Editorial

Janus is back and again on the lookout for people of all disciplines and undisciplined activities that have a thirst for understanding the mystery of being here and now. Whatever one might believe is the reason for making a magazine, a book or an art work, Janus will keep an eye on this hic et nunc as well as on the ubiquity of today’s culture.

This leads quite directly to the second goal of Janus: to be a magazine that you can read anywhere and anytime. The variety of contents of this publication aims at allowing the reader to find the text that corresponds to his interest of the moment. There are three new sections conceived in order to help orienting oneself.

There will always be a theme for Janus, but we have decided to add a place, more precisely a city, in which the god can engage his ubiquitous powers in search of cultural initiatives worth discovering. In order to satisfy Janus’ passion for contemporary art, from now on the publication will invite five curators or art critics to use in the freest way possible a space of approximately ten pages to introduce an artist with whom they have recently worked or are working.

As it is well known that Janus is a double-fronted god, one face will speak English, while the other will fluently deliver the authors’ original language, if it is not English. Janus has also decided to take its time in a world where the general acceleration seems to push culture to a race, (maybe that is not so bad after all, see the interview with team manager of Ferrari, Jean Todt), so we will stick to a semestral publication for a while.

We would have a couple of more things to say but, as less is more, and as there are more than 200 pages awaiting you, just allow us to mention our gratitude to Jan Fabre, who quite audaciously decided to challenge us with the continuation of the Janus project.

There is a beautiful dialogue of Plato called the Parmenides, in which he proposes his interlocutors to commit a parricide and go beyond the great thinker of Unity, Parmenides. If we can dare do the same, then it is time for us to go beyond multiplicity and, as Aristotle put it speaking of Plato: “Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas” . (Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.”