True, the name can be misleading, since our mainstay is neither painting nor modernism. (In our office, staff responses to this dilemma range from fond irony to proud historicism to feeling utterly misunderstood.) We embrace all contemporary art, regardless of medium—architecture, film, performance, and other disciplines all fall under our wide purview. For me, the key to understanding our title is that it builds on a tradition of critical thought that makes an important distinction between seeing and looking. Not unlike the distinction between listening and hearing, seeing is about perceiving, understanding, and interpreting, going deeper than the physiological act of registering what is in front of us. At Modern Painters, we strongly believe in art’s potential to expand our sense of possibility, and help us look at the world with fresh eyes.

The thoughts inspired by the conundrum of our name are apposite to a recent symposium I attended at MUDAM, the new Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg. Organized by the artist Candice Breitz, and aptly titled “Call + Response,” it started with notions of appropriation in art—sampling, piracy, remixing, recycling— and slid into notions of copyright, homage, creativity, and, of course, originality. Cultural producers from around the world engaged in a free-form conversation about reinterpreting creative work in a figurative dialogue (or call and response) with the past. More than that, it suggested ways of making sense of our surroundings through art, and to put art into a wider context. Breitz’s assembly of creative thinkers and makers might well enjoy the tagteam efforts of Bucky Fuller and Norman Foster, who appear in “Blueprint for the 21st Century.” While considering how to cover Fuller’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, we were reminded of the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Norman Foster’s work, both in form and aspirations. Fuller and Foster were close friends after meeting in 197 1, and collaborated on a series of unrealized projects. We were therefore very pleased when Foster accepted our invitation to remember his mentor in the pages of our magazine. Fuller’s revolutionary ideas on sustainability and energy efficiency, analytic geometry and “tensegrity” (or tensional integrity), had a great impact on Foster, as revealed in his building projects—Masdar in Abu Dhabi, the Reichstag in Berlin, and the Swiss Re building (the “Gherkin”) in London, among others. In addition to opening a window on Fuller’s philosophies, Foster’s remembrance gave us new insight into his own practice.

The dynamic exchange that can take place between a seasoned veteran and a younger practitioner is in evidence in another feature this month. We paired William Kentridge, perhaps best known for his animations with strong political and social themes that often comment on the situation in his native South Africa, with Robin Rhode, a younger compatriot engaged in street art, performance, and painting, who now lives in Berlin. Their conversation ranges from creating staged productions—both are currently working on projects for Lincoln Center— to connecting Russian Constructivism with political strife in South Africa, to trusting the decision to make a mark or a shape as their way of seeing. As it happens, South Africa is an important thread throughout the issue (Breitz hails from the Rainbow Nation as well). The work of another South African (albeit one who has resided in Amsterdam for 30 years), Marlene Dumas, graces our cover this month. An artist who cannot be pigeonholed, Dumas makes us look at malevolent figures like Theo van Gogh’s killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, and Osama bin Laden as human beings made of flesh and blood, and at pop culture icons as utterly mortal, even by showing the corpse of Marilyn Monroe.

Naturally, every artist deals with perception in one way or another, but the artist covered this month who has most overtly struggled with ways of seeing is Neil Harbisson. He is achromatopsic— that is, severely color-blind. With the aid of a custom-made device called the eyeborg, he is able to “hear” colors, and assign them to people, objects, and even cities. A musician as well as an artist, Harbisson has his own unique form of call and response, listening as well as seeing. An integrated approach to unifying the senses is a fitting model for our own ever-evolving attempts to see.