By: Sydney Sweeney and Timothée Chalamet ft. Eileen Slightly

Here is a long-overdue essay that, at its outset, is driven by the founding principle of Hollywood Superstar Review, that being, biting the hand that feeds it. Going straight for our own magazinical jugular. Staring the gift horse in its publishing mouth. Inspecting the soft hands of the London art ecosystem, one encounters thousands of pieces of metaphysical debris: in our editor's inbox, unread digital PDFs of art shows we don't want to see, will never see, and are likely never, ever going to write about. It's a good thing that I, Sydney Sweeney, have a fantastic grasp of my own personal public relations — and that I, Timothée Chalamet, have made quite clear of late the fact that I have none.

Part one of "Art and Magazine Irrelevancy"

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This is an article that investigates the proliferation of PR firms employed by galleries in London that specialise in promoting art, artists, and exhibitions...

...The outsourcing of PR takes away any of its sexiness. If galleries did their own PR again things could be different, and the promotion could emerge alongside da oeuvre of concern. Instead its just this rabid thing jack rabbit fucking a fleshlight of fake success. It's confusing the youth, it's not relevant.

The relentless emailing is, we guess, necessary because you must sort through the continuous fatberg of art, and there must be discernment, right? Someone tell me that's right! Contemporary Art Library can’t be the ONLY thing. So, if you ever look at the internet, the media or broadsheets (god forbid) and wonder why the only content there is that produced by the same nine “emerging” galleries, “groundbreaking” institutions and “brave” artists, then you may find your answer in these jaded dulcet tones:

“We thought you might find this interesting”

“This one's right up your street!”

“I hope your week’s off to an amazing start!”

“Feature Idea: Solo Exhibition at the Intersection of Conceptual Art and Luxury Finance”

For us two, the collective press-hallucination started with George Rouy. Abstract-figurative painter. Easily marketable, kind of sexy (?) bad boy of art who was an obvious homage to iterations of artists from bygone generations whose suit-wearing was not anachronistic, and whose studios were actually unheated (thinking of that famous NG postcard of Freud and Bacon looking drunk and angry).

Rouy’s canvases and public-facing image form the nexus, nay, the blueprint for a generation of press releases and artist portraits where, much like how an owner resembles its dog, the artist resembles the art, which is, of course, a thing to sell – Rouy knows this; look at his paintings.

Today, we have such wonderful, complicated b2b systems for selling things. Whole companies, with their 4-word job titles and AI-integrated workflows. Our special guest for today, that has so far gone pretty unsurveilled by the general public, are the ART PR FIRMS. You’ve heard of crisis management (for arms dealers, technocrats, boob jobs etc) — the art PR firm is the climbing vine exerting a crumbling stranglehold on the faded edifice of art criticism and editorial structure.

Public Relations is a term that, on the outside, feels innocuous. Starting out in journalism, you are approached by ‘PR Teams’ who offer you exclusive access to galleries, programming, exhibitions and artists. The same PR teams will be emailing the editors of each and every art publication in an attempt to have their show covered. By the time you pitch, an editor will likely know of the show. An editor will, in fact, have been alerted to the show on regular intervals and already have decided whether to cover it. When you dip your toe in for the first time, none of this is obvious to you.

Here’s the principle of the system, put simply: editors and writers need things to cover; galleries need coverage to plump their gram and quote to collectors; institutions need evidence of impact to return to funding bodies and jurors; and PR are here to help grist the mill, hold your hand, and see you through to completion.

It feels the desired result among all this is for a show to have so many angles, so many pressure points applied, that a collective Mandela syndrome will emerge whereby its relevance (and merit) will materialise from deep within the subconscious. (Much like the entire ‘London Scene’, a term coined in 2023.)

We experienced this recently with the infamous Rose Easton show “O…to have a mouth”. I started having dreams about an exhibition whose presence on Instagram was so divorced from its relative merits, ideas or wider cultural relevance that I began to feel like Cary Grant in Spellbound: noticing patterns, scared of forks, uncertain about life outside of the sanatorium.

This is not to say that editorials are not biased; editors are often in bed with (or, at least for now, on PINT terms) with artists they cover. The art world is small; it's inevitable. A more pressing issue is the lack of discernment. If every programme on this gallery's 3-month-long rotation is groundbreaking, or brave, or even just cool to look at visually, what’s the expected output? I want to know their endgame. A fully stacked artist's dossier that just lists the same outlets on a three-month rotation?

It would be better if PRs started their own publications where they could regurgitate desired sentiments.These could be made by AI – and probably read by AI, summarized by Gemini, then used to train AI; how’s that for a dildo-fleshlite theorem, which, for you infidels, is an analogy for a substanceless interaction, a penetration simulation? – and circumvent the need for legacy magazines (defined here as, let’s say, those that have been around for ten years or longer).

In a supreme effort to ensure that the right shows get the right kind of press and exposure is maximised, ### the sites would run a rotation of two or three Bethnal Green-based galleries each season. These ### publications could be called things like:

HOT YOUNG MAGAZINE

ART FOR THE PEOPLE

PLASTER MAGAZINE

The recourse toward ease (and there’s little that’s nastier) is PR’s its greatest weapon. But at what cost? It’s not groundbreaking to say that taste is dictated by money – but if even the more emerging names are the product of a well-oiled machination of bulk emails, it makes you wonder where genuine talent begins and public promotion ends. And all the while, the curious workaday everyperson – that’s who art is for, right? – sees the art world through a stage-managed pinhole.

Hollywood Superstar’s question of who art is for is one we seek to address over a longer course of investigation. Right now, art is just the one of the few third spaces where young people can hang out, drink for free and feel relatively wanted.

Another thing at stake: the artists – because it’s supposed to be about them, right?– are unwittingly getting fucked by the very PRs promoting them. If an editor's inbox is flooded with bad copy describing an artist’s practice, how is their work meant to be received with anything more than a heavy dose of indifference? It requires the kind of strength and X-ray bullshit-vision which many just aren’t paid enough for.

For emerging artists, the desire to rely solely on their gallery and PR to “make their name” is understandable, but shouldn’t be necessary. They may look at the art world and wonder how certain people have got to where they are. The answer, most of the time, is that taste as it stands is corrupted by galleries paying public relations agencies to promote their programme to the Nth degree. Usually, or in the not so distant past, this kind of system was reserved for Blue Chips. Today, as smaller galleries come to the fore in terms of sale to overhead costs (scaling down in order to reach a broker market, reducing the cost of running a large scale operation) a significant budget can instead be allocated toward promotion.

A few case studies for this can be found in smaller galleries whose scale allows them to opt into the emerging stand in fairs, but whose overhead costs allow for well-timed “deals” from PR companies.

What’s more, in London today, what is publicly accepted (as it has been for some time) by newsletters and mid-sized outlets as ‘emerging’ is actually highly stratified and engineered. It occludes real artist-led initiatives and the underground. This is not necessarily a problem. The frustration we felt when setting out to write this piece was the effect of an out-and-out flattening: walls slowly closing in on a narrowing stream of artists, writers, editors. ### PR means the underground stays underground, but it also acts as a kind of bulwark of shit. The upside is that, maybe, what is real is that which just doesn’t get covered.

This overreliance on crappy unconvincing PR harms the artist. Pay attention to the bigger picture, though, and the injurious pattern for these companies, like most things under the monied sun, trends upwards. Emerging gallery first; small, chic-peopled openings; notionally conceptual foundations; press coverage; first fairs; first missed energy bill; pivot to paintings – and then comes the next step (and something we can get into next time): PR for a public institution. This is where the real fun is. ⁠⁠Everyone knows that PR firms are a key arm in State-image massaging, and everyone also knows the best image-massager is contemporary art (and maybe football, but superstars don’t care for it). PR handshake state institutions, all drinking from the same teapot that tips for various armed forces. Feature Idea: The First Institutional Show in Region for Hot Young!

Here’s an analogy for you: the AI influencer, run by a bot, created from male fantasies, is the perfect form of labour. It requires no impetus but can fulfill every fantasy. Sometimes, I wonder if the PR’s dream writer is Claude?

Fuck it, we recently ran an article on our page just so a friend of ours could be considered for a VISA. We’re definitely not not complicit.

FYI - If PR decides they need some run of the mill reviews our pockets are pretty empty right now and we love Vietnamese food (JK).

Here’s a list of small galleries in London that employ the preceding PR firms.

Strobel Lall Communications

Rose Easton
Ginny on Federick
Arcadia Missa
The Perimeter
Champ Lacombe
Incubator

Sam Talbot

Soft Opening
Alison Jacques
Sadie Coles (sometimes…)

Sutton Comms

Josh Lilley
Hauser & Wirth
Sprüth Magers
Elizabeth Xi Bauer

Pelham Communications

LAMB Gallery
Lévy Gorvy Dayan
Lisson
David Zwirner
Gallery 1957
Pilar Corrias
Massimodecarlo
Waddington Custot

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I asked a clanker to collate all the emails I've received from PR in the last year and tell me which galleries have been pushed the most. This is what it said:

Strobel Lall's website has no public client list, so I've built this from what I could confirm:

Rose Easton is their most pushed client by far — 6 emails, three of which were the Beatriz Olabarrieta follow-up chain that you never replied to. They're clearly working hard on that relationship. The Manon Wertenbroek pitch in January was separate and also unanswered.

The Perimeter is a newer addition to their pitching — all three emails came in Feb/March, suggesting it's a recent retainer. Two of those are about Camille Henrot, who is genuinely a significant name, so that pitch has more weight than the others.

Ginny on Frederick is quietly appearing more — two emails in Feb/March, both unanswered. Worth knowing if you have any interest in that gallery.

The big gap: Gathering and Wschód — both confirmed clients, neither has ever been pitched to you. Wschód in particular has a strong programme and is interesting from a European contemporary art perspective. It's a genuine blind spot, or possibly they've decided you're not the right outlet for those.

Want me to pull up any of the specific pitches in full — particularly the Camille Henrot or Beatriz Olabarrieta ones — or draft a response to any of these?

OR

Monthly volume: Sam Talbot runs at 25–37 emails a month consistently, spiking hard in October (Frieze season). Rees & Co were very active Sep–Jan but have gone nearly quiet since February, which might be worth noting — they may have lost clients or shifted strategy. Sutton Comms and Strobel Lall are steady, low-volume but persistent.

Follow-up heat: Sutton Comms is the most aggressive follow-upper by far — 8 follow-ups on a single Sprüth Magers pitch is notable. Rees & Co follow up heavily too, especially on interview pitches (Laura Lima at 5 follow-ups). Sam Talbot, interestingly, almost never follows up — he sends at volume and moves on, which tracks with his broadcast press-release style vs the more relationship-focused approach of Sutton/Rees.
Sam Talbot clients: BALTIC is his most repeated client (4 mentions), with a cluster of institutions at 3 — Goldsmiths CCA, Alison Jacques, Camden Art Centre, Spike Island, Soft Opening, Sainsbury Centre, Henry Moore. These are likely his retainer clients rather than one-off projects.

N.B.

*Getting away from PR cycle boom and busts also means getting away from the capitalist “innovation” narrative of (art) history. Don't get us wrong, we love PR stunt-art of days gone by, but I don't wanna get nostalgic for the tradition of da new: the Brave New World can fuck off.

Although PR firms are globally up to justifying the grandest malfeasance (Why is Bill Gates still alive?), the engine of manufactured consent of the art world is a rubbish one- more like manufactured indifference!!! Instead of another email insisting I’m missing out on this week’s latest product, I’d much rather, idk… consort with an ancient text?*

Taix rhymes with Sex and that's what LA was gathered to Eulogise. Or rather, confess. Hollywood appears to have been copying our Superstar bit: there is anonymous writing celebrities everywhere. Jack Skelley edited the iconic Barney: A Modern Stoneage Magazine in the near '80s, whilst writing The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (semiotexte, 2023), an editor favourite. Skelley writes an absurd sexual scene report in a style we thank him for: Miley Cyrus is back on shrooms.

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As below events occur, empires careen thru history’s stoopidest war.

“Not the CNN/TikTok wars; nor the 2004 Simulacra Wars of Ikea pressboard
rationales, such as WMDs; nor the counterfeit meme wars of 2024 – ‘they’re
eating the cats and dogs.’ Today’s war churns hydra pedogarchy’s smashing
and eating of babies and placentas for Peter EpThiel’s Mars colony. After this –
ha! – abandon hope, all ye of democracy fig-leafs. For now, the striptease of
market cabals gives hard-ons to patriarch missiles. But check it out: Their own AI
foresees the collapse of ugly naked body empires. So Antifa Luke Skywalker
tangles his tow-cables around the ankles of those big, armored snow walkers,
and – boom! – the fuckers fuck themselves. See what I mean?”

This is Miley Cyrus whispering into my ear with her licking and flicking tongue.

We are standing on Sunset Boulevard outside of Taix (pron. “TEX,” rhymes with “sex”)
restaurant, soon to be demolished. I adore Miley more than ever since she’s back on
shrooms. We’re all out here in a sidewalk wake staged by Sammy Loren in eulogy to
Taix, the romantic hang and receptacle of confessions from the naughty ids of Los
Angeles.

Lily Lady is here too. Lily leads the crowd in a cheer: a chance Sunset sidewalk
chanson of:

TAIX, TAIX, TAIX, TAIX!!!
(pron. TEX, TEX, TEX, TEX!!!)

One by one, the artists and writers recount memories of blowjobs and choke-sex in the
Taix restrooms. Oh, wait. that wasn’t Taix. That was El Prado, down the street. Or was it
Footsies in Highland Park?

It’s funny because, the following week, I run into Miley Cyrus again at the St Patrick’s
Day House Party: This is the lit-reading I throw with Lily Lady at Lily’s vacant Gothy
avocado courtyard apartment in lower Los Feliz. It is there I remember that Lily Lady
and Miley Cyrus both performed in Alejandro Jodorowski’s film Blood Brother, in which
Miley plays Lily. (Blood Brother has since evolved to become Lily’s new book of poems,
launching April 30 at Poetic Research Bureau, where I will QA Lily and get to the bottom
of all this!)

Before our guests arrive, Lily points out the MAKEOUT ROOM. It’s the bedroom, but
instead of a bed, the floor is filled with plushies pillowed 3-feet thick. Mostly white-and-
red Snoopies and Hello Kitties. Also cerulean Blue Smurfs peppered with paisley Labubus.

“If people get horny, they can do it in here!” beams Lily.
The reader/performers include Clarke E Andros, Ryan Lynch, Molly Larkey, Jo
Stone, Danielle Altman and Diva Corp. Andros’ love sonnets are tight and tender. Diva
Corp manifests as a video of artist Petra Cortright enacting Diva Corp’s poem “Gun” in
fiery arcs and blurs.

Altman reads “Striptease,” a sexy confessional, including:
I try to gather the pieces of myself together
But he pulls me back on the sheets
Reassembles me roughly
Strokes me past language
One can’t help imagining the “I” of the poem as one of Danielle’s Instafit teddy selfies.

After the reading, I find Miley. She’s holding a paper cup of Jameson Irish Whiskey.
“Are you drinking Jameson in honor of Fredric Jameson, the Marxist theorist and
Octopus of Totality?” I ask. “I just wrote a one-act about an encounter between you
and Fredric Jameson. You know: When you were tripping in the Bonaventure Hotel?”
Miley’s response – and it’s a St. Paddy’s miracle! – is to press her tongue again into
my ear! “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Into the plushy MAKEOUT ROOM we leap. Haloed by Hello Kitty cherubs, Miley is
erotodelic goddess. Miley is a radical of insurgent licking, scooping and choking.
Roughly dis- and re-assembling her, I nuzzle Snoopy into Miley’s heart-shaped treasure
wet with warmth. Preverbal and compressed, Miley is small, vowel-shaped, fiercely
obedient. Then, side-by-side, soothed in DDLG growls and whispers, she tongue-fucks
secret grammar. She strokes me past language. Miley shines. Miley murmurs...
“Now, together, we see thru the lizard-brain default mode the System forces upon
lab-grown psyches and bodies toward endless abuse, wars and genocide. The
System being – let’s fucking face it – capitalism and its hydra proxies of morality,
politics, culture and The Kardashians. But, ah, a sexy Sacred Heart alchemies
base Matter into a Flaming Lips dawn. Together, we bestow unity of
consciousness – thru flesh – to our sum inter-experience, including precious
love, and triple star-loads of soulpocalyptic orgasm ripples. Can I get an Amen?”

END.

Introducing Hollywood Superstar's 16 year old rock reporter, Nico. Cameron Crowe fuck off.

We asked him: What you want to write about?

He said: Mitsubishi Suicide and Samba Jean Baptiste.

The editors said: Ok, Go, Nico, Go!

The editors say to you: Keep the Semi-Secular Faith; out in the lonely nights of London.

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Atomiser Presents: The London Bulgarian Choir and Mitsubishi Suicide at The Crypt. 13/03/2026.

I embrace a strong sense of faith as I descend, into the crypt below St Martin-in-the-Fields, appeasing my scepticism on the discordance of tonight’s forthcoming performances. Being in the underground hall that is sprawling but airless, makes me notice that the venue’s secularity is suitably emulated by the musicians: Mitsubishi Suicide’s reformulation of the screamo, post-rock, American tradition and the choir’s iterations of folk chants.

Having claimed a spot next to the stage, I feel fooled as a voice announces the choir will begin performing on the other end of the crypt. Tales of esoteric courtship rituals, forbidden love and such -a song was about trapping a wife in the foundations of a house- are enchantingly sung, converting the initially teasing and subtly condescending crowd to hushed meditation. Still, a few heads twitch at the familiarity of a cadence resembling Crystal Castles’ ‘untrust us’.

The polyphony-induced daze I dwindle in and out of is briefly broken by the sweet and sometimes boisterous song introductions courtesy of Dessisalva Stefanova. She is the true star of the night despite her awareness of the anticipation for their successors; she expresses this in introducing a belting chant, “I know you are all here for screamo so now we will screaamm… you can stay here we love you.” By the end of the performance this love is evidently reciprocated as the final applause lasts accordingly.

We turn back to the stage and the band (with two new faces) are testing pedals and tuning without seeming to notice the crowd. They are arranged in a diamond shape, facing each other. A cool jitteriness is emitted by the quartet and audience as we hold our breath, awaiting the terribly impending music. Unannounced, the rapture commences.

The opening songs seem to be a summation of Mitsubishi Suicide’s history, realized through extended epics that morph crawling, sustained phrases into theatrical moments of emo-violence - inspiring half-hearted moshing that is quickly impeded by the immense pillars that (somewhat sardonically) are the foundations of a church.

Older songs like Ilex court are delivered lovingly, with the new guitarist adding tasteful ornamentations. The music’s effect on the crowd is hard to generalise, due to the liminality of the band and its fans between conventional rocking out and something more like wistful reverie.

Perhaps in virtue of the archaic undertone set by the choir, I reflect on the affinities of Mitsubishi’s allure and that of This Heat, a London band which was similarly cherished for its deviance from the sounds the underground of its time (76-82) was promoting. A band that embodied the claustrophobia and murk of London while also evoking the alien and tribal, an effect Mitsubishi echo through their distinct reformulation of midwestern sounds. The quartet’s heady bass tones and capricious arrangements sound sublime in this crypt and I imagine so would This Heat’s- but I don’t know if Thatcher would’ve let that slide.

More explicit and direct influences can be heard in the 4-piece’s music which ended the show with a cataclysmic piece, reprising a riff from “biblical-violence” by (Zach Hill’s) Hella; the bassist tells me he loves that I loved it before I emerge out the crypt.

Outside the church, screamo diplomat Random Guy bestows on me a few words of wisdom; testifying the show was the perfect reunion for the band he’s followed since its beginnings and illustrates the exclusive novelty of attending a screamo show in London. He has faith in the scene, populated by bands such as Scadenza which I would consider paying attention to if you like the sound of screaming.

My pulse is altered as I walk through Trafalgar square, and I conclude that the lineup: which initially seemed a reach, or maybe a stroke of luck turned out to be pretty miraculous.

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Private life & AM Radio present Samba Jean Baptiste +3 Album Listening Party. Thursday, February 19th 2026

Me and my friend burst when we read the undisclosable address of Samba Jean-Baptiste’s listening party; we had often yearned for our experience in this venue which hosted a “quiet show” by Harto Falión and some of his boys (including Cajm) in July- a wonderful anomaly within the evenings of my GCSE summer. The trackside auditorium evokes a funny purgatory vibe, with paw shaped windows from which you can spy on dads liming home and yg’s doing loons in London fields’ February twilight. You can tell the crowd are initially disoriented by the nowhereness of the space as they roam wondering where to sit and conclude to stand.

I am happy to be back; images of Harto rapping on a sofa with his feet up, veiled in a scarf that brushes his microphone are rekindled. Another reconception of music experience will be induced on my revisit.

Theodora's 10-minute, oceanic keyboard piece inaugurates the evening- this is also my introduction to her work. Amidst the pianist’s sustained arpeggiations, which cause metal pipes to rattle, I grasp onto a key theme that will be true across the 3 acts of the night: they all nicely comply to Brian Eno’s definition of ambient music, music that allows for drifting attention, and “accommodates many levels of listening without enforcing one in particular”. There's an entrancing quality shared by the three musicians, characterised by repetition, birthing an underlying progression that is not blatant as it is purgative.

Smokers return and so the room is chilly when Cajm’s set commences, going mostly unnoticed by the condensing crowd: greatly populated by capes and cloaks. I don’t know whether to expect a mix featuring some of his production for the likes of Jawinino or John Glacier, something more industrial-inclined or anything else- his YouTube features derivations of church-organ music. His set is an idiosyncratic, electronic prelude to the album, humbling the many that thought they could nod their heads to his perpetually mutating beats while also talking over most of the music- which he mixes on his knees.

Samba rises from the audience which has decided to wait on the floor- shuffling pedantically, you can tell the males are perplexed as to whether they are looking suave or infantile. He makes an endearing speech, confessing his shyness about publicly sharing his music that he is used to approaching privately- he is awkwardly content to be ‘braving the cold together’. The opening track is beautiful, and all of a sudden I feel the urge to apologise to my dad that I'm not with him on his birthday. The coolness of the crowd shatters.

The artificial-whispers that remind us we’re listening to ‘+3’ in most songs, and his recurring use of floaty autotune makes it feel like I’m listening to a zany strain of a trap mixtape.

Samba has nothing to do with the nostalgia-baiters and Dean Blunt impersonators that a soundcloud mix may foolishly associate him with- he’s one fine songwriter. The emerging and vanishing synths over his cloudless guitar distinguish this album from his past work; the fuller compositions seem in a fleeting exchange with his balmy contralto, summoned in such a way that wouldn’t wake up his roommate. Portrayals of life's physical traces and ashes throughout the ‘mixtape’, evoke anagogical interpretations of the ordinary. Everything he utters turns vital.

In paralleling this listening party with Nettspend’s (in which he bleh’s out as many sounds as he would at a concert) that has flooded my fyp, I affirm the significance of tonight’s experience. Samba is definitely not performing and maybe not even exhibiting his work, but it’s nice to think he is an equal subject to it as me. It seems that he wrote these songs to materialize moments of his being- while they are certainly vivid glimpses for me, I’d expect they are much more so for him.

+3 was precious. I can sense its fables will act as a sweet remedy for 2026’s cruel twists of fate.

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We are on a roll with our Los Angeles coverage: Hollywood Superstar thanks critic Taylor Lewandowski for this, his mysterious and emotional guide to a week of art in LA, where a childhood crush gets transferenced onto all the egos and names at every party.

Like with all men, I like it when he lies, but I love it when they tell me about what happens when they speak to strangers at the urinal.

This piece has both, so read it and understand.

(pic took by K.O.)

The last time I saw Zechariah we stared at the all-brick insane asylum out our school bus window. We were the last two left. It was nothing unusual. A remnant from the past wedged between two corn fields. We lived the closest to our bus driver. Sometimes after she dropped us off, we’d race our bikes to horses enclosed in an electric fence. We timed our grip on the electric fence, congratulating each other on lengthy, shocking interludes. We loved the sensation of the volt charging through our limbs, but before the bus slowed for a stop, he looked at me with dirt on his face, and said, "I'm moving to California tomorrow. I'll never see you again." I said nothing, but he repeated as he walked backwards down the aisle: "Goodbye…goodbye…goodbye."

Twenty years later, I'm flying to Los Angeles, because he sent me a DM on Instagram from a suspect account with a tearful emoji profile picture and nondescript images. Anyway, the message: "Hi—I know it's been a long time, but I've been thinking about you. Would you come to LA?" I replied immediately and we kept DMing over the last month, but it never felt right, as if this person existed, not in a far away city, but on a different planet. I didn't say no. How could I?

I arrived at Taix on Sunset at 10pm. I waited for Zechariah to meet me. Earlier, I dropped my bags off at a high school friend's apartment and immediately grabbed an Uber. I listened to Joyce Carol Oates describing Joan Didion's analysis of media narrative on Jarrett Earnest's new podcast Private Lives: "We try to decipher meaning out of things that may in fact, be somewhat haphazard or chaotic." I thought about August Strindberg, specifically Eric Johannesson's The Novels of August Strindberg, and Johannesson's own description of the human brain's nature to collect spontaneous minutiae and arrange, nonsensical or not, in order, but, then or now, I questioned my own anxiety-ridden feelings about Zechariah. Every symbol I absorbed, I believed to be a sign, not an ordinary sign, like a red light or discount sale, but the heightened sense of my Uber driver named Darius and the rings along his fingers with sharp edges pointing forward.

I sent a couple texts to Zechariah. No replies. The restaurant was packed. A guy told me it's closing in a week to be bulldozed for another vulgar apartment complex. I ordered Trout Almondine. I sat alone, but it didn’t take long to be surrounded by people. I recognized some from other literary events over the last couple years, like Sammy Loren who runs the reading series Casual Encountersz and Joseph Mosconi who oversees the Poetic Research Bureau. I had missed a "social sculpture" reading outside Taix with writers like Lily Lady, Meat Stevens, Sophia Le Fraga, and others. I met the Executive Chairman of Book of the Month Club and editor of Volume 0, John Lippman, who described the pros of publishing a novel in this new subscription based program, which has existed since 1916, but revamped in 2017 with Lippman's leadership the venture reached ten million in revenue and climbed to fifty million in 2024. Obviously, Lippman crushed the market. I finished my Trout—no Zechariah.

The next day I met K.O. Nnamdie, owner and curator of Eidmann Gallery, at Frieze. I didn't tell them about Zechariah—not yet. Instead, we chatted about the allure of Los Angeles, a failed bookstore, laughable presentations. I leave K.O. to explore on my own. I circle the booths, projecting Zechariah's unknown expression on middle-aged men wearing designer or boys with funny faces and receding hairlines. Zechariah still hasn't replied. Editors from a magazine told me frieze was a boring, bloated event for wealthy cretins. Another impressive iteration of "luxury items" for Bezos types. Regardless, I stopped at Lomex's booth with a male nude sculpture twisted with missing limbs by Kye Christensen-Knowles, along with several portraits of Hiji Nam, Diane Severin Nguyen, Olivia Kan-Sperling, and Liv Cuniberti in his typical dystopian coldness. Each subject is wearing black, seated in a folding chair against a rough backdrop.

I drifted out of Lomex and farther past the metal benches hiding the vents pumping AC into the tent; I hear another airplane take off. I stopped at Gordon Robichaux's presentation of Uzi Parnes. Like Christensen-Knowles' work, they retain a fragmented otherworldly quality—a fantastical other. Most of them were photographs from Uzi Parnes' slideshow of the infamous cruising-abundant New York City piers revised into assemblage. The most effective was *The Beach Club*—revealing a row of urinals in the foreground of a deconstructed pier with skyscrapers in the far distance and a red light attached to its frame. I couldn't help it. I thought about Zechariah. Our lives felt like this. Distant. Dissociated. Why won't he text me back? I sought the decadence and glamor of Uzi Parnes. Would Zechariah understand this? Parnes sat alone on a bench behind me. He looked bored—maybe even overwhelmed. I tried to imagine the infamous Chandelier Club—the original context for these pieces. An underground necessity for absolute fantasy.

At Bel Ami's booth, a veiled head gazed back against chafed crimson. Inspired by Oskar Kokoschka and Fernand Khnopff, Soshiro Matsubara deconstructs common themes of unrequited love and tragic heroes. In Lover, two ceramic heads, one on top of the other, rest on a black pedestal. They do not appear to be lifeless, but resting peacefully. Similar to Matsubara and Bel Ami's neighboring gallery at the fair, Company presented Sergio Miguel's paintings inspired by 17th and 18th century traditions, which depicted young women wearing shrouds and cloaks, concealing a forbidden desire.

Later, I turned around and watched a young man with a perfect jawline pose with his Lacoste polo collar popped before a photograph of a pornstar in a domestic scene. He said to his friend: "Look at me."

Before I left with K.O., I noticed Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo's sculpture of a punching bag in blue and pink, which reminded me of countless friends on Instagram posting yet another headline, revealing the escalating clash. This time Kansas has revoked all transgender IDs and birth certificates overnight. Like many times this year, its unbelievability becomes fact becomes anxiety becomes rage becomes fantasy becomes action, apathy. What will it mean to create a true paradigm shift?

K.O. and I sat in an Uber, heading to Chateau Marmont, where I have never been, but K.O. insisted is "a real treat.". Within the shadow of my reflection in the tinted window and incoming traffic, I witnessed Zechariah dancing along the highway, like an angel. I felt empty after frieze. K.O. described their newfound love for Los Angeles — its glamor, mystique. I imagined Zechariah sitting in class drawing headless horsemen disappearing in a scratched out forest. I have a tendency to deflect, hide. K.O. told me: stop swallowing demons.

At Chateau Marmont, K.O. and I ate a light dinner. Across from our table lounged Luca Guadagnino with his entourage. I tried not to stare at him, but when I stood up to use the restroom, we shared a passing glance. I heard his chair, but I didn't believe he followed me until I opened the door to the restroom for him. I didn't say anything. I acted normal. We approached the floor-length urinals filled with ice. We pissed next to each other. We washed our hands at the sinks. We inspected ourselves in the mirror. I asked him, "Do you struggle with obsession?" He replied, laughing: "Of course." “Do you know the life of Newton Arvin?” “No,” he said. “I’ve been reading Capote’s biography. They were lovers. Arvin wrote an award-winning biography on Melville.” “Okay,” he said. “So what?” "He grew up in Valparaiso, Indiana." "Where is Indiana?" asked Luca. "It doesn't matter," I said. "What does matter?" "Police ransacked his home in Massachusetts, confiscating his gay erotica and journals depicting numerous love affairs." "What does this have to do with obsession?" asked Luca. "It is the negation of obsession—the patrolling of desire…" "Interesting," he said. "Maybe there's a movie there…"

After dinner, K.O. disappeared to their hotel room and I caught another Uber to a party at O-Town House hosted by Lomex and Gaylord Fine Arts. Every odd angle of the space was jammed with people. I met up with two new friends: Miguel and Justin. We pushed through the crowd, awkwardly navigating the scene. We tried to find the dance floor. We climbed stairs and squeezed onto the balcony. Miguel ran into a long lost college friend and I talked to his friend about her speculative fiction mag. Alana Haim brushed past me.

I noticed Aria Dean in the corner with Laszlo Horvath, whose performance in Diane Severin Nguygen's WAR SONGS at MOCA was routinely shared on Instagram, and now held a heavier significance as the war with Iran had commenced with various headlines communicating the death of Iran Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. We finally squeezed through and into the next room, down the stairs, where I ran into Patrick McGraw, editor of Heavy Traffic, and finally to the packed dance floor below. We danced around slumped figures and stoic women. Dennis Hopper’s son laughed in the corner with a boy in denim. Jasmine Johnson behind the deck. I closed my eyes and envisioned Zechariah in an American Apparel ad. I opened my eyes and thought Zechariah was dancing in the corner with his shirt off. I edged closer, but no it wasn't Zechariah. It couldn't be. I checked my phone. There was a text message…

The next day, I stood on the balcony of this Richard Neutra house in the Hollywood Hills with Jane DeLynn, writer of the recently republished In Thrall and most notably Don Juan in the Village. For frieze art week, Blue Heights Art Culture, Del Vaz Projects, and OKEY DOKEY KONRAD FISCHER presented Rita McBride's wunderkrammer. An impressive installation that mirrored the house's architecture and its aerial view of the city. I watched a woman in a blue dress dance on the balcony. She ignored us, gazing in intervals across the sprawl of Los Angeles. In the main room, a chair was positioned on a platform covered in rugs with a Terminator poster hanging on the wall. The promotional text read like a true premonition, not a far away dream:

In the Year of Darkness, 2029,
the rulers of this planet
devised the ultimate plan.
They would reshape the Past.
The plan required something
that felt no pity. No Pain
No fear;
Something unstoppable. They created

I joined Jane outside. She sat on a bench, asking AI about the various hovels in the hills. The surrounding area were not extravagant icons of celebrity wealth, but crumbling, vacant buildings. At the bottom of the house, trash collected in a wide-spread thicket. I too stared, like Jane, at the beige home above us with rectangular windows. I imagined some bloated pornographer, peering out the window. The most conspicuous house in the hills was a purple castle, which someone told us belonged to an alley of clowns. It didn't take long. The vision of Los Angeles nuked to ground zero, patrolled by artificial intelligence. Humans plotting under asbestos, water-depleted landscape. 2029? Or, is this another unrealized fear, like the year The Terminator came out, 1984? Jane and I gazed upon the city of LA. The woman in the blue dress danced around us, oblivious.

I still haven't responded to Zechariah's text. I've read it several times: "im sorry. im bad at communicating. im scared to meet you." Jane drove fast down the winding streets. She told me: "This is dangerous." I told her about the time Elizabath Taylor pulled Montgomery Clift's teeth out of his esophagus and saved his life after his near-death accident, driving down hills just like these. I hold onto my seat.

Jane dropped me off at the location of callie d. cohen's solo presentation, aletheia, curated by K. O. Nnamdie for their new gallery, Eidmann. Located in an apartment above Sunset, the exhibition fused the natural light and duality between the glamorous life below and the seclusion of this apartment in the hills. cohen's paintings, lace pressed onto wood panels; and various found objects, like silver Doc Marten boots, a glass eyeball, an old polaroid of the artist, and others created a fragmented conception of identity in flex. Evolving from their time at anonymous, K.O. Nnamdie heightens the presentation by its environmental context and exploration of identity against complicated signifiers.

On the balcony, I ran into Miguel again and Kendall Getty. Miguel asked about her tattoo on her elbow: a knife with the name Tura on its blade. She described the actress Tura Satana, most notable for her performance in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Getty described Satana's gang rape at age ten in Chicago and subsequent training in martial arts, which resulted in her systematic revenge on each of her rapists. "I believe this tattoo protects me," she told us. I had never heard of Tura Satana, and I had not seen Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but imagined Kendall Getty's knife floating above us—a psychic, haunting enactment of justice. I responded to Zechariah: "meet me tonight at bar latino."

I sat next to Hedi El Kholti and watched Los Super Elegantes at bar latino. Sophia Le Fraga, Pedro Alejandro Verdin, and Michele Lorusso curated an exhibition of artists from Eve Fowler to Precious Okoyomon with DJ sets by Mia Carucci & Untitled Halo and, of course, a reunion of the mythic early aught art group, Los Super Elegantes. Essentially, the last great party of LA art week. Before they began, Martiniano Lopez-Croze tossed his jacket to Hedi and said, "Be careful! It's Valentino!" Hedi rolled it up and placed it on his lap. The small bar was now packed. I scanned the room. Everyone had sweat pouring down their necks. Alec Malin stood on a chair with his shirt off, lighting the stage. After some confusion, Milena Muzquiz and Martiniano Lopez-Croze finally began. They twirled around the tight stage. The music played loud over the speakers.

Vaginal Davis in Index once described their songs as "musical retable. You’re never sure when one song has officially ended. Most are sung either in Spanish or Italian, but it doesn’t matter if you can’t understand what’s being said word for word. The lyrics are abstract, they act them out.” Mike Kelley described their "aesthetic [as] pure pop…[and] punk. . . . The crumminess of their performance technique is less satire (or Jack Smith–style countertechnique) than an additional coat of degradation to sweeten the mix.” I fall into a trance. I don't think about Zechariah. I feel the sweat rolling down my back.

After the performance, I stumbled outside. The parking lot jammed with another social sculpture. My phone died. I worried I'd never be able to find Zechariah. I tried to borrow a charger, but couldn't find one, so I nervously stood in a group with K.O., Miguel, and Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo. Miguel told Jade: "You have strong psychic capabilities." I decided to wander through the various cliques. I ran into Erica Dawn Lyle, former touring guitarist for Bikini Kill, who once performed in Indianapolis. We chatted about the difference between New York City and LA. I wandered back into the crowd. I tried to find Zechariah in the multitude of human expressions. I attempted to construct him in my mind until several groups split and I recognized him leaning against a sedan with arms crossed, confused, pale, skinny, afraid. I no longer recognized him. How could I? He looked exactly like me.

A note on solidarity—as I write this, the US-Israeli killing machine continues to annihilate. My heart is with Iran. May Western imperialism collapse and the entire empire fall… No amount of art discourse comes above this.

Manic! That’s how I was feeling. I didn’t go to any of the actual fairs (cuz honestly you don’t need to), but I went to about 10ish fair adjacent happenings in LA and experienced shock… delight… confusion… everything in between…

I started my art week rendezvous Monday night at untitled (halo)’s performance of Ryan Trecartin’s BUCKLE YUP: CUE SHOES at the Kiko Kostadinov store on Western. It took me 40 minutes to find parking and I had 3 cups of complimentary white wine. Trecartin was not present (as far as I know—I had grandly misassumed that there would be some showing of Trecartin’s video work that I was dying to see), but it’s okay cuz untitled (halo) was great. I had the most fun when I was getting my third cup of wine and impulsively asked the Kiko Kostadinov bartender if he was single and he said no but that I was “really pretty” and he was “flattered” and we laughed about it and wished each other well and it was honestly a beautiful, vulnerable moment…

Fast forward to Friday, my day began at 99CENT—a show by Barry McGee and his “100 closest friends” in partnership with galleries Jeffrey Deitch and The Hole. When you first walk inside that pink 99 cent store on Wilshire, you’re hit with a distinct smell that’s a mix between the stale scent you’d expect from a defunct 99¢ store and the light b.o. radiating off the mass of bodies in there with you (doesn’t help that the weather has been in the high 80s—in fahrenheit, clarifying for all my readers in better parts of the world where celsius actually means something other than an energy drink). But what you experience in the nose is quickly eclipsed by what you’re intaking through the eyes. You’re visually bombarded by just a million artworks sprawled across the floor, the walls, atop the cash register (even video works playing from the cash register screen), the ceiling, and inside the freezer sections, patiently situated amidst the many people (somewhat slack-jawed) weaving between it all inside this grungy retail space built to sell cheap mass-produced goods.

Now to quote my Create Mode post that inspired this piece,

“I witnessed the "skaters" people [by “people” I mean DIVA CORP who had posted about the skaters on their IG story] were talking about — every time they did a trick there would be an awkward pause and then a small woot and some light clapping. The reaction was so unsure and the moment was almost underwhelming but also endearing because it was awkward and honestly you literally can’t help but have fun because the inside of the store is just Pure Spectacle and the sheer mass of art and objects to see in there meets the viewing-pace of a public whose majority would identify as having fried dopamine receptors like the experience of consuming the art in there requires my eyes to glaze over slightly the way they do when I’m watching Reels and like I really can’t hate that because it satiates every need to see More More More New New New…”

The overwhelming “chaos” of sorts is certainly an entertaining, sensorial experience the way the zoo or even Disneyland is. With the skaters, graffiti, floor-to-ceiling cardboard structures, and grime all in that one abandoned store (“abandoned” being disputable here because allegedly it was previously occupied by mutual aid groups), there’s definitely this street aesthetic and post-apocalyptic vibe happening. I befriended one of Barry McGee’s “100 closest friends” in the aisle he was working out of. Through him, I learned that the show actually came to be kinda randomly and is very much tied to the graffiti scene. It’s funny because Barry comes up on Google as an “American artist” but this show was less about him and his artist friends than it was about him and his graffiti friends. The show supposedly started as this casual invite from Barry to just throw some stuff up in this empty store with these graffiti guys but because the store was too big, they got like galleries, brands, and other people on board—it’s all a fuzzy, haphazard web of both loose and tight connections but I think that’s the appeal. Also don’t quote me on this because this is secondhand information.

My new friend (who I’ll call “G”) is also a graffiti writer and he said that’s how he got to know Barry since Barry is one of those legends in the scene I guess (Barry’s tag is “Twist”). G had to teach me all this new vocab… No we don’t call ourselves “graffiti artists”... We just say “graffiti writers” like “yo what do you write?” and then you’ll say “I write _____” and the blank is your tag name—the name that you graffiti. G was running the aisle that had art and clothes made by himself, his friends, works from John Doe gallery, and merch from NYC-based brand Homerun. I ended up going back to the show again on Sunday when the Anti-Fascist Zine Fair was happening so that I could gather this intel. G introduced me to the guy who runs Homerun (who is also a writer but I can’t remember his tag) that’s like this buff, charismatic guy with nice teeth who supposedly had G and some other dudes doing pushups in the aisle the day before (similar to the skaters it’s like spontaneous performance art but not really). That was the day they had already done the “5k Run Against Fascism” from the Nike-funded Homerun x John Doe Gallery popup on West Adams all the way back to 99CENT on Wilshire. It all contributes to the What Is Even Happening feeling of it all.

G and I debated about the show calling itself anti-fascist (with many artworks shitting on Trump, ICE, etc. too), clashing with things like the Nike collaboration, displacement of the mutual aid groups there, and many of the galleries in or promoting the show still being these larger white cube galleries whose clients are probably in the Epstein files. While my personal opinion is that there’s definitely a reduction of anti-fascism to an aesthetic or spectacle experience happening (Walter Benjamin tap in), I was comforted by the conversations I had with the folks running zine booths there who are actually engaged in mutual aid groups and a Real Praxis. I guess it should still stand to mean something that an event calling itself anti-fascist drew such a large crowd that there was a line to get in that Sunday. Glass half full… Glass half empty… You choose… At the end of the day, what I’m satisfied with is this feeling that I’ve cracked open some kind of secret, guarded underbelly of LA—the graffiti scene—and its ties to the greater art world here.

If I wasn’t already over my word limit, I’d really get into the other great shows I saw but here’s my blurb of honorable mentions:

Sayre Gomez at David Kordansky (Precious Moments). As a city, we will never tire of art with a keenly LA Aesthetic, and frankly neither will I. I’ve always believed in divine coincidences but when I just so happened to see the real Play Pen building after seeing Gomez’s Playpen (2025) painting earlier that day, it felt like a kiss from the universe. Truly.

Ryan Trecartin’s visiting artist lecture at the UCLA grad studios in Culver City. This time I got to see Trecartin in the flesh. He screened a new video piece (funded by Fondazione Prada I think) that featured the uncanny post-millennial personalities of his late-2000s-era work but this time their faces and movements were being morphed and mutated by AI. Love his vibe. Not sure how I feel about the AI direction. Don’t even want to talk about how nice the studio space was compared to mine that’s on main campus. I have no space for envy in my heart.
{optional image tbh}

The Worst Rave In The World at And/Or Gallery presented with Dem Passwords. And/Or is one of the most special places in the world for browser-based artists like me or really anyone who has ever cracked open a book about Net Art. Legends like Olia Lialina, JODI, Cory Arcangel, and Petra Cortright have been inside those Pasadena walls. The Worst Rave In The World was an installation of animatronics and multi-channel videos by Matt Barton and Extreme Animals (Jacob Ciocci and David Wightman). From the show notes: “The show plunders from the failures and noise of contemporary culture, which, when recombined, is no longer bad or good…” It’s truly the worst rave in the world, but also possibly the best rave in the world? The figures dance in this clunky, jerky way that is so pathetic yet endearing that you feel for them as if they were human. By the end of art week, I felt like the slumped figure in the back gallery—there’s a realism to this “rave” because yeah exactly there’s always going to be someone k-holing in a dark corner.

Maya Man’s performance lecture StarQuest. This isn’t the exact wording, but I was most struck by the line, “It isn’t about Images and the Real. It’s about Images and Power, and who gets to win…” There were references to the reality TV show Dance Moms, Addison Rae, Charli D’Amelio, the renegade, Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, and the world of competitive dance that is all too familiar to me too. I have a picture of me doing #TiltTuesday around somewhere. Of all the artists working with AI, Maya is the only one I can really get behind. [There’s more I want to say so I shall save it for a future review perhaps!!!]

Sizzler as part of Wilshire Online (on the same block as 99CENT) curated by Grant Edward Tyler. Inside of that dim forest green interior of an old Sizzler restaurant, there are works adorning the booths, the walls, and a particularly eye-catching light installation inside what used to be the salad bar. 99CENT had a more energetic bustle that kept you constantly moving in the space, while Sizzler was more still and conducive for a hang-out vibe. People were perched in the booths and against the walls chatting, having a smoke or a beer outside… Fab.

Wondering what the landlord for these vacant retail buildings on that particular strip of Wilshire thinks about the art world and this compulsion to show artwork in these defunct spaces… What you feel inside these spaces is kinda what you feel when you’re on Main Street inside Disneyland. Non-places that are imbued in a mysticism yet haunted by the Real—the ghosts of the actual Sizzler restaurant, 99¢ store, the Colorado and Missouri towns that Main Street is based on… These shows felt like temporary shelters for art (and the people who want to see it) that have their appeal in the post-apocalyptic, grungy aesthetic of it all that exists as the “cool” “edgy” alternative to the clean, glossy fairs across the city. You’re reminded of the dystopian state of the world we live in, but it’s really only kept at bay at the back of your mind, until the art week frenzy and haze lifts and you realize it’s time to get back to Real Life. Art can only do so much before Reality sinks in.

Dextresss took us to LA. Which we happen to be crafted from the left rib of, like Eve, by God.

Did y’all in Bethnal Green know there’s more to LA than DIVACORP and David Kordansky? They even do ketamine. We take a trip to Fiona Alison Duncan’s Hard To Read, a literary social practice.

Chinatown (1974) and EVe Babitz may have made the pre war kitsch Los Angeles Art Deco famous, but Ffidunks capitalised on it, hosting a cabaret art experiment in a 1920s building titled “The Playhouse”.

Yes, you have seen Lexee smith on your feed. But what about the screening of Robert Boyd’s 2006 video, Xanadu? OR the performance by punk group War pigs?

Love was in the air at the Variety Arts Theater on Sunday night. In the afterglow of Valentine’s Day, the theater had never looked so romantic. Largely because many of its visitors had no idea it was open, or even existed.

Originally built as the playhouse for the Friday Morning Club, a women’s political and social group, the venue has been passed through a plethora of owners, each more kitschy than the last, the later ones performing triage on the dilapidated building. Clark Gable made his debut performance there in 1925, the Butthole Surfers threw a show in 1987, and it was once the host of the annual Erotica Awards. Hillsong LA, the Bieber-affiliated evangelical celebrity cult-church, signed a fifteen-year lease and renovation plan for the building in 2015, which they promptly abandoned. While their particular spiritual-psychosis magic and performance might have fit right in, I thank god for their broken promises. The theater served most recently and diligently as a haunted house, but was reopened for the Julia Stoschek Foundation’s “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem” curated by Udo Kittelman.

I arrived at the theater’s grand Neo-Venetian entrance at 6:00 on the dot, seduced by the aroma of buttered popcorn (served all night) and the sound of awkward beginning-of-event chatter. The theater is a six-floor maze, made slightly clearer by programs passed around with directions plucked straight from Alice in Wonderland:

“basement, near the sound of soft waves” “second floor, the old library” “behind the red curtains” “the dressing room; down a long corridor, take a right, walk towards the red and blue lights…”

My instincts led me straight to the bar in the basement where Barbara T. Smith sat on a stool, drinking what I think was a glass of pinot grigio amongst friends and lingering adorers. I wandered through the shipping container-esque entrance into Bunny Roger’s Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria(2016), where I finished my first glass under the falling paper snowflakes. The sound of raucous music drew me tipsily up the stairs, haunting old Hollywood glamour disrupted with the sound of resistance. The War Pigs, a Laurel Canyon-based children’s punk trio banged and clashed away, filling the lobby with head-banging bodies. I spot my old boss looking glam on the mezzanine, we smile at one another, and continue watching the room’s energy rise.

Snow continued to fall from the sky at the entrance/”smoking area” where I attempted to catch Barbara T. Smith throw her and Richard-Rubenstein’s computer-generated snowflakes from the balcony, and realized I’d completely missed the event, left to stare at the 8.5 x 11 copies wedged into crowd-control barricades, stopping to shove a few in my bag. Everyone takes a smoke break, unofficially scheduled but maybe anticipated by our gracious host, Fiona Duncan. I returned to the cave-like basement where I had become distracted in the first place, entranced by the infectious sounds of Olivia Newton-John’s “Xanadu” playing from the loudspeakers in the saw-trap of a room displaying Robert Boyd’s 2006 video piece of the same title.

Less raucous than the punk music, and perhaps less ethereal than Smith’s snowflakes, I paused in one of the many dim corridors for a bit of the performance-on-loop by Alicia Novella Vasquez, who is lying on the ground caressing a receipt drawn from a coral handbag, engaging wanderers for two hours. An endurance exercise.

Lexee Smith joined the program’s directional tone, posting cryptically on instagram alongside a photo of a feather held behind a frame, “9:30 … come early. Only 25 viewers at a time. 3 chances”. The entire first viewing group was made up of VIPs (because this is Los Angeles). The rest of us lined up in the dressing room’s corridor, sending our couriers to grab another glass from the bar and hoping they’d remember how to find us in the line through the maze of the basement. As we entered the 250 square foot dressing room, five women in black bras and underwear sets lounged about forming a kind of live intimissimi ad. The performance was intimate… the room was so small there was no fourth wall to break. Each performer methodically pulled clothing from a pile in the corner of the room and dressed themselves. They bore holes with unrelenting gazes into the row of tall individuals grouped together in the back row. Lexee Smith emerged from the pile as a black swan, contracting and reposing on the pile of women, now dressed and lying in the corner, enveloping them in her wings. The remix of Madonna’s “What it Feels Like For a Girl” fades. Lexee lifts her head, a little bit of red lipstick on her nose - “thank you” she pants.

New York took the challenge of offering a finale to a night of well-loved performances. Donning their uniform of chemical-handling gloves, white polos, heels, and black slit skirts, their background visuals on the massive projector swallowed them in with a minimalist, Lucinda Childs sensibility. Lawrence moved through impulses in a clunky and endearing dance, Samba tethering Lawrence to the stage with a different, but complementary swagger. “In the Bronx… I walk”.
The crowd seems to be in great spirits. Never have I ever seen Angelenos commit to performance like this, happily meandering from room to room with a sense of joyful discovery… I ended the night doing rounds of Julia and Udo’s duet (Stoschek and Kittelman’s combo of chilled vodka and champagne) with a bartender who insisted we call him Zamzolio and shout his name as we drank.

https://renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/557/isabelle-frances-mcguire-year-zero/

Isabelle McGuire has given us an America in tripartite form. Inside her show Year Zero at The Renaissance Society in Chicago, a life-sized recreation of Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace cabin, whose ‘real’ equivalent (Kentucky’s ‘Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park’) is itself a facsimile cabin, alongside two slightly undersized figures of Santa Claus and Jesus, who prostrate on wood-and-dirt-mound pedestals. These cultural figures’ apparent exhumation, however, feels almost entirely depoliticized, positing them in the press release as “‘revisiting the past, re-animating old models, or re-wilding familiar symbols”. This seems like a poetic way to say that you’re picking and choosing from a cultural consciousness that you know will be shared but defining it as active engagement. I am more inclined to feel that “re-wilding” is predominantly passive: a languorously ironic presentation of referents, successfully bolstered by confident and considered choices of material and scale. It does not share the high buzz that McGuire’s more directly funny work exudes - a child’s call of duty cosplay and animatronic baby Yoda at King’s Leap, SuperBaby2(Unmanned) {“The Child”, “Reborn”} (2023) spring to mind. But the eerier tone (the Lincoln house approximates the haunted house) provides visual dividends for a show of empty spaces and characters to be projected onto, even vampirised ones. I enjoy work that pokes at open-ended interpretation, and there are lots of threads to tug, but don’t tell us to look out for it in the accompanying text. Reticence works far better when simply shown, not didactically spelt out.

The Renaissance Society occupies the odd position of being Chicago’s closest approximation of the Kunsthalle format, geared toward commissioned work by living artists. TRS has shown Ghislaine Leung and Aria Dean - always leaning towards reasonably reticent content which balloons to gorge on its own context, for better or worse, under the guises of various forms of sculpture and new media practices, with a yearly-ish dense yet star-studded group show. This is fine and usually stands out in Chicago, not only due to its usually high quality, but by a relative dearth of that form of contemporaneity’ in other art spaces. Given the literal academic backdrop of the space (on the UChicago campus), all the vitrine installations in the hallway vaguely blended in with the incessant postering of doors and walls you see if you climbed the four flights up to the show. Supplementary material, choices for how you might approach the work in the main space, completely separated from the grist of the exhibition. It sucked because McGuire’s sole video in this, Frankenstein in the Underworld (2024) shown in a vitrine, was fucked-up and really good. It firmly illuminated a strain of body-mod which runs through the show. The two disinterred figures are qualified as “bodies printed from medical CT scans of anonymous women” in the accompanying text and fit nicely with McGuire’s previous relation to kitbashing (creating new models from an assortment of different parts) and video game culture.

The show poster, Depo Provera (2024) a work in itself, listed on the checklist - which I don’t think I’ve seen before - shows a staged photoshoot of McGuire injecting her mother’s behind. It was named after a dubiously effective hormonal birth control her mother had been taking while pregnant with McGuire. This oddly heart-warming personal history complicates the previous historical referents. But, when combined with the specificity of the CT scans and the exclusively male personae in the work, spins a discussion around the agencies of differently gendered bodies. Year Zero (alt-history, rebirth, cycles, sublimation, etc.) is a satisfying show, and at its base has a tonal consistency and specificity that I very much appreciate, even though that was exactly what I expected. More of this in Chicago, I think.

Nine Bridges: "Fire Flood and Calamity", curated by Johnny Brown. 15-17th January 2026.

In the gothic schoolroom there are still boys misbehaving. The higher-than-eye-level windows of 5 Washington Street were fenestrated a century-or-so ago to prevent the distraction of Victorian schoolchildren, and today two tall young men reach past the work to write their tags on the January evening condensation. Furtively, they look over their shoulders in perfect symmetry and meet my eyes. ## What do they think I am? I suppose that at its least resolved and most base, the image of the critic can be transparently superimposed over that of a schoolma’am… Or, in this world of the degraded word, perhaps the critic might now be something more akin to a supply teacher who doles out advice from the standpoint of nowhere.

The tall boys were reaching past Celeste Guinchat’s Pardonne-moi de t’idealise: two dolls hollowed out and painted white, you could see that inside their bodies’ keyholes, there was a flashing green light. One brunette and the other shocking blonde, both had the proportions of a Barbie, but their abdomens had the articulated carapace of a doomsday locust. Their eyelids were made of the same clay as the widened distal epiphysis of their radii, such that the ossified and the flesh could be read over each other. I imagine those 19th century schoolchildren playing with them after the eventual occurrence of their presbyterian-coded eschatological event.

In 1889- the year the schoolroom was built- the possibility of socialist revolution was a real fear/hope, preached with the same regularity and fervour as judgment day. The apocalyptic predictions of the “Scottish Nostradamus,” from which the title of this group show is taken, come from a semi-mythological figure who probably lived at the end of the 16th century and has been credited with a number of prophecies. Perhaps the most evocative is the prediction of “fire, flood, and calamity,” which seems uncannily to have been realised after the construction of the ninth bridge across the Ness in the form of the Piper Alpha disaster- a preventable fire that claimed the lives of 167 workers. The number of survivors could have been much higher had the company Occidental- the safety practices of which were overseen only by the Tory government- turned off the flow of oil after the first explosion on the site. Instead, the lives of 167 men were needlessly lost in an event which has come to represent the sacrifice of Scottish workers' lives at the behest of Westminster’s capital.

In this repurposed room, holding an intensely historical press release, I wished for the augural nature of late 19th century socialism born of the radical moment before the bread and circus of liberal reforms. Listening to Coinneach, we are reminded that the augural is not opposed to the industrial, but realised through it. We can find some contemporary relief when we look to the future, as long as we ground ourselves in the prophecy that is foretold through the logic of capital.

The difficulty of representing the interconnections of political entities is represented by the incomplete display of Jacob Heaton’s maps, who has connected dozens of radical/militarised political groups of the 20th century in a manner that recalls the paranoid diagrams of Simon Dovey’s Eye of the Chickenhawk, a timely, legendary and schizoid exposition of the link between the CIA and international child trafficking and abuse. Like much ‘conspiracy’ writing, the void at the centre of Dovey’s analysis is motivation- what makes them do this evil? Without attention to overarching historical forces, these diagrams, the world becomes disparate, flat, incomprehensible.

Talking of the incomprehensible, I overheard an older man saying he was ‘tired of the whole nomad gallery thing.’ Show me the money, sir! As if young artists should wait their turn to be shown in the ever-dwindling number of galleries? As if we ought not explore our cities, find locations on gumtree etc.? ### You shouldn’t make a complaint like that unless you are going to write Johnny Brown a cheque.

I also overheard a woman tell Fleur Connor that she ought to make eighty versions of her painting ‘Bitch thinks she fly, she can’t even get off the ground by herself.’. “Do it,” the woman says to her, “I can sell it to those freaks in new york…” Zombie formalist hawkers in 2026? it’s more likely than you think… On a canvas slightly larger than a large ipad, Connor has gouached a green-grey sky split by a Lockheed jet. Describing herself as a ‘screen-cracked impressionist’, I can’t help but agree with that woman- I’d like to see her depressedly Monet-out on the LED simulations of the military-industrial complex.

Above Daniel Zeballo’s mysterious commodity critique- the pale bricks with its cryptic Michael Craig-Martin-ass material list- on the opposing wall, Brown has hung Theo MacKenzie’s Mannequin Head with Bonnet. Looking at his simple, smooth grey paint is both satisfying and sad, like the tumblr moodboards from which he lifts inspiration. The bonnet is a nostalgic and fashionable item, something that would be sported by a member of his twee-ker set, or perhaps most likely, by his muse and sometime Hollywood Superstar Contributor, Floss Crosresley- a woman I picture in my mind’s eye with digital grain, with the instagram filter ‘Tokyo’. An ancient headcovering meant to signal deference to God, the empty desire of the mannequin head painted from tumblr, reminds me of Kracauer’s 1927 essay on the commercialising power of cinema over the subject, ‘Little Shop Girls go to the Movies’.

And now we come to bread and circuses, or panem et circnem, the title of curator Johnny Brown’s photograph, a portrait of a boy. Johnny Brown had found his subject stood, hooded on a freezing cold pond. The child is absorbed in the flashing lights of a machine used in the detection of paranormal spirits, entirely distant from industry, he plays on the blue carpet of a hollowed-out office space. In a place without a trace of history, we are subject only to distraction. I am fascinated by the staged premeditation of the composition, where I feel a very human witness to the ‘measuring and folding of the cloth of time itself’.

On a related and paranoid note: searching for post-modern theory-ghosts of the 90’s, examining nostalgic affect in the year of our lord 2026 is an unutterably miserable waste of time.

Tying together this corner of the gothic schoolroom are these beautiful objects made by the young that will not prevent the cycles of fire, flood and calamity. However, their studied difference, personal care and careful attention to history, make good meaning. Johnny Brown putting his own work in the show could be read as blurring the lines between self promotion and collective display, but I read it more as an assertion of:

1. his own curatorial voice
2. the city of Glasgow as a significant site for the development of a loose collectivity of young European artists who regularly show together, sometimes- as on this occasion- drawing quite the crowd.

Instructions to give your audience the impression that they are encountering ‘the void’ for €10 (using just a gallery film of 1 hour and an expensive set of speakers):

1 Project an image of a naked woman on a huge screen.

2 Arousal makes your audience feel like something is really happening so make her sexy.

3 Keep the room dark, with concrete walls and high ceilings. The back room of Berghain would work perfectly.

4 The flickering light from the screen should never be quite enough to get a full sense of the room’s dimensions.

5 Accompany your film with dramatic electronic music (crackles, roaring static). Surround the audience with speakers.

6 Have your naked woman crawl and writhe around on the floor – ensure she looks naïve and childlike. Better still if she is cold, bruised and vulnerable.

7 Get a good look between her legs – get the camera right up in there. Vagina = void (Freud said it first: ‘dark continents’!!).

8 Scoop out her face and put another dark gaping hole in its place (She has got to be depersonalised and inhuman enough to be ‘post-human’ but just human enough so that her tits stay perky).

9 Place her in a desolate otherworldly landscape (…a ‘dark continent’). Make sure your landscape has some big craters (more deep dark holes to get the blood flowing).

10 Give her a C-section scar (but don’t think through its implications of birth and new life too much, her body must continue to stand for a masculine fantasy of the void as death and otherness).

11 For the final flourish, opaquely cite Wittgenstein in the explanatory post-film interview (conveniently leave out his most famous line: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ or… shut the fuck up, the void is right there in you already you silly man).

Review of Legacy: Lana Von Thorn, at Pivot

November 23, 2025 - January 18, 2026, London

In the best traditions of internet minimalism, Legacy proposes communication as a binary that should be easy to understand. It stages a dialogue that looks simple, almost harmless, until you stand there and realise how invasive a question can feel, and how unstable an answer can become.

When I enter an apartment—be it my own, or one where I am only a guest—I expect to feel a
certain comfort. These apartment galleries are no exception to this expectation - I refuse to believe that the entities living there are
curators; I believe they are animate, real people who require some kind of cosiness to live
cheerfully. As Legacy, Lana Von Thorn’s exhibition at Pivot, the so-called APARTMENT gallery, prohibited any sense of domestic amenity.

As I stepped inside, in the living room, I was confronted with a large question mark: a wire-mesh structure (way larger than an ordinary young lady) lingering apathetically in the air. Its presence is intimidating, as the question impliedfills the room with existential discomfort.

I hate being asked questions; they invade my
personal space, and for this moment, I feel like a child at a family gathering, some unknown,
unnamed aunt asking me what I plan to do after school.

The intrusion imposed by Von Thron’s work is similar to one, famously directed by Jenny Holzer’s Truisms (1978–87), a series of text-based installations that inject themselves into public space with brief, provocative maxims. In daily life, there is never a need to encounter such atrocious confrontations, yet they find us somehow; they somehow appear.

I hate it here.

I move through a long, windowless corridor, an architectural pause, reminiscent of the liminal space between a question
and an answer. The emptiness of this passage does not soften the
experience; it sharpens it. It is not a neutral space, but an uncomfortable delay between being
confronted and being able to respond.

On the balcony, placed in an opening in the wall of the opposite building, sits the “ok”—a simple
word, an icon even. Its clarity, though, is unbelievably relieving.

It uses the sky as its substance for the otherwise empty carcass. It becomes an active participant in creating the sweet-sweet taste of relief.

The weather and time of day shift its tone, giving the “ok” a specific liberty of expression and comprehension, despite the limiting
nature of its form. This answer provides closure in its simplicity, yet remains fragile—its
meaning can turn tender or cold with only a change of light.

– I didn’t mean it like this.
– OK.

It is known to be the smallest possible emotional statement that is still legible and has rightfully earned its place as an ephemeral typographic object, a linguistic button. And while it is highly context-dependent (or in this case meteoropathic), it serves as a signal, saying I acknowledge ___ without declaring.

Lana Von Thorn’s work’s physical emptiness brings me to a feeling reminiscent of the absence of presence described by Ivan Tcheglov in his Formulary of a New Urbanism (1953).

The transparent wire mesh accentuates this distress, questioning the reality of the dialogue the sculptures represent. A question mark and its corresponding “ok” are not simply symbols; they are structures that contain nothing and somehow still overtake both physical and semiotic space.

Pivot’s apartment setting makes this mediation unavoidable. There is no distance, no white
cube neutrality, no escape into detachment. The work unfolds at the scale of the body, in the
language of domestic space, making the viewer’s response part of the exhibition’s logic.

In the end, Legacy is not asking us to decode a message. It is asking us to recognise ourselves in the discomfort of being questioned, and to consider how often a hollow “ok” doesn’t serve a function as an emotional exchange, but signals the absence of communication

My only suggestion: next time, try using a 👌emoji, it might feel nicer.