For decades, the luxury goods industry represented one of the market’s strongholds. In 2006, Egon Zhender International estimated the global luxury goods sector a $170 billion business. Similarly Kwak and Yoffie indexed the branch with a growth rate of about 6% per year.[i] Following Luzzini and Ronchi we might even speak of demographic shifts, with …
In its latest issue, the acclaimed online journal for the arts, e-flux, looks into our crisis-ridden moment, and its relation to current affairs and contemporary aesthetics. In the aptly titled Idiot Wind: On the rise of Right-Wing Populism in the US and Europe, and What it Means for Contemporary Art, the editors gathered a series of dispatches from the frontline between politics and art – from the US and the UK to Germany and Austria and from Denmark and Holland to France and Spain. For whoever is interested (and we imagine that our regular readers certainly are) it is most definitely worth the while. So please do take your time to read the abundantly illustrated, inspired and, by times, angry reports.
A new era comes with new acronyms for new phenomena. We have already commented on the rise of the BRICs, which is an apt shorthand for Brasil, Russia, India and China, the economic powers to be (or that be). Yet there are also less flattering acronyms around. What to think of the PI(I)GS, for example. It …
