I am particularly excited about the fifth issue of 21st because I so deeply believe in this work and in the photographers and writers included, and because I am able to keep promises to several artists I have wanted to publish for quite a long time now. I have tried to make the selection as catholic as possible in its varieties of strangeness. Sometimes the strangness is primarily about the content; sometimes it is primarily about a particular photographer�s new and unusual content. There are, of course, a good many strange geniuses and a lot of wonderful strange work left out, but at least this brings a powerful mixture of strange but deeply artistic work to a larger audience. No doubt some will comment that much of this work is quite lyrical and sensual and wonder where the strangeness is. Too often we think that for something to have an edge, it has to have a jagged edge. However, few things are more edgy and shocking in contemporary art than beauty � witness the furor it can set off within the establishment.

In an essay in this issue I write that in earlier ages artists were more concerned with making art than with making �statements� or with being seen as relevant within the confines and definitions of their own tiny moment in history. When a segment of a society, a group of artists, or a body of intellectuals turn their backs on joie de vivre or decide that beauty needs any justification but itself, it is a certain sign that they are taking themselves quite importantly, and no kind of importance is more quickly forgotten in the slip and slide of history than self-importance.

The value of joy and beauty to the fullness and completeness of life � and of art � is so obvious that today�s cultural nihilists have cleverly shifted their arguments away from traditional appeals to sternness and seriousness, solidity of moral purpose and other such prescriptive formulas for the truth to one equally specious and dictatorial but with a showy intellectual and egalitarian veneer. In our time it is simply more effective to attack the very foundations of language and culture than to insist on particular behaviors. And so they argue that words like beauty, art, nature, and good and bad as aesthetic judgments are merely linguistic constructions with no objective reality, that these terms do not describe cultural universals and are no more than subjective descriptions. They argue that beauty has no meaning apart from the culture that produced a certain object and used the word beauty to describe it, that beauty is not a universally recognizable entity.

Theirs is a position of intellectual provincialism and suggests we are completely culture bound � or more precisely, temporally, societally, and linguistically bound to our own moment. The end result of such cultural, aesthetic, and linguistic reduction is solipsism � or catatonia. But art is the very thing that has always allowed us to leap centuries, languages, and cultures; it is a font at which we can all drink and mutually feel the same intoxication. If it weren�t the case why would the whole world, not just a single cultural segment, appreciate the beauties of, for example, Shakespeare, Li Bo, and the poetry of the Bushmen; Rimpa paintings, cave paintings, and Watteau; Shang or Benin or Rodin bronzes; the sounds of harps, gamelans, kotos, and sitars; Bergman, Kurosawa, and Satyajit Ray; and on and on?

Statement, edge, and all the other clich�s of contemporary criticism pale in the presence of art, which is always an expression of �strange genius.�

John Wood