The new issue of Art Lies is out on shelves. And its primary focus this issue is a proverbial bitch slap– "architecture is not art."

"The positions maintained in and by this issue upend the seemingly quaint flaccidity of Picasso’s moral argument that “Art is not truth,” and that “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth” and shifts to Nietzsche’s enigmatic statement from The Gay Science that “we need art, and the other kind of art, an art for artists.”  While I have always appreciated Art Lies, I have never agreed with its name." –Mary Ellen Carroll and Peter Noever

Mary Ellen Carroll, a conceptual artist, is known for her previous works involving architecture. A recent project, Prototype 180, involved rotating a house 180 degrees and then reconfiguring the lot based on the change envisioning the structure and its surroundings as an intertwined system. In this issue, she takes the reigns as guest editorial contributor.

Other points in the issue? Tehran's Azadi Tower framed by a rather novel word, "Architectomancy."

"The asylum provided a “pulpit” for the expression of suffering and justice-seeking as well as protection from punishment by authorities. The secular and Westernized Iranian judiciary had banned the bast in 1925. Could one now question Shahyad that she was regressing from her avant-garde pose into the medievalism of the bast? Shahyad was predicting her people’s future like a soothsayer. Was this a case of “Architecto-mancy”? Geomancy, through which practitioners of wizardry prognosticated the future via geometric shapes or other magical phenomena, was practiced in Iran long ago." – Morteza Baharloo, "Shahyad (Azadi), A Monument of Many Faces," Art Lies

Various other essays and articles line the journal ranging on topics such authoritarian American lawns, a Pennzoiled Phillip Johnson, neuroforms and "dick smarts."

To learn more and get your theory on, you can check out the latest issue here.