transcendental meditation

I spent a nice afternoon on Saturday drinking iced tea, eating triple ginger biscuits and poring over the new ACNE PAPER in the sunshine.

The issue explores spirituality, in all its guises. I've always enjoyed ACNE PAPER, but this issue was particularly interesting, probably because it looks at spiritual things from a thoughtful and intelligent yet agnostic standpoint.

The best part was reading an interview with David Lynch, who, as it would happen, is a longtime devotee to the practise of transcendental meditation. Jerry Seinfeld is too, but that's another story.

Enlightenment, spirituality, transcendence and paradise - these themes have inspired man since the dawn of civilization. Mysterious ideas have been cultivated as religious and alternative belief systems around the world for longer than most of us care to think about. We are, however, reminded about these energies when entering holy places created by great craftsmen and artists. Even the most sceptical atheist, when gazing at these icons, paintings and sculptures, feels that there is something godlike about them.

Art, as we know it, has its history in these rooms and that is why we have chosen spirituality as a theme for our first issue dedicated to art. In the history of civilization, how has art addressed the idea of spirituality and the immaterial world? These and many more questions are discussed in Acne Paper No.9 The cover story sees a unique collaboration between Tilda Swinton and Paolo Roversi. Interviews include David Lynch, Marina Abramovic, Alejandro Jodorowsky and AA Bronson. An extensive art portfolio is curated by Lisa Rovner and Neville Wakefield. Gallerist Maureen Paley makes a special homage to Edvard Munch, while renowned art critic Waldemar Januszczak discusses the lost secrets of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

You can buy ACNE PAPER from here, or at good magazine stores I guess. Maybe bad ones too, who knows? I don't.