greece of her new video-opera. Subsequent issues revisited Istanbul for a look at art collectives, while global biennials returned in a David Moos-Magda Gonzalez-Mora dialogue about the Bienal de la Habana. “Art as a Strategic Weapon in Israel’s Culture Wars” counterpointed an essay on Jean-Luc Moulène’s photographs of Palestinian commercial products. Longtime correspondent D. Eric Bookhardt described the resurgence of New Orleans art after Hurricane Katrina, while a two-part report on an ambitious conference at in Austin was an illustration of the Blanton Museum’s determination to situate contemporary Latin American art in a global art historical context. In the year’s final issue, an essay on Vaginal Davis’ “terrorist drag” set an appropriately confrontational tone, somewhat moderated by essays on Hilary Wilder’s reformulations of landscape painting, Pierre Huyghe’s screen-based exhibition in London, and a studio visit (but not headlined as such) with Cairo artist Hassan Khan.