Under the title The Exhibition: New Practices, Old Containers, the dossier of the first issue of 2010 reflects –by means of articles by José Manuel Costa, Christiane Paul, Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes and Mónica Núñez Luis– on the demands of new art formulations and the difficulties they encounter when attempting to fit into exhibition models and museum structures which are based on traditional patterns, in a functional, as well as an ideological, sense, regardless of whether their architecture adopts innovative formulas. Additionally, Daniel G. Andújar, in an interview with Alicia Murría, analyses the landscape which has emerged thanks to technology, highlighting the responsibility of the artist in the face of these changes.

In the central pages, Juan S. Cárdenas talks with Mieke Bal about her latest book and her film work, while the art scene in Los Angeles, the guest city at ARCO 2010, is examined in an article by Micol Hebron.

In addition, the issue features articles and reviews on film, music and books; the section CiberContexto and our exhibition reviews, covering events in Spain and abroad, including those by Gabriel Orozco, Jorge Barbi, Lawrence Weiner, Jimmie Durham, Mario García Torres, León Ferrari and Mira Schendel, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and many more.

In a few years, I hope, a sociologist-critic will realise that the current transculturalisation between the Hispanic and Anglo-Saxon worlds, which will serve as a paradigm to understand the time we are living, has been most clearly and firmly expressed in the work by Beto Hernández, rather than in the places where critics have been insistently looking. Despite this, a few critics have had a look at Love & Rockets, the exceptional magazine with which the Hernández brothers made their name. However, very few have ventured beyond the comfortable territory of easy classifications, particularly with regard to the clear differences displayed by the work of each of the brothers in their early days. Those who felt closer to the visual arts preferred Jaime’s work, which was much more suited to its time, as well as being more experimental, despite its narrative absurdity. Those who approached comic books from the perspective of narrative were likely to prefer the work by Beto (Gilbert), which was clearly inspired by Latin American literary narrators, and was much more conservative in terms of its graphics.