Elephant Magazine Issue 36 (Autumn, 2018) All or Nothing The New Luxury Maisie Cousins Cover
Elephant Magazine Issue 36 (Autumn, 2018) All or Nothing The New Luxury Established in late 2009, Elephant is a quarterly magazine on contemporary art and visual culture. Edited by Marc Valli, Elephant features up-to-the-minute visual material, fresh faces and original voices, covering and uncovering new trends and talent in contemporary visual culture. In this issue: The concept of luxury is ever changing-from era to era, and from person to person. For some, luxury exists in material form, as something to desire and long for, while for others it is more intangible, the attainment of time, space, peace and quiet. In issue 36 we speak with seven young artists and designers who play with opulent, excessive aesthetics as a way to question the world around them. Our cover artist, Maisie Cousins, discusses ideas around luxury and food, exploring consumption and gastronomy through the lens of desire, class and community. In our Encounters section we meet German painter Katharina Grosse and Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, and visit John Loker and Emily Mayer, the British artist couple who live and work in an intriguingly independent studio set-up. We also feature the paintings of Cristina BanBan and Jules de Balincourt in our two Paper Galleries, and catch up with the New Establishment, featuring interviews with rising stars Zach Blas and Summer Wheat. In Journal, Hettie Judah discusses the notion of fully automated luxury communism, and Alice Bucknell explores the latest trend for luxury art spaces (on heat)-with shopping malls, galleries and concept stores all rolled into one.