Category: Artists
Nationality: Russian/Mexican/American
Last Year: 16

There’s something weirdly impressive about e-flux’s apparently effortless ability to deploy its critical activity into even the most orthodox reaches of the artworld. The email information service, founded in 1999 by artist Anton Vidokle, now reaches more than 50,000 artworld readers, yet this isn’t even half the story. Aided by collaborators Julieta Aranda and Brian Kuan Wood, Vidokle’s e-flux is a continuously evolving investigation into the mechanisms, economies and ideologies of contemporary art, organising projects and events in New York, Berlin and elsewhere. This June, ‘elsewhere’ happened to be at the heart of the commercial artworld, as e-flux got itself invited to occupy a soon-to-be-demolished wing of the exhibition centre that houses Art Basel: Kopfbau offered residencies for young artists and curators, ‘in-conversations’ with artworld egghead Hans Ulrich Obrist and a rooftop bar-disco, above street-level installations of ongoing e-flux projects Time/Bank currency exchange and Pawnshop – experiments in alternative forms of economy that seemed doubly ironic when rubbing shoulders with the unreconstructed commerce of the art fair next door. But embracing such contradictions has allowed e-flux to project its ideas further than more usually constrained nonprofits; while its paid newswire service has rolled out sister versions targeting the art education sector and the commercial gallery market, e-flux’s regular journal publishes essays by the likes of Boris Groys and Diedrich Diederichsen. Maybe the secret to e-flux’s success is that its vision of radical alternatives chimes with large sections of the artworld establishment. Less a rebel uprising, then, than a government in waiting?