The decay of modernity, melancholy objects and shared cultural moments

Las Vegas and Berlin; bird-watching and urban development; mobbing and elbow room

While the gritty glamour of Marepe’s work valorizes the ingenuity of the inhabitants of north-eastern Brazil, its meaning is further complicated when it travels

An interview with Martha Rosler about politics, feminism, the art world, media, religion and integrity

Artist meets con artist; travel and tourism; matches lit at both ends

Born in Munich in 1965, Konstantin Grcic trained as a cabinet-maker and then studied design at Royal College of Art in London. After graduating he worked in Jasper Morrison’s studio before opening his own practice, Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design (KGID), in Munich in 1991. He has designed products for companies including Authentics, ClassiCon, Flos, Iittala, Magis, Muji and Plank. KGID, a monograph on his work, is published by Phaidon

Truth to materials; the mundane and the amazing

Including the work of 53 artists and artist-groups and held in spaces as varied as a vacant office building, a former tobacco warehouse and a run-down apartment block, the low-key and locally engaged 9th Istanbul Biennial, curated by Charles Esche and Vasif Kortun, was simply titled ‘Istanbul’

Catherine Sullivan’s work skips between historical periods and locations, connecting Baroque ideas of ‘all the world as a stage’ with an individual’s subjectivity

Various venues, Coniston

Sharon Lockhart makes rigorously formal films that complicate the boundaries between fact and fiction

Google’s recent foray into satellite maps highlights the subjectivity of cartography

Is the recent trend of seminal bands playing their ‘signature’ albums a cynical marketing ploy or a stab in the eye of iPod culture?

Is the new art history a one-party state?

Is the new art history a one-party state?

A new project by e-flux highlights an extraordinary archive of photographs amassed by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros

The best graphic design must be more than decorative – it has to make sense of its subject

Stuart Morgan once wrote ‘artists are not in competition with each other but with themselves and the past.’ That said, can art prizes be useful? And if so, how?

Stephen Shore is Director of the Photography Programme at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Stephen Shore: American Surfaces, in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name currently on view at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, is published by Phaidon Press. He lives in New York.

Miranda July is a video and performance artist turned commercially successful filmmaker. What’s the difference?