THE-ICONOMIST publications are included in collections such as the contemporary art library at the Beaux-Arts in Paris (France), the Schaulager/Laurenz Foundation (Switzerland), the contemporary collection at the m-AG — Museum of the Avant-Garde (Switzerland), and the photography library at the Moreira Salles Institute (Brazil), among others. In 2023, the magazine was featured in the exhibition The Intelligent Library at PhotoVogue, at Base Milano. In 2025, THE-ICONOMIST participated in Offprint Paris as an exhibitor.
Whywar➝ Memoryscape➝ Mirror:Mirages➝ STAYNONSTOP➝
WhyWar? Memoryscape A Dress Grew Itself and Other Fragments➝ In the waiting room
Memoryscape.mp4 XXXSpace.mp4➝ theWorldAsAStage.mp4➝
“THE-ICONOMIST’s latest issue is hectic and “suffocating” in its use of online image banks. The magazine has never really operated within the requirements of a conventional magazine. This isn’t just because the issues don’t have any advertisements or an ISBN number, or even that it doesn’t have a website that can be indexed by Google. The magazine defies a traditional editorial approach at every turn.After its first four issues’ focus on AI-generated visuals, the magazine has returned with its fifth edition — a printed exploration of surveillance in the digital age.” — ELLIS TREE, It’s Nice That “Leafing through the eighth issue of The Iconomist feels like plunging into a dense sea of images drawn from widely different origins and visual regimes. Appropriated, manipulated, distorted, corrupted, cropped, filtered and recombined, these images accumulate into a surface that is intentionally overwhelming, producing a visual field that feels both vertiginous and delirious.” — ELAINE RAMOS
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What is THE-ICONOMIST? I imagine it as a cross between the imaginary museum proposed by André Malraux and Aby Warburg’s mnemosyne atlas adapted to a post-digital context dominated by artificial intelligence services. Just as over a hundred years ago the ready-made drew attention to the exchange value of the work of art, the artist-ready-made also … about
THE ICONOMIST is an ongoing research project, an artist’s magazine, an observatory, an institution, and a post-digital collective founded in 2021
What is an iconomist? The element “icon” comes from the Greek Εικόνα and means “image”. In its origin, therefore, iconomy is the art of managing images. Today it is the science that deals with the production, distribution and consumption of images. The iconomist treats images as mass, raw material, and can either give value to rotten images or … …
The concept of “iconomy” originated as a neologism coined in 2006 by economist Gilson Schwartz. Schwartz judged that “in this iconomy, the nomos is defined by the icon, by something that is tangible, which is a visual, immaterial, real, and symbolic code at the same time…this iconomy that messes with our way of thinking, measuring, … …