Let us make our position clear from the start, as summarised in the two epigraphs. The first, more problematic, written in a Europe on the brink of World War I, implies that body-mind-action should tend towards a human ideal of integrity (the ‘upright gait’ also mentioned by Ernst Bloch); the other (derived from a classic of theoretical thought, written at the end of that war) proposes that art is not above (or below) an ethical conscience and that beauty should not excuse barbarity or forms of thought that legitimise it.

Paul Werner, an artist and cultural critic, has written a book entitled Museum, Inc.: Inside the Global Art World. It is a critical reflection and account of his experience at the Guggenheim in New York. He writes about art institutions at a time of radical change and about art as paradoxical merchandise.

The aftermath of the first round of voting carried much apprehension and worry; for two weeks, there was a sense that never had a victory felt so much like a defeat – as if we had been blindsided once again and knocked down by reality. I had never really believed a win would be as straightforward as the opinion polls suggested. Nevertheless, I was shocked when the results from, say, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro started to come in; even after the four-year term of a disastrous administration that seemed to be self-evidently so, Bolsonarism proved to be much stronger than we thought. Many had laboured under the illusion that we were still living, essentially, in the same country that had elected four consecutive centre-left administrations, and everything would go back to the way it was – once this unpleasant interlude was over. That illusion was now shattered once and for all.

In this issue of Electra, the ‘Subject’ section focuses on the age-old and forever renewed question of the relationship between the life of authors (writers, artists, philosophers, etc.) and their work, a problem that also arises outside of the specifically ‘authorial’ realm, implicating public figures, especially those who hold political roles and responsibilities. Their private lives have increasingly become an object of media interest, often with the complicity or active collaboration of those implicated.

Ivan Nunes, who earned a PhD with his thesis ‘Nanni Moretti as a film-maker and character’, writes about Three Floors, the Italian director’s latest film. It is an article in which the writer not only shows his profound knowledge of the work, but also expresses his own point of view: ‘It might be the first film of old Moretti — and it may well be that, of all his avatars, old Moretti might just be my favourite’.

In the diary written by the New York gallerist Ted Bonin for Electra, personal time and world time cling to each other in an endless embrace. In the days recorded, presence is a machine of absences. Here, what is found comes with what has been lost: artworks bring faces and faces bring deaths. Through these words, which sadden and cheer, travel the questions time asks art and life. Days crossed by the light and shadows of a city where nothing stops. At the end, an unpronounced name – and silence is the voice of a threat.

Written a few days before the elections in France, this text by Lionel Ruffel – essayist, researcher and professor of Literature at the University of Paris VIII – responds with emotion to the political situation of the crisis and the expectation it has engendered, in the country that gave rise to the new par excellence in the form of the Revolution.

Taking Borges’ famous short story ‘Funes, the Memorious’ as her starting point, Carla Ganito, a lecturer in the Faculty of Human Sciences at the Catholic University, Lisbon, analyses the complex dialectics between memory and forgetfulness in the digital age. She shows that the internet has brought a new but paradoxical condition that consists of making memories permanent, in taking away the right to be forgotten, at the same time as it transforms us into amnesiacs.

From leisure travel to the initiation of young nobles – under the title of the 'Grand Tour' – and today's mass tourism, the urban theorist Thierry Paquot creates and underscores a distinction on the basis of the idea that a tourist trip has nothing to do with the concept of travel and upholds that there is an urgent need to cut short the growing movement of global tourism.

From the elitist journeys in the old days to the democratised travels of mass tourism, there is a long history that has been mapped out here by a geographer who has traced the long-time phenomenon of tourism and accompanied the rise of trends and concepts that we often tend to regard as a creation of our times. Álvaro Domingues believes that the fundamental issue of tourism today is the game of global capital in urban geographies.