This interview with Alfonso Berardinelli, the most important Italian literary and cultural critic, who has been active for more than half a century, is not only an approach to the critical-theoretical ideas of this ‘invisible writer’, but also a cultural diagnosis of our time.

António Cabrita, a Portuguese writer who has been living in Maputo for almost two decades, casts a critical, sophisticated eye over the city. It is the lucid account of a lover who is quite aware of the merits and flaws of his beloved, and her evolution.

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.

In this article, António Guerreiro covers the history of Kitsch and that ‘fatal attraction of intelligence to stupidity’ which leads politics to totalitarianism and reduces artistic values to evil, transferring aesthetics to the domain of ethics. Through the mass media, it has assumed an absolute preponderance over daily life by turning the market into a form of existence and giving entertainment a banal hegemony.

Taste, as an object for reflection in the aesthetic theory of the 18th century, the century of taste, particularly by encyclopaedists, requires an incursion into the questions of beauty and goodness. Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, professor at the University of Milan and author of an extensive bibliography in the area of Aesthetics, does just this.

The television genre which goes by the name of reality TV is a manifestation of the entertainment industry strongly marked by social and cultural codes of taste. Rodrigo Pereira, a researcher at NOVA University of Lisbon, writes about this type of show.

The French philosopher and sociologist Geoffroy de Lagasnerie explores in this article why the object of his intellectual investment was never literature, but theory. This personal taste of his has provided him with a reason to analyse the attraction of theory, both in terms of knowledge and of libido.

The fashion industry today is a complex, governed by the laws of vulgarity, futility, waste and acceleration typical of fast fashion: this is how Rosie Findlay, professor at the University of Kent and author of research works in this area, describes the effects of an industry that commands: ‘Don't think, buy’.

Curatorship as an extensive project, both in the type of ‘events’ that it performs and in its intervention strategies, opens art up to fictions and potential times, against the obsession with the present in which the contemporary world is immersed. This is what moves Aliocha Imhoff and Kantuta Quirós, whose work inhabits the intersection of art with theory and research.

The cultural policies of democratic governments adhere to the principle that they cannot dictate taste, as they once did under totalitarian regimes, and therefore they must be protected by a series of interventions and bureaucratic protocols. This complex issue, the source of constant criticism, controversy and protest, is examined by writer and performance artist Patrícia Portela.