“You can be as smart as Einstein, but if you fail to direct your attention to what is important, then what good is that high IQ? People who are focused are more alert, experience less stress, and worry less. Unfortunately, focus has become a rare commodity: our attention span has dramatically decreased over the past decades.” – Elke Geraerts

How many times have you been distracted today from what you actually wanted to do? We live in a world of constant connectivity, where distraction lurks around every corner. Our endless to-do lists and packed schedules are a merciless reflection of what’s going on in our minds: we are constantly in overdrive, and our focus is completely lost. No wonder stress and burnout rates are at an all-time high. Despite the fact that we now know more than ever what we need to remain resilient and healthy, our overstimulated brain seems unable to handle all that knowledge, let alone put it into practice. Ten years after her bestseller Better Minds, Elke Geraerts presents a book tailored to a generation without attention. She combines powerful insights with practical tools that can be implemented immediately. Her goal? Sharpening our focus again. Not only by making us work more efficiently and attentively but also – and especially – by teaching us to deliberately unfocus. Are you ready for a mental revolution?

An artist defies the Cultural Revolution to learn the secrets of Chinese painting

Was it really reasonable to drop everything overnight and go off alone into the depths of Communist China in search of the forgotten secrets of ancient Chinese art? Fabienne Verdier never stopped to ask herself: in the early 1980s, the brilliant young Beaux-Arts student was virtually possessed by the desire to learn the art of painting and calligraphy that had been devastated by the Cultural Revolution.

And when, a foreigner lost in the province of Sichuan, she found herself in an art school run by the Party, she was determined to come to terms with the situation: the language and the mistrust of the Chinese, the unbearable lack of privacy, the poverty and filth all around, disease and the inquisitorial administrative system. Blocking the West totally out of her mind, she became the pupil of great, though despised and marginalized, artists, who introduced her to the secrets and techniques of an age-old art form.

This unique experience amounted to a true adventure story, spawning a fascinating body of work that combines east Asian inspiration with contemporary art, as illustrated in her extraordinary art book L’unique trait de pinceau (Albin Michel). The present book, autobiographical travel journal, is an enlarged English edition of the original published by Albin Michel: several photographs have been added to the already richly illustrated volume, together with a full index and glossary.

In a symbolist striptease, Moreau painted Salome’s lethal fan dance twice. Fochessati explores what Dickinson called “The Homesick Eye” in a show in Genoa. There’s a Mood Indigo spreading over San Diego’s El Prado, as Shugaar describes: the show is Blue Gold. Salis looks back fondly at buxus, a cousin of Masonite beloved by Futurist Fortunato Depero. Navoni describes the latest auction of work by Vigée Le Brun as well as her wanderings across half the courts of Europe. Scaraffia describes the Japanese painter Foujita in Lost Generation Paris, with his bowl haircut and round Lennon glasses. Maróti brought the style of the Hungarian Secession to Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes. Dell’Acqua tells us about the ivories of Salerno, a finely etched medieval diorama of the Bible, from Creation to Pentecost. Brilli reminisces about the Marmore Falls, a spectacular manmade cascade. And Mariotti brilliantly revisits the metaphysics of coin banks.

In recent years, photographer Bieke Depoorter developed an overriding interest in astronomy. She sought out amateur stargazers, visited state-of-the-art observatories and researched the history of the field. Gradually, it became clear that her interest in astronomy was linked to lost memories from her past. After all, the night sky is a kind of shared memory; the light of celestial bodies takes hundreds, thousands or millions of (light) years to reach our eyes on earth. In Carte Mémoire, photographer Bieke Depoorter explores the power and fragility of memory, the human desire for objectivity and the elusive nature of ‘truth’. She does this by interweaving photographs of amateur and professional stargazers, diary-inspired texts and fragments of astronomical history, in which often-forgotten female astronomers play a role.