Demetra Vogiatzaki In October 2024, the Musée Carnavalet in Paris opened Paris 1793–1794: Une année révolutionnaire, an exhibition tracing how the city was transformed during Year II of the French Republic.[1] Among the objects on display was a limestone head, severed at the neck, that once formed part of a…
Ushma Thakrar Shortly after being elected to office in a landslide victory in 2014, Narendra Modi, India’s then and current prime minister, appeared on Dashashwamedh Ghat on the banks of the Ganges River in Varanasi, from where he took part in a prayer for the Hindu river deity, Ganga. In…
Laura Golobish Urine spills onto the floor. A grimacing man stares out at you while seated with legs inserted into the vent holes of a public latrine (Fig. 1). Charles Mosley etched and published the visceral Sawney in the Bog-house on June 17, 1745, in a London workshop amid news of…
This conversation took place between the editors of this special issue of Journal18: Maarten Delbeke, Noémie Étienne, and Nikos Magouliotis. Nikos Magouliotis (NM): How did “cleaning” become a topic or angle for your research? Noémie Étienne (NE): While writing my first book on the history of conservation in France more…
Marie Antoinette may be a person—and name—known by many, but she is also one laden with a series of inherent paradoxes. Expected to support domestic luxury industries and dress in a manner befitting a French queen, she was nonetheless pilloried for her spending. And while her life was populated with…
On June 6, 2025, Resplendent Dreams: Reawakening the Rococo opened at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) in Indianapolis. The exhibition brings together three artists—Robert Horvath, Diego Montoya, and Anthony Sonnenberg—whose work responds to and reinvents the rococo. Their creations engage with queerness, visibility, and critique, engagements that are expansive…