Art Unlimited

Editorial #41

Article

March 2026

Fig 1. Editor in chief Nicole Ex, final editor Sarah Knigge and art director Sabine Verschueren | photo: Katerina Bezedei

text: Nicole Ex

How it was supposed to be called, he asked eleven years ago. ‘I’m thinking of Art Unlimited,’ I said. I knew he was acquainted with Jos Smits, the man behind Art Unlimited, who distributed posters and art cards worldwide under that name, and who had a beautiful shop just around the corner from the Leidsestraat in Amsterdam. After years of building it up, things were beginning to wind down for him.

While she was alive, my mother had bought quite a substantial stack of them. Every time she visited an exhibition, she would take cards from the museum shop as a keepsake. Whenever I was bored, I would lie on the couch with that stack. I’d look at the top one, turn it over, and read the artist’s name, the title and the year. And that’s how I worked my way through the ever-growing pile. Art Unlimited was printed vertically on the back. Good typeface. Good spacing. Art Unlimited felt right. But not everything that feels right ends well.

For many reasons, nothing came of that name. And so many years later, it’s just as well that it didn’t. Still, I didn’t let it go easily. I kept searching and hesitating. ‘We need a name for the notary, now,’ wrote publisher Maureen Meeng, who helped me set up the company.

I was lying sick in bed. Weak and nauseous from everything that came with starting a new title. There was a newspaper on the bed and my computer rested open against my pillow. I was scrolling through the website of David Shrigley. His absurd drawings and texts had inspired me more than once before. And then I came across a bright pink work with the drawn letters: See All This and More.

See All This, I thought. ‘See All This,’ I practiced out loud. I wrote the words See All This on a scrap of paper. We went for it: See All This art magazine.
‘What?’ everyone asked when I had them on the phone. ‘How do you spell that?’ See All This turned out to be a vista as a name. It belonged to a future that was not yet visible. More playful, freer, with a looser word image than Art Unlimited, which despite its ‘endlessness’ still felt somewhat bounded.

Recently someone asked me whether See All This should have an exclamation mark behind it, or perhaps even a colon. But the answer was formulated quickly. See All This is not a list, and it is never an imperative. And as far as I’m concerned, it will always remain an invitation, one that carries curiosity and wonder – for that extraordinary journey of the things around us.

With this issue we’re sending you, as a subscriber, a sticker for your laptop – or wherever you’d like that badge to appear. Not as an exclamation mark, but as a wink. Our thanks for your friendship and involvement are unlimited.

This is the editorial for See All This #41, Spring 2026.