For this roundtable we invited several respondents to reflect upon both the history and the present of artistic realism. We ask how its various revivals might be regarded as part of a long trajectory of “Western” art and aesthetics, and how such revivals might be triggered by discourses outside of contemporary art. If a new aesthetics of realism were possible today, how would it differ from its multiple historical antecedents? Is realism in its various modes an obsolete artistic form or style of the past (like baroque painting or modernist collage) that is as such incompatible with the modes of production and the augmented social reality of late capitalism? We are very grateful to Dave Beech, Christoph Cox, Sami Khatib, John Roberts and Marina Vishmidt for accepting to participate in this roundtable held over electronic mail.

This introduction and selection of Questions and Answers are from a conference organized in 2014 at the American University of Beirut Art Galleries titled Critical Machines: Art Periodicals Today. The conference summoned editors of art periodicals from different countries in order to discuss the role of art magazines, journals, platforms, and newspapers. While the introduction provides a general report on the conference, discussing the principles according to which the panels were organized or describing and comparing the missions of some periodicals, the selection of questions from the audience and answers from editors that follow aim to convey different editorial strategies, political disputes, funding models, and relations to readership that one can encounter today in the field of art periodicals.

The Introduction to the Special Issue entitled Art Periodicals, Historically Considered sketches an outline of the advent of periodicals in the context of the Enlightenment demand for the public use of reason, and situates the emergence of art periodicals in the context of the advent of autonomous art since the 19th century. The article introduces the contributions to the Special Issue and opens up a way to reposition the question of critique in today's art publishing.

This stenogram was recorded at an artists' meeting that took place in 1951 in Kishinev (as the capital of today's Republic of Moldova was called in those days). The discussion among the members of the local Union of Artists—a new type of art organization that was implemented in Moldova after the advance of the Red Army westwards—revolves around the organization of their annual art exhibition of 1951. The text discloses some of the major issues and challenges faced by the members of this artist organization during the late Stalinist era.

In this text, which takes the form of a conversation and is preceded by a short introduction, the ARTMargins collective seeks to draw the readers' attention to a global artistic community known as Stuckism. The contribution highlights some of the most conspicuous issues raised by the Stuckists. For more than a decade Stuckism has critiqued the mainstream contemporary art world, accusing it of being at the mercy of global speculative capital; Stuckism also questions the mainstream aesthetics of conceptualism and its insistence upon de-materialized artistic practices. Instead Stuckism calls for respect for traditional or fine arts media, providing in the meantime an example of forging global cooperation among artists from various countries, without or even in spite of a lack of corporate support.

This article contributes to a recent debate around the question “What Is Contemporary Art?” It brings into discussion certain key aspects of the activities of the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA)—a network of contemporary art centers established by the Open Society Institute in Eastern Europe during the 1990s. The author draws upon distinctions between this new type of art institution and the Union of Artists (the organizations which represented the interests of artists under socialism), highlighting distinct artistic, aesthetic and economic characteristics of each institutional model.