#329 February–March 2020

This issue of Flash Art explores a sort of archeology of images. We aim to reflect on issues of appropriation and authenticity in their most contemporaneous sense, whereby any original or preexisting artwork, image, or product can be invested with a multiplicity of meanings. For this issue Maurizio Cattelan has conceived a special cover project for our theme, here in conversation with the genre-bending artist and designer Virgil Abloh. From artists of the Pictures Generation, as Sherrie Levine, to the manifold messages in Barbara Kruger's images; from the "affective proximity" in Arthur Jafa to the complexities of the human brain in Jordan Wolfson; from the Alice Channer's repudiation of authorship to Olivia Erlanger's embrace of the image as a free-floating signifier, each uses appropriation as a means of grappling with our relentlessly refractive present.