July Highlights

[Mousse]

Hello, read about Thomas Ruff, Arthur Jafa, Mike Kelley, Louis Fratino and Lovett/Codagnone!

Explore this month’s selection of articles and new books, highlighting the finest content published during July. Highlights: Don’t miss the extended deadline for the second edition of the Writing Workshop in collaboration with Phenomenon. Open to Athens-based art writers under 40, the free two-day workshop will take place in Athens on October 2–3, 2026, led by Barbara Casavecchia, Chief Editor at Mousse, and Danai Giannoglou, co-founder and curator at Enterprise Projects. Apply here until August 8! What’s a birthday without a tarot reading? To celebrate Mousse turning 20, we asked writer Carlo Antonelli to interpret five of our covers as cards, across three decks. The result is a little summer treat. Follow the clues, enjoy the Tarot (Cover) Reading. On the occasion of Mousse #96 ~ 2006–2026: A Visual Record, the magazine’s special twentieth-anniversary issue, a selection of texts from the archive is revisited online. Read below the ones released over the past month.   THOMAS RUFF by Simone Menegoi In Mousse 1 (May 2006), Simone Menegoi portayed Thomas Ruff as a philosopher of the technological image through a journey across the artist’s best-known bodies of work—from his portraits of the 1980s to his then-recent series of “jpegs,” internet-sourced images treated as readymades whose enlargement reveals the characteristic “checkerboard” pattern of digital compression. Ill Suns: Arthur Jafa and Sondra Perry in Conversation with Dean Daderko For Mousse 57 (February–March 2017), Arthur Jafa and Sondra Perry sat down with Dean Daderko for a conversation on Blackness, image-making, and the social, political, and material conditions that inform their practices. Letter from a Trans Man to the Old Sexual Order by Paul B. Preciado In “Letter from a Trans Man to the Old Sexual Order,” originally published in T* (2019), Paul B. Preciado addresses the politics of gender, violence, and desire from the shifting position of a body that has crossed the border between “men” and “women.” Against the aesthetics of domination that structure the old sex-gender order, the text proposes queer and trans culture as a space where consent, dissidence, and the redistribution of power can reinvent the ways bodies desire. Ten Foundamental Questions of Curating: How about Pleasure? by Dieter Roelstraete In “How about Pleasure?,” Dieter Roelstraete’s  contribution to Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating (2013), the author asks what place pleasure, humor, and bodily enjoyment might still have within serious curatorial practice. Moving from the exhibition Academy to the anarchic work of Gelitin, the text challenges the tendency of contemporary art discourse to privilege rigor over pleasure, and asks whether entertainment can become a critical force rather than a form of escapism. Fear of Poetry by Sabrina Tarasoff In Mousse 64 (Summer 2018), Sabrina Tarasoff looked back at Beyond Baroque’s Wednesday Night Poetry readings, then programmed by writer David Cooper, who conjured up a coven of unlikely poet laureates, thrill seekers, punks, and S&M performers—including Amy Gerstler, David Trinidad, Bob Flanagan, Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, and the Yonemoto brothers—all sharing the will to take poetry to weird places and explore its anarchic spirit. NEW TITLES Angela Brandys: Outta Love €30.00 View Book Ndayé Kouagou: REAL THINGS STARTS OUTSIDE €27.00 View Book Mousse 96 ~ 2006–2026: A Visual Record €18.00 View Mousse #96 Anna Loch. Painting: So What? / Malerei: Na Und? €35.00 View Book Murat Adash: Camouflage Consciousness €27.00 View Book Andy Warhol, “Raid the Icebox I, with Andy Warhol”, 1969 by Anthony Huberman Anthony Huberman revisits the exhibition that saw Warhol invited to curate from the RISD Museum’s storage. Moving through the collection with the detached enthusiasm of a shopper, Andy Warhol chose shoes, umbrellas, damaged works, spare parts, and objects left out of the museum’s official narrative, often asking for them to be brought upstairs “just like that.” With his deadpan attitude and taste for leftovers, he turned selection into an act of disruption. The text reflects on how Raid the Icebox challenged curatorial authority, exposed the contingency of value, and expanded what an exhibition could be. Louis Fratino: Arcibellezza. Another “Lesson in Aesthetics” by Giorgio di Domenico Starting from Sandro Penna’s poetry and its refusal to define beauty abstractly, the text considers Louis Fratino’s painting as an accumulation of concrete, intimate, and bodily examples of beauty: dancers, lovers, crowded rooms, showers, glances, desire, memory. Giorgio Di Domenico connects Fratino to an unexpected Italian lineage, from Guttuso and de Pisis to Visconti and Penna, showing how the artist builds a personal canon outside strict hierarchies. Beauty, here, is not a universal ideal but something fragmentary, embodied, remembered, shared, and disarmingly present. The text has been commissioned by Centro Pecci for the exhibition catalogue Louis Fratino. Satura. Mike Kelley by Emi Fontana Emi Fontana’s visit to Mike Kelley’s Los Angeles home, originally published in Mousse 21 (November–December 2009), traces an intimate portrait of the artist through architecture, objects, and landscapes. The Appropriation Debates by Candice Hopkins In an essay first published in Mousse 55 (October–November 2017), Candice Hopkins expands on the debates surrounding Dana Schutz’s Open Casket and Sam Durant’s  Scaffold, asking who can speak for whom—and whose histories can be represented. Lovett/Codagnone: There Is No Revolution without Libidinal Investment. Emi Fontana, Andrew Suggs, and Julie Tolentino in conversation John Lovett and Alessandro Codagnone’s collaborative practice investigated power structures through histories of subversive sexuality and radical political dissent, working to chronicle subcultures and resist their erasure and commodification. In Mousse 91, Emi Fontana, Julie Tolentino, and Andrew Suggs come together to remember the artists, reflecting on the friendships, communities, and forms of resistance that shaped their work. Subscribe now to receive an entire year of Mousse in print and access to our fully browsable digital archive. Looking for an institutional subscription? Enquire here to provide students and visitors with access to more than eighty issues to date.   Instagram  Facebook  Twitter  LinkedIn Mousse Magazine and Publishing via Decembrio 28, 20137 Milan Contact us here You have received this e-mail because you have successfully subscribed to Mousse Magazine and Publishing newsletter. You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this distribution list at any time.  Was this e-mail forwarded to you? Sign up here.