What is the relation between the contemporary artist's desire to move on and the appetite of the market for newness? Where does this leave the project of historical reckoning that has traditionally been the task of the critic or art historian? If artists are caught in the effervescence of the now, how do they negotiate the historical legacies within which they are embedded? Is perpetual motion an antidote to history and its teleological ambitions or an impossible fantasy that is itself historically conditioned? Is such optimism a product of a buoyant and expanding art world or a symptom of its amnesia-inducing effects?

Editors: Christina Barton, Natasha Conland, Wystan Curnow.