On the basis of two films, the teacher, who is also (or especially) a poet and renowned translator, reflects on his experience of dealing with school-age youngsters. He takes the stage in a clear-sighted relationship with the ‘restless’ characters of students going through the different stages of a sinuous ‘mental path’.
 

Stefan Kürten is a well-reputed German artist whose work has been shown in art galleries and institutions in Europe and the USA. He was professor for painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and is currently guest professor at the School of Art and Design, Alfred University, New York. In this portfolio, especially created for Electra, he develops some of the themes and motifs most represented in his work. The respected curator and critic Gregor Jansen, director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, wrote the following essay expressly to accompany this artwork. He speaks of the inspiration that Kürten’s work finds in cinema, of the strange relationship between architecture, innocence and terror – and, also, of the images, and the stories that we derive from them.

Ann Cotten is an Austrian poet and essayist, born in the United States, whose work, recognised for its originality and plurality, has been published by the prestigious German publisher Suhrkamp. Here, the writer introduces us to Steyr, a ‘statutory city’ in Upper Austria, named after one of its two rivers. In understanding the journey to get there, we begin to form a notion of what we are going to find, in a powerful association of nature with historical and cultural memory and with its industrial factory heritage. In this text, in which the impersonal precision of objective information is combined with a personal and subjective look, we are given a portrait of a land that Ann Cotten visited to meet friends who ‘are master skiers and keep a mountain hut for hiking in summer and a chalet for winter sports’.

Stupidity is of all times but each time has its own stupidity. Flaubert inspired us by defining the forms of a stupidity that is neither the eternal nor the timeless type. Instead, this stupidity appears as the symptom of an age, lending it its features — i.e. the platitudes, preconceptions, and worn-out words that form, in their rigidity and conceit, manifestations as hard as rock. In our time of artificial intelligence, the purpose here is to highlight, analyse, and question some of the figures of contemporary stupidity, which cannot be entirely identified without us turning to another word of the same semantic field: idiocy.

For some time now in Portugal, the word super has been used and abused as a form of emphasis and overstatement. Rightly or not, individuals from certain social and professional groups employ it as a suffix, noun or adjective, augmenting what is being said and, as a consequence, themselves. It can be likened to the urge to exclaim about everything: ‘It’s great!’ This optimistic desire to hyperbolise the world is an interesting symptom that is important to note. The author of this entry of the ‘Dictionary of Received Ideas’ moves on to discuss the semantics of the word super.

In this article, the sociologist João Sedas Nunes, professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Lisbon, focuses on a new category of football supporters, whom he calls ‘post-supporters’, who make use of the principles of irony and critical detachment. For this reason, they no longer fit into the old model, where passion, and even fanaticism, for a club ruled.

In classical Marxist theory, surplus value is defined as the difference between the value of the product of labour and the remuneration that is sufficient to support labour power – a difference that in capitalist regimes is appropriated by capitalist entrepreneurs.In this context, labour is considered a commodity. In actual fact, looked at more closely, labour is not a commodity in Marx’s view, but rather the use value of the unique commodity that is labour power.

‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’

The brief history of the concept of sustainable development is well known. It gained its ‘right to the city’ with the definition quoted above. It was used in the famous 1987 Brundtland Report for the United Nations about the environment and development. Sustainable development made a timid appearance in the 1980 World Conservation Strategy prepared by the IUCN, the largest and most respected biodiversity and nature conservation organisation in the world. Its roots go back much further, however, demonstrating the so-far irreconcilable tension between its two concepts: the dynamic of growth and intensification associated with ‘development’ stands in contrast to the idea of balance and durability associated with the adjective ‘sustainable’.

The US author, professor and critic Svetlana Alpers, whose ground-breaking work redefined the field of art history in the last decades, has recently been awarded the 2023 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art by the College Art Association of America. In this conversation with Electra, Svetlana Alpers reflects on a lifetime spent thinking and writing about looking, revisiting the journey that has taken her from her early studies on Tiepolo, Rembrandt, and Rubens, to her most recent interest in both photographic images and autobiographical writing.

The central theme of this issue of Electra is Taste. To open this discussion, we might say that it is difficult to recognise a value of universal truth in the Latin maxim De gustibus non est disputandum – in matters of taste there can be no disputes – from the moment (that moment being the 18th century) when the world of taste replaced the world of beauty that had prevailed since Antiquity.