ISSUE #11 Is OuT!

It’s no mystery that the whole of society today is in search of an author. You just need to go on any of the social media to see all the fretting that’s around us. Everyone is trying to carve out for themselves moments, hours, or media eternity even with the basest of means. Fame is an ugly beast. It can come and go without any explanation. But once it used to arrive, over the globe, without the need for thousands and thousands of “likes”.

The group Queen, as the film narrates so well, became universally famous in the 1970s, despite resistance from the big record labels, by having their music played on the radio: the whole of history, whether recent or more ancient, is full of examples. Leonardo was a celebrity in his own times, as were many other artists, writers, poets, and superstar actors from all eras. What we lack nowadays is a critical vision to help us break out of a self-referential model of culture. There is no further need to write or add anything to the account that Bruce LaBruce, the brilliant artist, filmmaker and intellectual who was the father of the queer core movement, gives us in this issue: go to page 32 and you will find such a lucid analysis of the ex camp avant-garde and of the system revolving around fashion and contemporary cultural production that it leaves you completely stunned.

So you can enter another dimension while remaining yourself: Burberry is reborn with Riccardo Tisci, opening up to a reinterpretation of the elements of English tradition that make every item in the collection unique. The important thing is to find one’s own identity.

Dusan, Chelsea, Cheyenne, Timo, Nico, Eloiza and Lea are just some of the young personalities who are seeking their own dimension through fashion. Vic and Margo choose to wear preciuos atelier outfits and to show that couture is an enjoyable way to distinguish yourself. The Haute musical duo, Anne and Romain, express their sought-after personality over the strains of a sexy-punk style. And Kate is the interpreter of a contemporary yet nostalgic beauty in New York atmospheres.

If clothing can create icons, public places can also become iconic, places where people can recognise and identify themselves in a pleasant way, free from conventions, as in Ben Thomas’ unusual images. But while lots of people, young and old, aspire to celebrity, some achieve it through becoming symbols because of their own uniqueness. In passing on her family DNA to yet another generation, Angela Missoni reasserts the peculiarity of the style created by her parents. Her passions are not dictated by conforming to popular taste: she lays claims to her own choices, including some audacious ones, when it comes to building a collection of objects by famous artists alongside others whose value is only affective. Richard Prince’s erotic nurses? Some images speak for themselves. Letizia Battaglia is a female photographer who has devoted her life to the service of truth and documentation, turning them into works of art. She did not flee from devastating scenes, obscene demonstrations of a brazen criminal underworld, but elevated them to timeless icons, breathtaking in their ethic-aesthetic beauty. Thomas Hirschhorn, on the other hand, exposes the use of pixelation as a political tool for masking reality by leaving visible all the horrors that we cannot bear to look at directly, and that are therefore normally erased by a preventive censorship.

Ours is a moralistic view, but one that feeds off an attraction for what is improper, unacceptable but true, and therefore to be beautified or softened with an abstraction that does not overly involve the spectator; who is not then made to feel guilty. The aesthetic search that creates false icons in a society that nowadays puts everything on display, would no longer be tolerable. The falsehood is often elevated to the level of undisputed truth, because it is distorted by a debate that is falsely democratic in that it is free to attack. Everything is valid, and so is the opposite of everything. And what about antibodies? They can only be created by a new critical ability. By a new authenticity; by real people.