Taking a Stance
Summary
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Taking a Stance
Fall 2015
Few critics have yet dared to challenge the intellectual power assumed by certain institutions and forums that shape artistic trends and condition the discourses. esse opens the debate on the forms and conditions at play when taking a critical stance in the world of contemporary art today. What does art criticism imply in today’s context?
Editorial
Feature
Kunstgriff: Art as Event, Not Commodity
Fashionably Late
Critical Distances
Resemblance, Doubt, and Ruin
When Images Take a Position: Didi-Huberman’s Brechtian Intervention
Critical Art, Critical Sense, and Receptivity
Reel-Unreel, by Francis Alÿs
Indigenous Voices and White Pedagogy
Self-Determination When Cash Rules Everything Around Us
Portfolios
Off-Features
Columns
Reviews
Young Critics
Current Issue
Immersion
Winter 2026
This issue is interested in all forms of immersion in contemporary art. How are artists critically engaging with immersive technologies? Conversely, what kinds of practices are challenging technology in their pursuit of immersion? How are these experiences breaking down the boundaries between spectator, body, and art? We put forward proposals that rely on listening and sustained attention rather than on amplification and sensory overload – works using devices that are sometimes relatively simple and non-invasive, sometimes a little more elaborate, but in which participation is, with a few nuances, neither passive nor devoid of critical thinking.
Cover: doux soft club
bleu de lieu, 2023-2024.
Photo: Cléo Sjölander, courtesy of the artists