Clare McAndrew is a leading analyst of the global art market. Here the guest editors of this special issue interview McAndrew on the structures of the art market, its sectorial and regional arrangements, and transformations in its historical, technical, and monetary operation. Their discussion highlights the rapid increase in prices for art and the global extension of the art market since the early-to-mid 2000s, as well as further changes to its operation wrought by the rise of online trading in the early 2010s.

No abstract

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.

A received criticism of information is that it is an instrumentalization of knowledge. This article questions the conditions for such a critique. Examining developmental systems theory, biology and social sciences, it argues that information is a situated event; that it is intrinsic to the development and (de)structuring of mnemic organization (meaning) at a number of levels; and that such developmental systems are epigenetically constituted. This concept of information leads to: a critique of the statistical-quantitative determination of information that is put forward as its mathematical theorization; a review of characterizations of ‘information societies’; and comprehending instrumentalization as a variant of the event of information at the specific level of the constitution of the human understood as an anthropotechnical complex.

Calcification and ossification are very rare in primary squamous cell carcinoma of the lung. We report a 55-year-old male with primary squamous cell carcinoma of the lung who on histopathological examination was seen to have extensive calcification and ossification. Squamous carcinoma of the lung rarely presents with osteocartilaginous metaplasia. The case is presented here for its unique presentation.