Wolfgang Tillmans, one of the most important artists in the global panorama of contemporary art, and nominated by TIME magazine this year as one of the one hundred most influential people in the world, has presented Electra with a series of previously unpublished photographs taken in the last years. The accompanying essay, authored by Afonso Dias Ramos, explores and situates these pictures within the context of a highly-acclaimed work of over four decades.

Critic and historian Hal Foster, one of the most influential and prolific authors on modern and contemporary art, design, architecture, and postmodernism, talks to Electra about the status and function of critical theory in the current political juncture. He revisits the journey which has taken him from the radicalism of the New York intellectual milieu during the 1970s, to the preparation of an upcoming book around the popular idea of a ‘banal aesthetics’.

Raphaëlle Bacqué is a reknowned reporter for Le Monde newspaper and author of several books, including the acclaimed biography of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld Kaiser Karl. Drawing on a provocative quote from the great Chanel stylist, Bacqué offers us a fascinating portrait of the man who revealed so much in order to better hide himself.

In this interview, the architect Eduardo Souto de Moura looks back at his achievements, and at the key times and places in his career. He also reflects on the state of the profession and the conditions and contingencies architects experience, their social responsibility and the moral and aesthetic harm they can do, leaving their mark very visibly on the country.

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.

Taking as her starting point cases that have caused some scandal, in this article sociologist Gisèle Sapiro raises the question, which is also the title of her book, Peut-on dissocier l'oeuvre de l'auteur? [Can we separate the work from the author?] and advances in the possible answers (which vary according to the cases) to another complex question: what to do with the work when its author's personal conduct is objectionable?

The writer, psychoanalyst and curator Sinziana Ravini in this article describes and analyses an artistic attitude that found its perfect manifestation in the dandyism of the second half of the 19th century and then in the historical avant-gardes of the early 20th century. This attitude consisted in aestheticising life and making it a work of art, as did Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde to the highest degree.

Essayist and professor of Mass Communication Semiotics at the University of Alicante, Raúl Rodríguez-Ferrándiz analyses in this text how the privative character of privacy has become social in our time, through media such as Facebook. He shows how converting the intimate and the private into public communication has extended to the political universe.

The protection of politicians’ private lives, by means of an insurmountable ‘wall’, has a long history, full of polemic and debate, especially in France, where the illusion of a ‘model’ was created, but later broken by the phenomenon of peopolisation, i.e. media coverage in the manner of people magazine. It is about this long history, passing through some important episodes, that the historian Christian Delporte writes.

Éric Marty, the editor of the complete works of Roland Barthes, traces in this essay the history, effect and declinations of that famous text entitled The Death of the Author. He shows how this was inscribed in an ideological puritanism of the time and a theoretical position in favour of the maximum autonomy of the work, thus demanding the invisibility of the author's image. It was Roland Barthes himself who, in a sophisticated way, dismantled this dogma.