In the preface to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley explained that she wrote fiction not because she enjoyed “weaving stories of supernatural terrors” but because of its capacity “for delineating human passions more comprehensive and commanding [than] the ordinary relations of existing events.” Almost two centuries later, the films of the Otolith Group (Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar) also adopt fiction—specifically science fiction, the genre Shelley helped invent—in order to explore impossible or failed histories and the compelling messages coded therein. In A Long Time Between Suns (Part 2), 2009,

Stu Mead’s paintings touch the art world at a tangent. Not that he’s exactly an outsider, having received a formal art education. But the Berlin-based American has a bigger reputation in “underground” culture than on the established art scene. Maybe that’s because his paintings are unabashedly (one could even say sincerely) about their subject matter rather than about art. That the subject matter Mead is drawn to is entirely disreputable—girls, often conspicuously underage, as objects of desire—is a separate issue. From Francis Picabia through David Salle to John Currin, pornographic imagery