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It was the summer of Jonas Staal, a Rotterdam artist who was able to soak up considerable media attention during the legal suit that Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch PVV, or Party for Freedom, had filed against him. Wilders felt threatened by the artist’s series of small roadside ‘monuments’ at various locations in Rotterdam, which were focused on the politician. The court decided that the artist could not be prosecuted.The extensive attention to Staal’s media activism is just one example of the growing political involvement amongst today’s artists – including such major names in art as Marlene Dumas and Aernout Mik, who this last year demonstrated their engagement in, respectively, a series of (anonymous) portraits of Moslem terrorists and politically tinted installations in Utrecht and Venice. Major exhibitions place political engagement in a wider perspective, in Vormen van Verzet at the Van Abbemuseum, in which the social role of art is illuminated through the perspective of several ‘paradigm’ years (the establishment of the Commune in Paris in 1871, Lenin’s Russian Revolution in 1917, and 9/11 in 2001). Political interest in Dutch art goes hand-in-hand with growing interest in the subject on the international stage. It was already spotted last January by an American consulting agency that analyzes tendencies in the international gallery world on behalf of collectors, who announced that politics were again at the top of the agenda. The Turner Prize showed the commercial trend-watchers to be on target, with several political artists nominated for this year’s prize, whereas last year’s winner, Tomma Abts, is an abstract painter. The span of themes is broad, including the war in Iraq, policies towards foreigners and immigration in Western countries and religious fundamentalism. But the Special section of this issue looks more at ‘the political’ in art than at specific political themes. The playing field has changed, and so too has the role of art. If art was not long ago the independent, critical observer of social issues, it has since realized all too poignantly how much it too is a part of the all-embracing political and economic system that has it in its grip and is controlling it. The criticism from a distance is becoming criticism from within. -Domeniek Ruyters