Lampoon, Horny for Culture — there is no contemporary culture but sustainability
Lampoon, Horny for Culture: sustainability as the sole form of contemporary culture — something that stimulates the erogenous receptors
Lampoon — since 2014, between visual experimentation and human responsibility
Founded in 2014 by Carlo Mazzoni, Lampoon Publishing House is the operational engine behind Lampoon, across its two editions — print and digital. The publishing house supports creative talent worldwide, commissioning experiments in photography and visual art more broadly, developing texts with syntactic rigor. Lampoon Publishing House advances a composed, almost clinical graphic sensibility.
Lampoon is a dialogue between science and creativity. Photography interlaces with fashion, architecture, technology.
Lampoon, culture and sustainability: Horny for Culture
Lampoon’s editorial identity is rooted in sustainability — understood as human responsibility and collective commitment to the community. For the Lampoon editorial team, the only defensible definition of culture demands civic and social engagement — political, in other words, if we take the term “political” back to its Greek root: the matter of the polis, the matter that concerns every citizen. We find this is quite erotic – and we like to say we are horny for culture.
Lampoon investigates the intersection of culture and sustainability. Taken alone, these two words sound generic. Culture means curiosity, and it becomes sexier. Sustainability means human respect – this works like sexual intercourse. Lampoon works the space where they cross: the culture of sustainability; sustainability as the only viable form of contemporary culture.
Lampoon, culture as tolerance — but a complex one
Culture and tolerance. Not the passive acceptance of human difference, but the active pursuit of human complexity. Those lines from Malaparte come back: human beings are tolerable when they fall in the mud, not when they sit on the throne. There is something exciting about the mud — something that activates the body’s sensuality.
Lampoon holds, and reaffirms, that today the luxury sector can exist and survive only if it carries a credible social and civic message — one that supports craftsmanship, the selection of natural fibers, circularity, and the rejection of plastic. It believes in an ethical entrepreneurship that no longer places revenue as its primary aim, but income-sharing; that does not put reach first, but authority. Here too, we like to find some certain sensual agitation — a stimulus for the erogenous zones, for the intellective receptors. Horny for Culture — a title we love to use to introduce Lampoon.
These are values that once belonged to the left — Whig, Democrat, Labour — yet today they form the foundation of the only version of capitalism that does not collapse. And increasingly, they seem to have migrated toward what was once understood as the right — Tory, Republican, Liberal.
Drill Baby Drill and Boomer — you don’t have to please everyone
Drill Baby Drill spits humiliation into our neurons. The July heat, the ice dissolving, the concrete spreading across the earth, the plastic in the ocean. What else is worth talking about — what else is worth doing — if not, in whatever way we can, contributing to the utopia of changing common habits, the prayer of cleaning every last drop of the ocean? It may be as futile and repeatable as sex — and yet we keep seeking it.
Many will continue to turn their noses up — buyers, boomers, and plenty of others — insisting that sustainability is all talk and no one cares, that sustainability doesn’t sell, because only sex still sells, not culture. Yes, we are Horny for Culture.
Boomers see Lampoon as a publication confined to a niche subject, presumably dull — because the boomer is convinced that sustainability is boring, that sustainability interests no one.
On the other hand, there will be those who think as I do, as obsessed as I am: sustainability is the only commitment genuinely worth discussing today, the only form of culture, of making love – the only principle worth reasoning about, producing around, and communicating. Franca Sozzani reminded us that, of course, you cannot please everyone — and more definitively, you should not please everyone. Lampoon will not please everyone — and that’s fine, amore mio.
