It is said that while in Madrid to open an exhibition of his work they took him to the Prado Museum, which he had never visited before. He passed through the vast rooms with fleeting steps and set gestures, where from the walls the works of Velázquez and Goya, Fra Angelico and Rafael, Bosch and Dürer, van der Weyden and Caravaggio cast their forms and colours, lines and lights. This swift visit was barely enough for a distracted, distant glance at the masterpieces that time has selected to show us. It took no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. At the end of this whirlwind-visit, he went into the museum-shop and looked around for more than half an hour. With keen attention, care and curiosity, he examined, among other products and gadgets, the reproductions and replicas, posters and prints of the works whose originals he could not be bothered with. Such was Andy Warhol ...

‘Contemporary art’ is the operative but undefinable term that refers to the vast, heterogeneous realm of current artistic expressions, strongly influenced by the triumph of the new media, without that implying the extinction of classical media, especially since the modernist idea of ‘overcoming’ is no longer valid. The object of endless debate and controversy, contemporary art has been besieged by questions of value, aesthetic criteria, and autonomy in relation to institutions and the art market. Never before has art had so many institutions at its service: contemporary art centres, museums, fairs, biennales and galleries have created a ‘system’ with its own rules and codes and have multiplied and hierarchised spaces of celebration, but also new modes of legitimation. This dossier on contemporary art that we have prepared from an eclectic perspective, focusing on art criticism, sociology and economy, reflects not only on aesthetic issues and artistic forms, but also on the way the system works and its determinations. We have invited internationally renowned artists and theorists to write about the various aspects of contemporary art: Camille de Toledo, Yves Michaud, Paul Werner, Jovan Mrvaljevic and Gregory Sholette.

Robert Musil, author of The Man without Qualities, with his critical attitude of Viennese modernism, expressed huge scepticism about the idea of progress. Dario Gentili, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Roma Tre University, examines and comments on this idea.

On the bicentennial of Baudelaire’s birth, Ana Rocha, a music critic, researcher and author of theatrical texts featuring 20th century artists and writers (Courbet, Antero de Quental), evokes the poet of The Flowers of Evil and his relationship to Wagner’s music.

This interview with the philosopher Didier Eribon, focussing necessarily on his autobiographical book Retour à Reims [Returning to Reims], which had tremendous international resonance, shows the potentialities of a ‘critical thinking’ that crosses disciplines, disregarding their respective borders, and creates theoretical instruments for a political and sociological analysis and critique.

Donald Trump’s relationship with journalism and American journalists’ reciprocal relationship with Trump were more like a battlefield. They provided an important, even exhilarating chapter in the history of political journalism of our times, which have certainly been fraught with problematic deviations. Writing from different places, Carla Baptista, a lecturer at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and a specialist in the history of the media and journalism, and Paulo Pena, a journalist from a multinational investigative journalism team (Investigate Europe) analyse and discuss these issues.

Moisés Puente, the Spanish author and publisher, analyses a phenomenon of our times, a phenomenon of great importance that has not always been acknowledged: ‘contrary to that which was championed by figures such as Peter Eisenman during the 1990s, architecture is no longer read as a text but is presented as an image’. This change had many effects, such as the transfer of authorship of images from the architect to the photographer of architecture. Puente quotes the example of the well-known Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. When presenting their work at the Fifth Venice Biennale, they decided to exhibit nothing but photographs by four photographic artists. In this brave new world, images of the city and the city of images are the same and appear in representations that are becoming more and more abstract and closer to non-places.

The Mexican writer Octavio Paz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. A great poet, essayist and critic, he is the author of a work that seems to have everything: literature and linguistics, philosophy and history, politics and geopolitics, psychology and sociology, anthropology and the visual arts. He believes that culture reveals this world and creates other worlds. Paz’s writings about art and artists are abundant and very original. The words in them seek images and the images find words. Juan Manuel Bonet analyses them in this essay written for Electra, conducting an inventory and proving himself to be ‘as precise as a geometrician and as lucid as a poet’. This is how he shows us a less-known side of Paz. Bonet is one of the most prominent Spanish intellectuals: poet, essayist, art critic, curator. He has been the director of Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderna (IVAM), Reina Sofía Museum and Instituto Cervantes. He has published well-known works, including the monumental Diccionario de las vanguardias en España (1907–1936).

Photographer Viviane Sassen has prepared a set of recent, unpublished works for this edition of Electra. They simultaneously show what has made her stand out as an artist throughout her career and the current phase of her visual creations. In an essay presenting her work, the curator and writer Josseline Black says: ‘The merging of the fashion and fine art photography worlds has been achieved by few, and Sassen is at the forefront of this movement, to the delicate extent that she eschews categorisation.’ Black underscores the influence of surrealism on the artist and the photographs shown in this Portfolio. She points out, ‘One of the outstanding qualities of these photographs is that they need no description, and in this sense their worldliness is otherworldly. We return to attuning with the idea of “looking the world in the face”, making eye contact with what is before oneself. The fine and almost totemic play between photography and painting in these images is also a testament to the gentle undoing of expectation.’

Rui Manuel Amaral, a writer from Porto, describes and analyses the ‘problem’ — i.e. the problematic — of his city, based on a number of symptoms that he examines with his literarily trained eye. And what he sees are the illusory representations cultivated by its citizens, the real city and the imaginary city, the objectivised Porto and the beautiful phantasmagoria that feeds it in its narcissism.

A recent exhibition of works by Gaëtan (1944–2019) in Lisbon, prompted Gillian Sneed to write about this collection made up of serially obsessive self-portraits. They attest to all the ways that a person can look at oneself, and range from tragic realisation of the passage of time to a sad, ironic smile at this fugue-loss. Sneed is a writer and art historian who specialises in contemporary art. She has lectured at City College New York and MoMA. In her critique, she says: ‘Though critical methodologies informed by queer theory are perhaps new in Portuguese art discourse, I would like to suggest that Gaëtan’s work provides an apt opportunity to explore this mode of visual analysis.’

The recent publication of the Portuguese edition of Hölderlin’s complete poems – Todos os Poemas – translated by João Barrento is the culmination of an exceptional undertaking. Literary critic João Oliveira Duarte reviews the significance of Hölderlin’s works, which had an extensive and multilayered reception throughout the twentieth century.

The general theme chosen by the curator, architect Hashim Sarkis, for the International Architecture Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia 2021 is How will we live together? With the pandemic all around us, the event raises questions about our future living conditions in a world that is increasingly divided and unequal. The exhibition also shows how the curator’s work has turned into an instrument capable of shaking the Biennale to its core. Curator, historian and critic Julia Albani was in Venice and has sent Electra a report of what she saw and how she saw what she saw.

Bazooka is a playful word. When I was eight years old, and bought treats with the spare change my mother gave me to take to school, Bazooka was a piece of chewing gum for blowing bubbles which burst explosively. Derived from ‘bazoo’, slang for bluster, the word was created to name a wind instrument invented in America in 1910 by Bob Burns, a jazz musician and radio comedian. It spread into popular use during the Second World War as the name of an anti-tank gun used by the American army, whose tubular shape with a small bulging end was reminiscent of the instrument of the same name.