Editorial

Entering its second year, MAP continues to plot the visual arts over Scotland and its international cultural landscape. Traditionally, a new year looks ahead. So, Christine Borland, an artist linked to science, brings her latest explorations to the city at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh this coming winter. Richard Demarco, crusading as ever, battles to keep his latest venture, a gallery beside the sea and a nuclear power station, afloat. Glasgow’s attractions continue to inspire an increasing number of resident artist, musicians and artist-run galleries, producing talents like Simon Starling, represented by the Modern Institute, which celebrates its second Turner Prize winner in a row. Looking ahead to future issues, Douglas Gordon, who emerged onto the international art scene in the 1990s, returns from New York just over a decade later, triumphant, to exhibit this autumn with the National Galleries of Scotland.

As movement and international opportunities increase, so the job of curator becomes more powerful, defined alongside the artist, morphing the dictionary meaning of the word as ‘official in charge of museum, library etc’, to become an integral part of the contemporary artist’s life and work. Curator and artist are now often celebrated together. But while the temporal bodies of the art world entertain and manoevre, the effect ofthe art itself as a force of the imagination and change continues, creating work with a potential to inform the future and live on in it. It is that perennial potential at the beginning of this new year which is cause for our celebration.