The matrix of contemporary art, its «primitive scene» — Marcel Duchamp’s urinal — was the object of exclusion (from an exhibition) that allows reference to be made to one of the manifestations of stupidity: «stupefaction». The bewilderment many works of art have since been able to arouse in viewers makes the evocation of stupidity pertinent, and even necessary, both in critical reception and in the confrontation of the public with contemporary art.

As director of the Nieman Lab at the University of Harvard, Joshua Benton is uniquely placed to observe the contemporary press and the problems it faces in an age of innovation and expanding online platforms. The following interview with the journalist Cristina Margato shows that these problems carry significant political implications, as the election of Trump made clear, and they present democratic societies with a challenge.

There is a history of kissing in public places in the city that can be documented by iconography. It is this history and the different attitudes and reactions to the urban kiss, depending on geography and cultures, that the Catalan poet and essayist José Ángel Cilleruelo pursues in the article, which is also an evocation of the ethics and aesthetics of flânerie.

The life of writers, artists, philosophers and figures who perform public roles, or have become well-known for whatever reason, is not just the subject of erudite biographies. In our time, when the media reign supreme, the personalisation of every aspect of social, cultural and political life is everywhere. The relationship between life and work has become, in certain cases, an area that gives rise to scandals and controversies. This condition causes the work and actions of writers, artists, politicians and other public figures to be assessed through the filter of private morality. There is no dearth of recent cases that confirm this and we know the devastating effects that this can sometimes have. We need to understand that the factors that structure the public space today have generated a tendency towards the non-differentiation between the public and private, two spheres that had been separated by clear-cut borders since the Enlightenment. In the political realm, the exhibition of private life, personal gestures, idiosyncrasies and habits has become common, and sometimes obligatory, so as to satisfy tacit requirements. The people phenomenon, which used to be a territory circumscribed to gossip magazines, has expanded. And it has become commonplace to draw lines of overlap and conflict between life and work.

Based on an essentially anecdotal episode that occurred in the world of pop music and reality show celebrities, the philosopher Laurent de Sutter defines the key attributes of fame, looking back to the Roman world, the idea of ‘reputation’, and to the Middle Ages to establish the roots of the contemporary sense of the word ‘famous’.

Laurent de Sutter is professor of legal theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and managing editor of the series Perspectives Critiques (PUF – Presses universitaires de France). Here he develops a hypothesis that, under certain conditions, accepts accelerationism – i.e. the perspective that advocates reformulating and not sabotaging or damping down the means and the infrastructure that we have inherited from modernity.

Curiosity is one of the key words of modernity, as it is through curiosity that man has come to science. In 1973, the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg wrote about ‘the process of theoretical curiosity’. This came after a long, drawn-out chapter in a second, extended edition of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Die Legitimität der Neuzeit), which described and analysed this process and showed how curiosity had been removed from the medieval catalogue of vices and was now on the honour roll of virtues.

Georg Franck, the author of a pioneering book that has become a fundamental reference for reflections on the economy of attention, develops, in this article, his theses on the theoretical bases of this concept and on the specificity of the economic regime that characterises the economy of attention under the condition of the mass media.

The problem is not just that the book is over thirty years old and there is not a single Portuguese translation available. This case is not unique, but it is harder to understand that even in such an intellectually dynamic country as Brazil, the book is not for sale in some niche publisher or university press. As I was saying, the problem is that this thesis, published by the economist Edward S. Herman and the linguist Noam Chomsky in 1988, that the media depends on a political economy that strives to manufacture consent, is the last great critical contribution to a topic where criticism runs rampant.

Havana is celebrating the quincentenary of its foundation. For many, the city represents easy enjoyment, a flight from time, a mirage in the sea, music that never ends. The Cuban writer and journalist Carlos Manuel Álvarez, a regular contributor to newspapers such as The New York Times and El Pais lives outside Cuba. For him, when he went back to his city to enjoy himself, Havana had returned to being ‘a city full of untethered sadnesses’. He says, in addition, ‘The day in Cuba is still communist, but the night is ever more neoliberal. ’The evocation of Havana that he creates here is pervaded by an exuberant and melancholy memory and permeated by a wind that disperses the waves breaking against the Malecón seawall.