Issue 1 of Memo's first glossy annual magazine features an extended artist focus on Archie Moore, the 2024 Venice Biennale Australian Representative, with essays by Rex Butler, Tara Heffernan, Tristen Harwood, and Hilary Thurlow. Audrey Schmidt unveils a covetous history of tall-poppy takedowns in the Melbourne art world. Philip Brophy rips into Hollywood's shallow art-world playbook, while Cameron Hurst checks-in with the once-celebrated Spike magazine cultural critic, Dean Kissick, in his post-zenith era. The Manhattan Art Review's Sean Tatol visits the Dutch artist group, KIRAC, reporting on their legal woes with French literature's ageing enfant terrible, Michel Houellebecq.We also have essays and reviews on art from all around Australia and the world. Amelia Winata turns up the heat on Melbourne's public museums as Callum McGrath uncovers a typically Eurocentric failure at the heart of British art historian Claire Bishop's recent Artforum essay on research-based art. Helen Hughes writes on Helen Johnson's The Birth of an Institution (2022) and Chelsea Hopper and Shaune Lakin on Derek Jarman's Blue (1993). Stars like Isa Genzken, Royal Academy graduates like Anna Higgins, cult-favourites like Jas H. Duke---Memo features all this and more.

Memo is Australia's leading magazine of critical writing on contemporary art and culture-rigorous, provocative, and essential for those who take contemporary culture seriously. In issue 3 we present a focus on Maria Kozic, whose work has long unsettled the artworld's uneasy relationship with pop culture. Three deep-dive essays unpack the irreverent, uncompromising, and sometimes graphic logic of Kozic's art, whose work refuses easy categorisation, forcing pop into stranger, darker territory. Issue 3 also includes a special Art & Crime focus, bringing together leading critics and artists confronting how stolen wages, incarceration, and colonial violence shape Australian art. Elsewhere, Catherine Liu, one of the world's most unsparing critics of cultural gatekeeping, dismantles the moral posturing of "political" message art, and provocative philosopher Slavoj ¿i¿ek unravels Donald Trump's viral generative AI video "Trump Gaza" posted on Truth Social last month. Dale Frank's slippery persona and autistic mythos come under scrutiny, while Apple's "smooth aesthetic" design empire reveals an unexpected link to the writhing figures of the ancient sculpture Laocoön and His Sons. Wang Bing's latest film expands his brutal factory-world saga, and in fiction, Biddy Mahy follows an art history student watching his first love resurface-this time as Larry Gagosian's teenage muse. This issue also features pieces on D Harding, Mark Rothko, Madonna Staunton, Sidney Nolan, reviews from across Australia, and much more.

"A theme of institutionalism emerges in this second issue of Memo, its shadow seeming to lurk throughout the pages. Perhaps it's because the Tennant Creek Brio, this issue's artist focus, is about to cross an institutional threshold. Its artists are currently gearing up for the first major survey of the collective's work at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Maurice O'Riordan draws on the late, great conservative art critic Robert Hughes to speak of the shock waves that the Brio continue to produce even as they achieve growing recognition. Jessyca Hutchens also rides one of those waves, reflecting on the 2023 exhibition of the Brio's work Black Sky that she co-curated. But it is Tristen Harwood, in the most wide-reaching history of the collective published to date, who circles in on the Brio's breakout. He refers to an “imprisoned energy” whose unleashed force the artists stage rather than proselytise about. There is plenty more in this issue too. Kate Sutton and David Velasco, editor-in-chief of Artforum from 2017 to 2023, discuss the situation surrounding Velasco's firing by Penske Media, owner of Artforum, following publication of a collective ceasefire letter in October 2023. Vincent Lê writes on the “hipster death cult” of Wes Anderson's twee aesthetic; Declan Fry on language's amoral violence; Philip Brophy on Yoko Ono's Cut Piece; and Audrey Schmidt on the “Kool” Kim Gordon and Amelia Winata on the “uncool” hyperrealism of Edie Duffie. Elsewhere, you will find Carmen-Sibha Keiso on Alexandra Peters (a 2024 Macfarlane Commission artist) and Rex Butler on Emily Kam Kngwarray, a major exhibition of the eminent artist's work recently held at the National Gallery of Australia (and set to travel to the Tate Modern). With Gemma Topliss, Audrey Schmidt, Philip Brophy, Rex Butler, David Velasco, Carmen-Sibha Keiso, Vincent Lê, Lévi McLean, Paul Boyé, Declan Fry, and others. Featuring Yoko Ono, Emily Kam Kngwarray, Kim Gordon, Wes Anderson, Karen Kilimnik, Alexandra Peters, and many more."--publisher website.