Intrepid and long-time HSR correspondant, artist Tasneem Sarkez bravely brings her trademark wit to the vibelessness of one of the more exclusive art parties in NYC. The consumption bubble is not cool, the Hollywood Superstars, like Alice Deejay are better off alone...

Walking in through the clear glass doors of the Whitney museum in 10 degree weather, to the dare djing in front of Glenn Ligon’s Rückenfigur, 2009 amidst a crowd of millennials who paid for the price to feel like an emerging artist, made the work come full circle in a way that for a split second the stupidity of the room faded to a whisper and I heard Ligon screaming in my ear saying “You seeee!!!”

The Whitney art party is a fundraising event, particularly shaped by what the Whitney imagines to be their “young and cool networks…” The average age in the room was at least 37. And the party ended at midnight with no afters… People weren’t even drunk or coked out enough to start giving me their real thoughts on Whitney, the party, or the “art world” for that matter.

The young and cool art crowd kept finding each other gasping for air in between conversations with older folk that told me they're a member of the Whitney, and that they paid for their ticket, but that on top of all of that they’re an "aspiring painter.”

The best part of the party was finding the similarly minded young people laughing at how gimmicky this all felt, and drinking into the irony of the situation, because the meme “is the art world in the room with us rn?” never felt more true.

None of it felt real, nor mattered, but it all made sense when you think about the pretentiousness the art world likes to manufacture. The PR team was trying to drink from an empty fountain of youth. Why have the dare dj when 75% of that room don’t know who he is, and an even smaller percentage could understand why “the dare” and “the whitney museum” being in the same sentence is a funny joke.

The elevator bar went up and down all night offering people tequila shots as drunken art fans walked around the floors of the Whitney, making sure to have a photoshoot in front of the latest exhibitions. All to make eye contact with people you are too nervous to admit to knowing from instagram, just so that you can comment on each other's BFA photos the next day.

"Debtors and Daughters" A Review of Tala Madani’s exhibition ‘Daughter B.W.A.S.M.’

A friend of mine recently joked that if art is to recover, it needs to bring back a punitive sense of shame. During the pandemic, a silent and collective surrender occurred. As billions in stimulus credit were pumped into the global economy, the last shred of embarrassment dissolved. Every artist I know periodically screws their face up in bemusement; they bleat out, “Why have things got so bad, so empty?!” For all the handwringing and punditry, the diagnosis is simple. This is what happens when a culture is in a lot of debt.

For half a century, access to cheap credit has left an overhang which is now at absurd levels: global debt is at 337.7 trillion USD. Art and culture, through both design and unconscious reflex, have become a blind scramble to prove society’s creditworthiness. In the FT last year, as Frieze 2025 opened, Tristram Hunt published a short plea article, “Don’t move to Dubai – this is still the place to be”, stating that “this month’s Frieze London art fair will prove that, despite Brexit, we are still a cultural behemoth”.

Screenshot of Live readout of USA National debt fromusdebtclock.org

Art has become a corporate culture. Corporatism is the administrative and disciplinary infrastructure of debt culture. Because art has no inherent utility, it relies on consensus to legitimise its monetary value. Therefore, art in a debt society, untethered from centralised patronage like the church or nobility, produces a priestly class of bureaucrats who toil to induce confidence in their investors, to prove their spending will pay dividends. Despite their antagonism, both Marxist-inflected art academia and market-driven dealers are debt-culture bedfellows. Both share the same impoverished ontology: art is reduced to an instrumental entity, stripped of any intrinsic or metaphysical good. Each leverages the financial precarity of artists to produce a ‘paper economy’ optimised for their respective pensions or bonuses.

Let me explain: The legalistic jargon of this unholy alliance is ‘critique’: a pidgin dialect that unburdens audiences from having an adversarial or individuated inner experience. Consensus over consciousness please! Critique facilitates growth: an expansion of customers.

To survive the desert of critique, artists, viewers and art sector functionaries are all expected to cosplay a sovereign intellectualism. After internalising the “problematics” of dirty money and hysterical moralism, admission to the tenancy of the ‘art world’ is granted. The more globalist the marketplace becomes, the more acutely artworks zombify into empty vessels, hollow enough to pipe critique-adjudicated stuffing into, the way custard fills sugary doughnuts.

Art has attempted to be industrial, but the bigger it grows, the less the audience cares. This expansionist corporatism seeks to maintain a numbed-out present; history and the future exist only to prop up the ‘contemporary’. Their proper function, which is to contest the present, is a taboo. This is because, in a debt culture, fear of the future’s insolvency is unspeakable. Thus, aesthetics taper into disciplined homogeneity, an amnesiac beige sludge. How quickly can we forget the next Marvel movie or faux Ab-Ex painting keeping collectors away from Dubai?

So be it. To the real artist, the above is of no concern. They are like the stringy marsupials after the meteor hit Chicxulub: against rational self-interest, they will go on making art. They do not have a choice; to be a real artist is both a vocation and a pathology. Furthermore, the artist must confront, and even love, the present, no matter how ghastly or petty it is served up to them. The pervasive death loop of preening nostalgia and vain nihilism is neither critiquing nor transforming anything.
This is why, standing in Tala Madani’s exhibition ‘Daughter B.W.A.S.M.’ at Pilar Corrias Gallery in London, I felt awash with relief at its humane agitation. The exhibition is ensconced in some prime real estate. Across the street on Savile Row is a lobotomised Nicholas Party exhibition at Hauser & Wirth; to the other side, a Bape store with hoodies slung over chromed mannequins with shark heads. The New Routemaster trundles by, designed by Thomas Heatherwick, one of the most egregious flunkies of the debt-nostalgia tundra. The barbarians are at the gates.

The exhibition is deliberately overhung, a spoofing of the locale perhaps, bait for the red-chip aficionados driving past in Lamborghinis. It is also a nod to twentieth-century conventions, into which the exhibition’s satire of technocracy and progress sinks its teeth. An army of gleaming cyborg women languishing in the loading bays of spaceships would be enticing for accelerationist crypto bros, were it not for the repeated accompaniment of humanoids of shit. As corporeal turds splash and smear their way down Duchampian staircases, reconstituted as gen-AI condominiums, the question arises: are the noble genres of satire and mannerism the most pertinent avenues available to painters at the present time?

Installation View of ‘Daughter B.W.A.S.M.’

Tala Madani has the admirable discipline of not fussing with her paintings too much. The surfaces are always fresh, zippy and erudite. In ‘D.B.W.A.S.M. (Teddy)’, the synthetic polymer panel surface has an embedded sparkle; a smoky figure is fumaged sub-dermally, accompanied by a dashed-off teddy bear in globs of lemon and chrome yellow. At times the paintwork is buttery and porcelain-like; in others, clunky. There is an enticing control: the audience gets pin-pricked as soon as they relax into carnal voyeurism.

As with all good satire, this is a humane display of both revulsion and attraction to the subject matter. Madani is wallowing in the muck whilst flinging it against the windscreen. Picabia and Duchamp both produced virtual erotic machines, their fantasy of sex deconstructed into vapours and pistons: a castrated kinematics. Tala Madani’s paintings invert this fantasy of bodiless bodies. They are ciphers of big tech: super-nervous crash dummies painted to feel stimuli which are usually pumped through their image, into the brains of a smartphone audience.

In ‘D.B.W.A.S.M. (Head Birth)’, two sister robots sit on a park bench, upright like Old Kingdom Egyptian figures. Their pregnant bellies blend from neoprene peach to swirling diarrhoea brown, eliciting a visceral sensation of pain. The shit figures and cyborgs interchangeably role-play children and parents, their fears and desires intermingling into a circular feedback loop, from tender intimacy to frantic desperation.

*Tala Madani D.B.W.A.S.M. (Head Birth), 2025 Oil and ink on synthetic polymer.

Detail of D.B.W.A.S.M. (Head Birth)*

The sex-meets-death fantasy of acquiescing into a perfect machine is potent. We are the ‘technological animal’ and desire ourselves as such. Narcissus loved his externalised avatar. There is no place more conspicuous than sexual reproduction, where the immaterial self is starkly contrasted against the machine of the body. For Madani, her maternal and debased figures are a kind of post-Hobbesian ‘body politic’. Gone is the masculine, pyramidal god-king, astride the ocean with sword and sceptre in hand, the masses within his chest cavity. The androids and shitty companions are a Beckettian reduction of the Leviathan into feminine sprites. The populist debt economy is hell-bent on depersonalising the body politic; it does this through an excessive pornographisation of political conventions. This produces an incel political appetite: the virtues of civilisation are converted into fetishes to be debased and exhausted for libidinal reward.

Frontispiece Detail of Hobbes Leviathan by Abraham Bosse
D.B.W.A.S.M. (Teddy), 2025 Oil and ink on synthetic polymer

Madani’s paintings function as cathectic amulets, much like the fascinus dick figurines of ancient Rome, welding together the animal body and eternal soul to ward off the influence of a corrupt polity. They are a warning: even if the axis of personal and political desire succumbs to a bleached sex-bot proceduralism – eros without a body – there will never be the libertarian fantasy of a society without society! New proliferations of disharmonious kinship will wriggle free and need to be arbitrated outside contracts and laws; intimate biological desire and revulsion will always be mixed into mass psychology. The holy subject of the mother and child, their conjoined self, refutes the toy-model democratic voter, utility-maximising creditor or sovereign bitcoin holder.

At the back of the exhibition, an animation of a sloppy turd figure imitates a woman from Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of figures in motion. This Shit Daughter/Mom jumps rope, waves a handkerchief and even embraces her human counterpart. Ghost-like, she is a premonition of the coming technological century, ready to haunt the sensors, CCTV cameras, and surveillance drones of modernity. The contemporary fantasy of neutral instruments replacing the mythic body is naïve. Humans desire their own destruction and hobbling, as Madani said in a conversation for the Vienna Secession in 2019: “Children eat their parents; they kill them with love.” With her painting, it is unclear who is biting chunks out of whom; it is a frenzy of mutual exhaustion. Catharsis is not an anaesthetic – it hurts.

So how does a society get out of debt fast? Mostly through innovation or stealing. Thus, we see Silicon Valley’s marriage to the military. Poindexter Google execs are made army commanders in a force which roams the planet, plundering fresh resources. Tala Madani’s work cajoles artists to get off their hands and knees, it asks culture the question, “Whom do you serve?” If it is not the ravenous golem within, then you are most likely an indentured servant in the bureau of debt.

Remember Tom Otterness? The New Yorkese artist who, in 1977, at the age of 25, adopted a dog from an animal shelter just to tie it to a tree and shoot it. The whole thing, recorded on camera, has been titled Shot Dog Film… played first at a Times Square theatre and then on Christmas morning in 1979, aired on Manhattan Cable TV where hundreds of families watched it, unwrapping gifts and happily eating turkey breast.

After several months of pressure from the Animal Protection Institute, Otterness reinvented himself at remarkable speed and the scandal faded from public memory. He reemerged as one of the most in-demand creators of public sculpture worldwide. His impish, bronze figures now populate parks and civic spaces in Los Angeles, Toronto, Seoul and New York. Anyone who has passed through Manhattan’s 14th Street-Eighth Avenue subway station has likely encountered his work.In the same spot and for a fleeting, almost imperceptible moment, a critique/parody piece nodded to his prior morally dubious act.

In 1985, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority created what was then called Arts for Transit and Urban Design as part of a broad capital improvement effort intended to counter years of deterioration in the subway system. Part of this intiative, and installed in the year 2000, Tom Otterness’s Life Underground features more than 130 bronze sculptures that rise from the floors and interact playfully with the station. Some figures carry oversized versions of the tools used to construct the subway, while others appear to sneak into it; according to Otterness, the moneybag heads seen on many of the characters reference the work of 19th-century political cartoonist Thomas Nast, particularly his depictions of Boss Tweed and the corruption tied to Tammany Hall.

For over twenty years, references to Shot Dog Film were almost entirely absent from print. Glowing reviews from the 90s framed Otterness’s sculptures of dogs in chains as elements of “a fable about desire, curiosity, and folly,” seemingly unaware (or perhaps willfully so) of the artist’s earlier, sadomodernist, micheal-hanekian treatment of dogs.

In 2025, My Life Underground is the title of a show by Jeffrey Joyal,. We see eleven plaster-made figures formed from polyurethane, urethane, mdf plus some burlap here and there. The funny-looking characters, representing New York’s daily commuters, are displayed upon a black table in the centre of the room. Most of the sculptures trace the outlines of a recognisable silhouette. Those who, as the press release says, “used to hang Boss Tweed with ink and paper (...) now they are adorable, everlasting, and twice as guilty.”

This is the panorama on which J.J.’s underground life begins its procession; in what resembles a right-winged conservative ballroom or/and a cult congress room the curator and artist, Marc Kokopeli, appears as a post-Fordist Willy Wonka (less chocolatier, more foreman of the affective economy) delivering golden tickets via email inbox, an emissary from the attention-industrial complex…

Even the promotional materials got caught in the machinery. Prompted to generate a festive animation of one of Otterson’s works, the algorithm interpreted “snow” with the grim literalism of the contemporary image economy and the realism of the art one: a paunchy elf in a tailcoat snorting a suspicious white line on a park bench. The AI did not malfunction so much as tell the truth, overproduction meets under-control; the visual field buckles. More Myrtle Avenue at 2am and less someone's grandmother's mantlepiece indeed.

But this isn’t Brooklyn. This is Astoria, Queens, specifically: Aristotle Psychological and Biofeedback Services, where the word "Aristotelian", on the building’s façade, hovers in the cold air like a pillar-of-hercules-shaped bullet you can’t slalom.
Gandt reopened from below, or perhaps beneath even that. On Saturday, December 6th, someone lifted New York’s steaming manholes and forgot (accidentally or performatively) to put them back. Things fell in, others climbed out; it’s impossible to know the difference anymore.

The exhibition’s room is staged as a colossal piggy bank, or at least it is the impression it delivers; through a narrow slit, tons of other tokens clatter onto the floor and scatter like panicked insects. Mud-smeared Beagle Boys marshal them with the shameless swagger of early-2000s bling culture, dollar signs glinting with the sweaty sincerity only cartoonish mascots can muster. The choreography hovers between Scrooge McDuck and municipal collapse.

Within the cultural horizon of the Trump era, where the public domain is routinely reimagined as a resource to be monetised, the impoverished and easily degradable replica of a shared artwork operates as a cynical gesture. It functions as an act of hollowing-out, akin toSherrie Levine’s rephotographic interventions into the canon, which work to erode inherited authority, or to Rachel Harrison’s sculptures, conceived as cultural debris already obsolete at the moment of their appearance. Joyal’s work operates by its fragility, staging what Andrea Fraser has described in her 2005 From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique as the impossibility of separating art from the institutional and ideological conditions of its circulation.

Everyone is here: sun-tinted police officers; the fragile; the anonymous multitudes; and an improbable menagerie of animals that look more Rudyard Kipling than MTA. Every morning they all board the grey bullet train that bisects the city, a civic ritual structured like Russian roulette; no winners, no losers, just the suspended mechanics of chance.

An otter in a stupid little hat is chewing on a coin (my Life Underground 01). A crocodile tugs amiably at someone’s jacket (my Life Underground 06). Nobody protests. Bodies fold and unfold, smiling even as they lose limbs and colleagues. As the 20th-century Russian poet Sergej Yesenin in his poem The Black Man (1925) claimed,

Amidst storms and squall,
In the frost of daily life,
In grave losses and in sadness,
Showing oneself smiling and simple
Is the highest art in the world.

HSR correspondent Eileen Tweaking Slightly chatted with Jawnino at Exit, Glasgow. It was packed, no one on their phones, etc. Half the conversation was lost to the wind/redacted, but he told HSR he was the laziest artist in the UK and put us onto other stuff too. Read below.

'Nonchalance' is a word often attached to the some of the most contrived, boring fashion people you have ever met. It was used in the RA bio to sell tickets for Jawnino at Exit, Glasgow, but I think that is an inappropriate gloss for an evident, unforced, lack of ego and artistic curiosity for the world, outside the eternal recurring mirror of our For You Page.

Anyway, we are at Exit, a nightclub space taken over by a young man with a vision. I'd spoken to a friend of mine, a professional whistler, fresh off her European tour, who gave a hint to the nightclub's lore. There are the two floors, the upper part used to be an artist studios/strip club and the lower section - which makes up the club - also used to be a strip club, except the lower strip club was dodgier.

There was a staircase going between the two named ‘pigeon world’.

'Why?' I ask.

‘It had dead pigeons in it.'

We speak in the backrooms of the club where everyone seems to be laughing about Jawnino's rangers jacket.

Jawnino: 'They're booing! Someone in here must be supporting rangers. Somebody.’

(There's lore here that's too much to go into right now.)

Jawnino: “We’ll excuse it tonight”

Hollywood Superstar Review: Where would you take a girl on a date?

Jawnino: “Som Saa in Whitechapel, it’s the best Thai food, they do a little 2-4-1 deal.”

(It's loud so we go outside on the street.)

HSR: Laziest Artist in UK right now?*

Jawnino: That's a dark one. I'm going to have to say me.
I just feel like, flow-wise and just, I’m just talking a lot. I’m not really spitting and rapping as hard as a lot of people go. I’m just talking my truth. Like, it's not really a rapping thing. And I feel like I could have more output, so I’d say me.

I mention that HSR are trying to contact Eline Vehrodia.

Jawnino: Yeah, yeah. There's another girl I think you'd tap into. She's called Angel Gray. She just released one song recently. It's called "Outside." She's who I'm fucking with right now, UK-like, female-wise. And obviously BXKS, like, that's my... that's my sister. But like, Angel Gray is tapped.

HSR: First grime record that made an impression on you?

Jawnino: **Skepta, Mike Lowery.

HSR: And then 2026 is the year of...

The Firehorse.

HSR: Firehorse?

Yeah, Firehorse. It's not just a horse, it's the Firehorse.

HSR: It's the Firehorse. What's the Firehorse?

Jawnino: It means more enjoyment, more litness. We're growing up. 2025 was a period where we enjoyed and we take it back, we enjoyed what was going on, we understand. But 2026 is where we let go, unleash, and do our thing.

One autist on another...

Lo, Autistic Barbie, daughter of Mattel, Inc., nubile identity doll, is born. Bearing a teensy fidget spinner and iPad communication aide, this Barbie is sanctioned by the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. Her uncanny visage joins a lineup that includes Down Syndrome Barbie, Blind Barbie, and Broken-Arm Barbie—the "Diversity Barbies," you might call them.

But I propose an alternative name: the “Biopower Barbies,” or alternatively “Foucault’s Angels.”

Autistic Barbie and her compatriots are both cutie-pies and population control apparatus. Wearing her striped purple dress, Autistic Barbie exerts pastoral power: With love and affection always, she shepherds naïve subjects into nanny-state segmentations that arrogate to define the personalities of tomorrow.

Parents might use her to teach their children the specialized verbiage of care and control starting from the earliest moments of self-awareness. These are new heights of influence for Barbie, who once merely enforced the social norm for femininity. Now she is free to patrol the contours of neurotypicality.

In her world, the touchscreen replaces the human voice, and the fidget spinner simulates a meaningful occupation. She carries with her the gift of the medical establishment, and reminds the rest of us to demand our rightful alienation, too. She is the harbinger of a new Western psyche—an Autistic Civilization that, as the DSM-5 instructs, cannot recognize human emotion.

Germanness or Omni-Casuality at Maureen Palel by Dirk Diggler

Maureen Paley, Build from Here, Wolfgang Tillmans, 3 October – 20 December 2025 Sprüth Magers...

A late December Saturday afternoon trawl of galleries offering their end-of-year shows netted two specimens of note. Firstly: Maureen Paley, Build from Here, Wolfgang Tillmans. Maureen occupied 21 Herald Street for over two decades. She was moved out to make way for redevelopment six years ago; given the context of London’s post-2000s boom in crass, viral, "render-core" territorialisation, coming as it did shortly before Covid and the onslaught of Brexit, it was a sad state of affairs.

The actual space has some history from when Tillmans used it as his studio and hosted some very debauched parties there in the 1990s and 2000s; I recall a performance of drag queens giving a fake baby in its buggy a particularly rough ride. I once staggered out of one needing to buy some sobering crack, only to find myself driving down Whitechapel High Street on the wrong side of the road. Later, in 2011, Hotel gallery hosted a show of Keith Farquhar’s sculpture here; at the opening, I watched while a visiting writer snorted a couple of lines of morphine off one of the artworks.

But in these more somber times, the show isn’t really about the art; it’s more about the apparition of Paley’s return to Herald Street. There’s no mystery about the show; Tillmans is often used to herald the opening of one of her new spaces. It’s more her return—like Napoleon escaping from Elba—that interests me. This latest manifestation of her roster of galleries is a statement of intent, almost revenge. Entering the gallery, the first detail is the newly restored handrail of the balustrade: perfectly fitted, pale grey rubber. The fanatical painting of stairs and walls only prepares you for the first floor.

Stepping into the gallery, I thought, maybe I had died and was journeying through the tunnel of light to the afterlife, as I was hit by the force of the whitest, blindingly bright light my retinas have ever had to deal with.
Maybe ASML had installed a clean room, or I was coming to in an operating theatre after having been hit by a bus.
The extremist level of sterile clinicality burned into my consciousness; I could imagine a fly’s worst nightmare would be to have found its way in here on a balmy summer day with absolutely nowhere to hide.

The door to the office is an exact replica of the one from 21 Herald Street—it may even be the same door that has been sitting in storage for the last half-decade. Its polished stainless steel frame holds a single pane of toughened glass, and into this intense environment, a display of Tillmans' photographs, photocopies, and paper works lurks.

It’s hard not to see Tillmans' work as an exposure of him as a figure. In many ways, he is the German version of a YBA artist; coming of age as he did during that heated 90s era, he perhaps suffers slightly from a constraint common to much of their work: early success putting the brake on development.

Much of his output seems to rest in a self-contained appreciation that the spectator needs to "know," but in actual fact, like his British contemporaries, he seems stuck within a banality of his own making.
It ends up feeling like an echo of the worst of day-to-day German culture -—a kind of normcore, "omni-casual" style that hides a very thin interior.

It’s hard to think about his work (and there’s a lot of it) without simultaneously seeing the image of the artist himself as a clinician. In so being, the artist and his production help to back up the return of Paley to Herald Street in a fastidious examination of the accumulation of tedium that our present day will be noted for…

Meanwhile, in another part of town…

Seriously, Curated by Nana Bahlmann, 21 November 2025 – 31 January 2026

Seventy-one artists have been summoned into the show Seriously, curated by Nana Bahlmann. Sprüth Magers, along with their fellow mega-gallery owners, from time to time host group shows that easily rival those of museums—even if they are sometimes employed to contextualize their primary artists with historical works and test out fresh talent. ### This show is a "banger." One doesn’t need to compare it with a fellow group show around the corner at Pace (which is terrible); this one stands on its own as an utter tour de force—and I mean force, as in: open your eyes and get sucked in and off. There’s too much to really give it credit in the space of this short review.

Perhaps the biggest mention should go to the curator; Nana Bahlmann, each room makes utter sense without having to know why or read the press release. From the first work - —Andreas Gursky’s Desk Attendants, Provinzial, Düsseldorf, 1982, a work that literally welcomes you - —to each wall arrangement, the composition, balance, and juxtaposition are first-rate.

Running through the works on show, the carousel in my mind shutters one image after another: buried artist, large breasts, big tits, acid dissolving, dogs watching porn, dildos, toys, Elvis, Kiss, banana eating, smoking child, water towers…

While the idea of photography, as Barthes put it, was the noeme (the essence) - —which isn’t really correct anymore as AI is dissolving this myth -—it is most often the distillation of people into images, usually posing or caught candidly in front of the photographer. The resulting image is a document of the relationship between photographer and subject, probably best examplified by the upcoming Nan Goldin show, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, at Gagosian.

This show isn't that. This show is very funny, in part because the artists have really thought about the image they are making. It's not that photographers don't, but what they tend to do when "smudging" their subjects is rely on their personality as perceived by the subject, resulting in an intimate, personal moment that we spectators look on as a third party.

As witnesses giving light to our sense of observing a fellow being, we are caught in a moment of imagining ourselves in the scene -—a desire that almost immediately decays: gone forever, rendered unto death. But these artists, for the most part, are not doing this; instead, they have crafted into images the pause that humor needs to create the moment of confusion and wonder that jokes require in order to trigger the "LOL" response.

It would be impossible not to mention that among the works on show is Ceal Floyer’s work 644 (2025), which sees a photographed field of sheep, each being numbered, as if through a surveillance camera (totalling 644) believed to be one of her final pieces. She passed away a few weeks after the show opened, which brings the show’s reasoning sharply into focus: even someone who was regarded as "super serious" can be very funny.

What A Shit Show at Carl Kostyál
11.12.2025 - 17.01.2026

Last year I planned to write something about Callum Eaton. About how his photorealistic and life-sized paintings of ATMs, vending machines, lift doors and telephone boxes (openings in public space) cleverly messed with our ideas of surface and impenetrability. I was going to write that his paintings render in paint what Lauren Berlant calls capitalism’s ‘cruel optimism’: the way that it repeatedly offers us up a faint hope of passage to freedom whilst keeping us sliding endlessly across its greasy surface. Using Berlant to comment on these paintings is superficial: but now is the time of surfaces.

Public space is dominated by adverts, locked doors and shiny cladding that reaches all the way to the pavement. London is a hermetically smooth surface with no cracks to squirm through. I thought his paintings were about desire and fantasy in capitalism – of openings that appear to allow us a way beyond them but are just more surfaces (saying nothing of openings in other people’s bodies!). I was going to argue that Eaton’s paintings spoke to the claustrophobia I feel when I look at the screens in Picadilly Circus, or the empty shells of houses behind green park.

I was going to write that I thought that his paintings were witty – that they tricked the rich people who bought them into staring at a depressing trap of their own making. Their easy commodification was part of the critique.

But Eaton’s latest show at Carl Kostyál trades in the cleverness of his previous work for banality. He’s still making photorealistic paintings, except now he has ditched openings in public space as his primary subject – seemingly in favour of relatable moments (a lime bike?) and things that lend themselves to being painted photorealistically (a crashed car, a fire extinguisher, a parking ticket). There is no denying that the paintings look good, Eaton does photorealism well, but instead of the angular constraints and clean lines of his previous work we now get a series of paintings depicting a benign jumble of crumpled and shiny objects that do little more than showcase his technical ability.
Gone are the formal restraints found in his earlier work to only paint rectangular openings in public space. Now he can paint anything you like (read: commision), on a canvas perfectly matching its shape. This comes off as a gimmick.

If I had to try to redeem these paintings, I might write that the invention of gimmicks is the substance of neo-liberal life and that Eaton makes fun of this repetitive cycle of newness. To argue this I would point to Rear View (2025), a painting in which a man looks through a rear-view mirror at a car crash he has just avoided, the only one featuring a person. The viewer is the guy in the car, the archetypal subject of late-stage capitalism, always just escaping disaster and gliding towards the next gleaming thing that grabs our affect. Surfaceness doesn't get to us as long as we keep on moving. On this reading Eaton implicates us in the neo-liberal game of constant newness as we move through the gallery from painting to painting looking for a meaning which isn't there.

But the gap between satirical invocation and mere reproduction of capitals machinations is narrow. The show’s title: ‘This is a shit show’ indicates that Eaton fears he is on the wrong side of it. It’s overcompensation gives away the fact that there is not a shit in sight, there is no actual difficulty or discomfort for us in consuming his paintings, no real moment of crisis - just its fantasy. This is a clean line of product, vacuum packed and ready to be shipped. It’s a difficult line to walk, to be fair, making something popular and commodifiable that critiques its own commodification. Eaton is on the wrong side of it here, pivoting from the wry unctuous critique to providing the slick, oily, capital required to grease the wheels of the endlessly self-ironising collector.

Unlike Gili Tal’s Leperello work at Terminal Projects for example, which successfully incorporates adverts found on London’s hoardings (walls around building developments) to mime superficiality without replicating it.

A hollowed out shell visits an empty hell, spotted with colonial relics in the form of deluded collectors, inconsequentially related. Qingyuan Deng’s historical dispatch from Miami basel. An alternative to the normative, self-deprecating and ironising art week “diary” proffered in Spike's 2024 Miami coverage and Plasters recent report (ironic sensation without feeling). Deng is unabashedly searching for closeness in the desert.

I tried to arrive on Monday night, to make it to a few gallery and museum openings, but I utterly failed in Miami. I seem to have a pattern of missing flights in or out of Miami.

I was worried because I planned to only use public transportation in Miami.

Luckily, my mother gave me her credit card information last minute.

I was staying in a beautiful Airbnb rental 5 minutes from the beach, with my friend A, an artist-turned-advisor, from San Francisco. Last year in Miami, we were also roommates in the same rental. The only difference is that last year I was single, and she was not, and this year the fortunes reversed. On my flight to Miami, I wondered how fruitful, or not, this pairing might be. I woke up Tuesday morning at 7am, straight to work at the NADA fair. A few VIP collectors were supposed to show up at my boss’s booth at 9am, but they never did. But again, the booth, featuring my college best friend Q’s conceptual photography about the production of desire and the tyranny of psychoanalysis, witty and incisive as it is, might be too challenging for early morning viewing.

The collectors who did show up later in the day were amused enough to take selfies with Q’s appropriated images and ask many biographical questions but not enough to pull the trigger. A former reality television superstar who uncannily resembles Pamela Anderson (but only her character in The Last Showgirl) and a local gay couple exclaiming that writing erotica can resist the ascendancy of fascism in America finally bought a few pieces in the last two hours but after that sales dwindled, plumbing into more abysmal states as the week progressed. Since the inventory barely changed in quantity, I found myself staring all day at abstracted images of anal sex extracted from pornography. In each photograph, penetration appeared as a modernist composite of all possible physical and emotional scenarios of such acts across universes and timelines, rendered with an earth-shattering precision that muddied and degraded the erotic aura of its source.

What remained was a devastating desperation, a search for interpersonal truth that sex alone, stripped to its mechanics, could no longer guarantee. At moments, the images seemed capable of lifting me out of the banal temporality of work, toward the subconscious or even the atomic fabric of matter itself. Yet the spell always broke. I was reminded that these photographs, however aggressively anti-representational, are still representations: packets of information several degrees removed from fleshly materiality, already caught in circuits where sensation hardens into data and data slides toward matter’s becoming-property. But no one wanted to claim them. I was utterly bored at the lack of enthusiasm, or even depressed about the state of collecting, but luckily I had wonderful booth neighbors, a more productive place to linger than the dangerous political economy.

My left-hand booth neighbor is a daughter of major Korean collectors. She decided to open a gallery to support her artist friends from international school. I liked how secretly erotic her booth was, full of funny paintings that harbor neurotic seeds, neuroticism about body’s limits. I didn’t like their overly optimistic color palette, but I used the paintings as an excuse to start a conversation, which eventually arrived at Japanese colonialism, with the young Korean woman. We both agreed that it is permissible for us, alienated by the frictionless experience of contemporary cosmopolitan lifestyle, to entertain colonial nostalgia a little bit. We then reached an addendum that it would be smart and the right thing to do to contain the romanticization of violence and oppression in art. Subjugation is seductive, to a certain degree only. We also circled the point, rather abstractly, that we can hold our complicity in class reproduction at a critical distance instead of disavowing it outright, and occupy a position between desire and responsibility with our tendency to accept subjugation. I forgot to get her number after a few days of being in the booth together, so I never got to ask her what she thinks about the fact that Nam June Paik received his elite education from wealth made by his father, a Japanese collaborationist. Perhaps that was a good thing, as the conversation would have shifted too uncomfortably close to the real and real guilts otherwise.

My right-hand booth neighbor was another young woman dealer from Germany, stellar in her ability to close deals. She showed four difficult paintings made by a young white male from Idaho, who is only concerned with the ontic properties of digital images, with no regard for real world events. In Miami, a lot of paintings being shown did comment on the nature of imaging technology but usually ground such exercise in depicting fleshly bodies. My German neighbor, however, was only interested in promoting paintings that are pure, in this case formally devoted to the recursive experience of being implicated in the virtual. Somehow, she was able to sell 2 of the four paintings. I was pleasantly surprised. One night, over drinks, she told me the paintings were coded with esoteric references to underground resistance groups hidden among the general Chinese populace in Kiautschou Bay Leased Territory. She felt guilty for not telling the story, as her great-grandmother lived under German rule and worked as a maid for one of the administrators and so did the painter’s great-grandmother. But again, business is business. I did regret not asking her if they were related at all.

Every night after leaving the convention center, I felt restless, easily tired, and terribly hungry. I couldn’t stay long at any of the museum openings. The shows all looked refined and expensive, but I felt disturbed by the number of women attending these openings hoping to find a high-earning man. I wanted to be honest with them and tell them the tragic truth about life. Still, I decided against it. It would be good karma for me to let them live with their illusion of what Art Basel is for a week. I did become friends with a Polish conceptual artist seeking American representation at the ICA Miami opening. We bonded over cars. He makes sculptures about how they traffic libidinal investment and I have always wanted to learn how to drive. Every night, we skipped parties in membership clubs and island houses and enjoyed big meals at gentrified ethnic restaurants in Little Haiti. He was attracted to me, I could tell. Alas there was nothing I could do about his useless attraction.

I was more flattered when a girl at a Silencio party thought I was straight when I was complaining about how boring the party was and tried to get free drinks out of me. I liked her until she mistook my question of “Where are you from” as an interrogation of her origin. I was more interested to see if she is from New York or a Miami native. It turned out she was Vietnamese and grew up outside Miami, only without the ability to speak the language. I was disappointed, with understanding, nevertheless. It must be alienating growing up Asian in one of the several American cities not built by or for Asians.

I had more joy living vicariously through my temporary roommate, A. I was happiest when I learned she had sex on the beach with a film producer from London, a man who specialised in transgressive indies, whatever that means. When I woke up at 7, she just returned from clubbing and told me beautiful stories of horniness and sensuality. In Miami, even casual sex feels loftier and takes on more stakes than it does in New York. Last year in the lobby of Edition Hotel, I kissed an Italian curator before he started crying and telling me how desperately he needed to go back to Europe to fix his collapsing relationship. I cried with him too, shedding tears for my own unrequited love. This year, I missed him a little on my flight to New York, but I soon remembered his name and looked him up. I realized that he curates exhibitions that favor the experiential over the theoretical, often platforming painters and sculptors who are too eager to mask their lack of agenda as radicality. I also realized he makes more money than I will ever make. I started to resent him, not because we did not reach the stage of sex, but because curating contemporary art is an ideological battle, a life-and-death struggle, and he is my foe, not my friend.

Cat Valentine takes us down a magical mystery tour of a flatshow in Kilburn, writing up the wisdom of bassnotesonhope, a choir-band of ‘naive socio-geo-political’ inspiration.
If it takes a village to raise a child, it took a global village to raise these beautiful singing children in their twenties, and an Abby Lee-Miller-esque level of determination to rally them into performing. Melodia’s flat hosted the line-up: Charlie Osborne, Bassnotesonhope, WorldpeaceDMT, Floods in Atlanta.
Beaming into the instagram live at the party of dreamers, last night we blurred the line between audience and actor… last night was an episode of Dance Moms…

I’m Cat Valentine, member of choir-band bassnotesonhope. This is my report on the second gig we ever played.

"Almost as if it was just a random houseparty filled with people who, full-time or occasionally, dream of being rockstars."

It was a Christmas show put together by Leo (WPDMT) after he asked on his IG story if anyone had a free house to host. From what I understood, a random kid responded by offering up his mom’s house (without permission) while she was away, under the condition that he could play the opening set. He was in strict charge of the RSVP list and neighbours weren’t a concern of his. I pictured some kind of underground-music-loving Cartman figure who would force us into listening to some awkward set for half an hour.

On the night of, when my Uber dropped me off in residential Kilburn I was kind of stranded with all my instruments for a while. I couldn’t really Google Maps my way to the house, but slowly I started noticing e-girls and hediboys flocking around here and there, so I knew I was getting warmer. They approached me kindly, asked if I was playing, and then offered to carry my instruments and help me find my way. I remember this guy Harry who carried my keyboard—shoutout to you, Harry, if you read this. My bandmates were waiting outside and we all went in together, saying thank you and see you later to the cute e-girls and hediboys, who were made to wait until the “doors” officially opened.

Inside the house I realised that me and my band members were basically one third of the total capacity of people who could fit in this flat. As I was daydreamin about the problems the size of our band will cause for the future shows all over the world we hopefully one day get to play, the “kid” whose house it was walked up to me and asked if I was “Cat.”

“Yes, I am Cat Valentine. Is this your house?”

I was a bit surprised. Turns out the random “kid” wasn’t a random kid but a guy with a music project called Melodia. The house was his and his bandmates’ flatshare.

They opened the night with a cool set. One of them played electric guitar and sang in a nice, vulnerable way; the other played bass guitar using a violin bow. With the exception of Ike and Leo annoyingly having a vain photoshoot throughout most of the set, everyone else was locked in, sitting on the floor subtly head-bumping. To me it felt like being somewhere in between that trancey listening-party space in Berlin—where everyone lies on the floor listening to a set that’s oddly quiet because it’s in a residential area—and what I imagine it must’ve been like (idk, I can only imagine, I was personally a high schooler in Amsterdam at the time) to attend a Double Virgo gig when they were just starting out.

After Melodia it was Charlie Osborne’s turn. She prepared poetry and read it to a score of her friend Eric playing banjo. Charlie’s voice sounded soft and beautiful, and Eric’s banjo playing took me to a fictional place. I sometimes long for: an American road trip in an America I imagine from a YouTube clip of Townes Van Zandt playing Waiting Around to Die, every spaghetti western I’ve ever seen, and the movie My Own Private Idaho.

At this point the living room was so packed I could barely see anything, but for a brief moment I caught them sitting on the floor with their backs against each other, looking magical.

Then I had to gather my troops. We were on next. I found some of them mid doing a line, some doing vocal warm-ups in the toilet, some doing final touch-ups on their costumes. I felt like Abby Lee Miller, losing my shit about choir members losing their stage props and not knowing the order of the setlist (JOJO, HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING?!).

Abby Lee Miller is a good analogy here actually, because bassnotesonhope takes inspiration from naive socio-geo-political themed children’s musical, theatre, and dance recitals.

Think Dance Moms season 3, episode 12, when they prepared a dance recital in honour of Rosa Parks, and for a moment the role of Rosa Parks was undecided between Nia (the obvious choice, as she
was the only black girl in the group) and Kendall (a cute white girl with an overbearing mom who calls her “My Little Kendall,” which on TikTok has now granted Kendall the nickname MLK). In the end Nia got to be Rosa Parks, but Kendall will forever be MLK.

For the Christmas show we prepared a set in honour of Somalis and their right to return to their promised land: Minnesota. If you’re a reader who doesn’t understand what I’m talking about, I’ll briefly explain these geopolitics to you. There’s a large Somali community living in Minnesota. Some of them kinda don’t really integrate in the way certain Americans want them to, prompting Trump to talk a whole lot of shit about Somalia during a press conference. Somalis responded to this by rage-baiting Americans on X and TikTok into believing that they think “The Minnesotas” were promised to them in the Old Testament 3,000 years ago and that they’ll soon be mass immigrating through birthright trips to the promised lands. Bassnotesonhope stands in solidarity with the Somalis. Bassnote memberMartyna read a short text describing how Somali explorers found Minnesota 3,000 years ago, followed by a choral version of Coming Home (not the P-Diddy version—strictly Skylar Grey).

Choir member Bexley came up with the idea to sing from the perspective of Americans welcoming Somalis into Minnesota, so we sang Glad You Came by The Wanted.

We closed with Homemade Dynamite by Lorde, aligning ourselves with peoples worldwide forced to fight back against oppressive states and regimes through guerrilla warfare whether online or IRL.

Our set flew by, and then it was time for the headliner: WPDMT. Rowan Please looked phenomenal.
She’d painted her face and had been painting other people’s faces throughout the night to raise money for the homeless. I briefly spoke to her manager, who had a blue butterfly painted across his face, which was very cute.

Everyone—WPDMT member or not—was singing along or playing some kind of instrument, receiving soft instructions from Leo. When they played Year of the Dragon, an acoustic version of a Bassvictim song, Maria M put a phone in my hands.

“We’re live on Bassvictim. Record.”

I recorded the whole thing, and afterwards we realised the sound had been off during the live.

“I DON’T FUCKING HEAR ANYTHIIIIIIING” a Bassvictim fan commented.

So we did the whole thing again, sound on this time. After that I requested Love Yourself. They played it. I loved it. At that point everyone was just yelling stuff. Someone yelled Beatles! Across the Universe! so we collectively played Across the Universe. Chords kept being played, people yelled random phrases, and out of that the beginnings of a new song were written: Bassnote member Isobel’s line "All of our loser neighbours... can’t stop us from dancing....” spun into a twenty minute jam session, which ironically caused the neighbours to complain massively and then the party was shut down. Unfortunately Floods in Atlant last on the lineup, didn’t get to play his set.

I was asked to review this night, and I don’t think I can objectively do that, since I was part of it. But if I try anyway, and be as ruthless and critical as possible, I’d give it a ten out of ten—because it was fun, DIY, and collaborative in a way where the boundaries across acts, audience, and performer completely disappeared.

Almost as if it was just a random houseparty filled with people who, full-time or occasionally, dream of being rockstars.