The December issue of Texte zur Kunst contains my review of Johanna Burton and Ellegood’s exhibition catalogue, Take It or Leave It, which reexamines genealogies of institutional critique and appropriation art. My text is supposed to be titled “Expanding Concepts and Fields,” which admittedly isn’t terribly catchy, but has a clear connection with the content of the piece. When I received the issue, it became apparent that this had been changed into the horribly generic “Event Horizon,” – the very same title that Artforum had bestowed upon my review of Gerald Raunig’s Art and Revolution back in 2007. That text was originally titled “Retro Revolution.” Great minds think alike – and so, it would seem, do editors.

Okay, I’ve vented my spleen. The actual text is, I think, quite substantial and worth checking out, and it has benefited greatly from the Texte zur Kunst editors’ editorial care.

For the December issue of Metropolis M, the editor has asked Marina Vishmidt, Tom Vandeputte and myself to say a few words on the state of art theory in Holland (in Dutch).

The December 2014 issue of Theory, Culture & Society contains a section on Jacques Rancière edited by Nikos Papastergiadis. Nikos was involved in the organizing of the Autonomy Symposium at the Van Abbemuseum in 2011, and like 2012’s autonomy issue of Open, which I guest-edited, this TCS special is an outcome of the symposium. My essay, “Autonomy as Aesthetic Practice,” is a further development of my essay in the Open issue and related to the subsequent book chapter (“Autonomy in Action”) in History in Motion (2013). Originally I assumed that Nikos’s Rancière issue would see the light of day before my book, but the glacial pace of peer-reviewed academic publishing has decreed otherwise. The advantage of this is that it has allowed me some further tweaking. It’s fair to say that the Open issue had its share of small editorial slip-ups, due to pressing temporal constraints – though I wouldn’t have wanted to wait till 2014, quite apart from the fact that at the moment Open (now Open!) is an online platform. (The possibility of paper anthologies for certain thematic strands is however being examined.)

Meanwhile, the Art and Autonomy reader on which I’m working for Afterall is also inching forward in a snail-like manner, mostly due to the many pressures on both parties (Afterall and myself). It should see the light of day sometime in 2015.

Image: Charles Esche, Nikos Papastergiadis and Jacques Rancière at the Autonomy Symposium. Photo by Emilio Moreno.