In 2005, Italian art journalist Edoardo Bonaspetti curated an exhibition called Untitled, showcasing young artists active in Milan's contemporary art scene since 2000. The experience crystallized a frustration: the visual language of traditional art media, evolved from newspapers, could no longer keep pace with the creative language of global art production. The existing magazines were too slow, too national, too bound to formats designed for a previous century. Bonaspetti decided to build something new.
In 2006, he founded Mousse in Milan — a bimonthly contemporary art magazine published in a distinctive tabloid format, in both Italian and English, that would track the trends in contemporary culture through feature articles, interviews, and conversations between the most prominent voices in international criticism. The format itself was a statement: larger than a conventional magazine, more immediate than a book, designed to feel like something between a newspaper dispatch and a critical journal. By 2024, the magazine had published eighty-five issues.
From the magazine, Bonaspetti built an ecosystem. Mousse Publishing launched in 2009 as an independent book imprint focused on contemporary art, producing tailored editorial projects in collaboration with artists, curators, galleries, museums, and biennials — more than seven hundred titles to date. Mousse Agency followed in 2011 as a communication practice for the art world. In 2014, Bonaspetti collaborated with curator Elena Filipovic to create a new exhibition space within the magazine itself. He also co-created Vdrome, an online platform for artists' film and video, curated with Andrea Lissoni and Filipa Ramos. In 2019, he co-founded Ordet, a non-profit contemporary art space in Milan, with Stefano Cernuschi — named after Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1955 film, the Danish word for "word."
Bonaspetti has held positions at La Triennale di Milano, GAMeC in Bergamo, and MADRE in Naples, curating solo shows for artists including Anri Sala, Jordan Wolfson, Sterling Ruby, and Danh Vo. But Mousse remains the foundation: a magazine that proved Milan could host a truly international contemporary art publication, and that the tabloid format — oversized, immediate, serious — was the right container for art criticism in the twenty-first century.
Explore Mousse at <a href="https://www.moussemagazine.it/" target="\_blank">moussemagazine.it