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.
Hollywood Superstar publishes Italian director Pier Pasolini's Cosair writings (1973–75). These excerpts examine the international style of counterculture and the political adaptability of fashion via the infamous fascist long-haired males. The second extract is the conclusion to one of the more famous essays from the collection, which identifies the “new fascism” with its “pragmatic” and “American” style. The Corsair Writings remain remarkable, contemporaneous to Pasolini's final film, Sàlo (1975), which depicts the depths of fascist libertine depravity.
It has been nearly 50 years since Pasolini’s body was found on the beach at Ostia. In the film Amore Tossico (1983, dir. Claudio Caligari, Italy), two young heroin addicts overdose, draped together over the memorial to the director. Like the doomed characters of Caligari’s film, Pasolini’s posthumously collected Corsair Writings were written as raids on the public consciousness, steeped in the counter cultural capture of a moment when clandestine state actors were widely suspected of obscuring or enabling far-right terror, cultivating a sense of crisis that would come to define Italy’s long decade of uncertainty. This so called “strategy of tension" cannot be read in history books.
How do you categorise your average political assassin? Computers are seized by government agencies, who release the facts when and how it suits them. Can anyone be certain of the political signs that the Trump shooter, that the Charlie Kirk shooter, left floating in their virtual worlds? British police impregnated left-wing activists, the US government was all over 4chan, and the EDL still gets more cash from government agencies than Stephen Yaxley-Lennon knows what to do with.
This Anonymous Hollywood Superstar feels better for not believing MI5, but that’s just what they’d like...
When we can’t tell who is killing whom, or why, scapegoats are found and order must be seen to be enacted. Pasolini warns us of a “hasty” attribution of blame to those who are treated as “congenitally destined to become fascists,” the “eighteen-year-old boys… who plunged into this horrible adventure simply out of desperation.” Young men are blamed for violence but immigrants are blamed more; the Prime Minister invokes the fear of the illegal worker to justify a totalitarian digital ID system. When the confusion is mundane, when the sense of disorder is complete, when communities are atomised, it is imagined that fear will make them cry out for their own suppression. But an enlightened public does not have to ask for any protection that they are not already capable of giving to each other, and that’s a fact.
"The Discourse of the Longhairs"
January 7, 1973. Published in Corriere della Sera under the title, “Against the Longhairs”.
The first time I saw longhairs was in Prague. Two young foreigners, with hair hanging down over their shoulders, entered the lobby of the hotel where I was staying. They walked across the lobby and sat down at a table in a secluded corner. They sat there for about half an hour, observed by the customers of the hotel, including myself, and then they left. The whole time they sat there, and as they walked through the crowded lobby of the hotel, neither of them said a single word (perhaps—although I don’t recall right now—they whispered a few words to each other: but I suppose if they did it was something strictly practical and pedestrian).
In fact, in that particular situation—which was completely public or social, almost official, so to speak—they did not need to speak at all. Their silence was strictly functional. And it was functional simply because words were superfluous. Both of them, in effect, used a different language from the one that is composed of words to communicate with those who were present, with the observers—with their brothers of the moment.
What replaced traditional verbal language, rendering it superfluous—and immediately finding its place in the broad domain of “signs”, in the domain of semiology—was the language of their hair.
In a single sign—the length of their hair flowing down over their shoulders— all the possible signs of an articulate language were concentrated. What was the meaning of their unspoken and exclusively physical message?
It was this: “We are two longhairs. We belong to a new human category that is now making its appearance in the world, which has its center in America and which is unknown in the provinces (for example—indeed, above all—here in Prague). We are therefore an apparition for you. We are performing our apostolic mission, filled with a knowledge that is both totally overwhelming and totally exhausting. We have nothing to add orally or rationally to what our hair says physically and ontologically. The knowledge that fills us, as we perform our apostolic mission, will belong to you some day, too. For the moment it is something New, a great Novelty, which generates, together with scandal, expectation in the world: it will not be betrayed. The bourgeoisie are right to look at us with hatred and terror, because the length of our hair constitutes an absolute contradiction of their ways. But don’t think of us as uneducated savages: we are well aware of our responsibility. We do not bother with you, we keep to ourselves. You should do the same and await the unfolding of events.”
I was the recipient of this communication and I was immediately able to decipher it: this language that lacked a lexicon, grammar and syntax could be understood immediately, because, semiologically speaking, it was nothing but a form of that “language of physical presence” that men have always known how to use.
I understood, and felt an immediate dislike for both of them.
Later, I had to swallow my hostility and defend the longhairs from attacks by the police and the fascists: I was, of course, as a matter of principle, on the side of the Living Theatre, of the Beats, etc.; and the principle that caused me to side with them was a strictly democratic one.
The longhairs multiplied—like the first Christians—but they remained mysteriously silent; their long hair was their only real language and they felt no need to supplement it with another. Their language coincided with their existence. Ineffability was the ars retorica of their protest.
What did the longhairs say, with their inarticulate language that consisted of the monolithic sign of their hair, between 1966 and 1967?
They said: “Consumer civilisation nauseates us. We are protesting radically. We are creating an antibody against this civilisation by way of our refusal. Everything seems to be going smoothly, right? Our generation is supposed to be integrated, right? But take a look at how things really stand. We refuse to accept the insane fate of becoming ‘executives’. We are creating new religious values within bourgeois entropy, precisely at the moment when it is turning secular and hedonistic. We are doing this loudly and with revolutionary violence (the violence of the nonviolent?) because our critique of today’s society is total and intransigent.”
I don’t think that, if they were to be interrogated in accordance with the traditional system of verbal language, they would have been capable of expressing the meaning of their hair so articulately; but that is essentially what they said. As for me, although I have suspected ever since then that their “system of signs” was the product of a subculture of protest that was opposed to a subculture of power, and that their non-Marxist revolution was suspect, I still stood by their side for a while, finding a place for them at least in the anarchic element of my ideology.
The language of these longhairs expressed, although ineffably, Leftist “themes”. Maybe those of the New Left, born within the world of the bourgeoisie (in a dialectic that was perhaps artificially created by the Mind that rules, beyond the consciousness of particular historical Powers, the fate of the Bourgeoisie).
Then came 1968. The longhairs were absorbed by the Student Movement; they protested with red flags on the barricades. Their language expressed an increasing number of Leftist “themes”. (Che Guevara was a longhair, etc.)
In 1969—with the Milan massacre, the Mafia, the emissaries of the Greek colonels, the complicity of the government Ministers, the trama nera, the provocateurs—the longhairs were everywhere: while they were not yet the majority from the numerical point of view, they were dominant in terms of their ideological impact. Now the longhairs were no longer silent: they no longer delegated the totality of their communicative and expressive capacity to the system of signs of their hair. To the contrary, the physical presence of the longhairs was relegated, in a way, to a different function. They once again returned to the traditional use of verbal language. And I do not use the word, “verbal”, casually. In fact, I place special emphasis on it. They spoke so much between 1968 and 1970 that, for quite a while after that, they would no longer be able to speak at all: they devoted themselves to verbalism, and verbalism was the new ars retorica of the revolution (leftism, the verbal disorder of Marxism!).
Although the longhairs—re-immersed in their verbal storm—no longer addressed their agitated listeners in their former nonverbal way, I somehow summoned the power to sharpen my decoding skills and, amidst all the noise, I tried to focus on the unspoken discourse, evidently uninterrupted, of their hair that was always getting longer.
What did their long hair say now? It said: “Yes, it’s true, we are now speaking of Leftist themes; our meaning—while performing a purely secondary role in support of the meaning of our verbal messages—is a leftist meaning…. But…. But….”
The long-haired discourse stopped there: I had to finish it myself. With that “but” it evidently wanted to say two things:
“Our ineffability is revealed to be increasingly more irrational and pragmatic; the preeminence that we mutely attribute to action is of a subcultural character and therefore essentially Right-Wing”;
“We have also been adopted by the fascist provocateurs; they are mixing with the verbal revolutionaries (verbalism can lead to action, especially when it mythologizes it): and we constitute a perfect disguise, not only from the physical point of view—our disordered flowing and waving locks tend to make all faces look the same—but also from the cultural point of view: in effect, a Right-Wing subculture can quite easily be confounded with a Left-Wing subculture.”
In short, I understood that the language of long hair no longer expressed Leftist “themes”, but rather expressed something equivocal, something that was Right-Wing/Left-Wing, which created a situation that made the infiltration of provocateurs possible. About ten years ago, I thought, among us—the preceding generation—a provocateur was almost inconceivable (unless he was a magnificent actor): his subculture was different, even physically, from our culture. We would have known him by his eyes, his nose, his hair! We would have exposed him immediately and we would have immediately taught him the lesson that he deserved. Now this is no longer possible. No one in the world can distinguish a revolutionary from a provocateur by his physical appearance alone. Right and Left have merged physically.
And then came 1972.
In September of that year I was in the city of Isfahan, in the heart of Iran. An underdeveloped country, as the horrible expression goes, but also, to use an equally horrible expression, a country on the path of development [in pieno decollo—“taking off”].
Upon the Isfahan of ten years ago—one of the most beautiful cities in the world, maybe even the most beautiful—a new Isfahan has been built, modern and horribly ugly. On its streets, however, on their way home from work or just taking a walk, towards evening, you see the kind of young men you used to see in Italy about ten years ago: humble and dignified boys, with their smooth necks, their nice clean-shaven faces under their proud shocks of hair. And one evening I saw, walking down the main street of the city, among all those old-style, beautiful young men who were so radiant with an ancient human dignity, two monstrous beings: they were not exactly longhairs, but their hair was cut in the European style, long in the back, short in the front, drawn back and artificially slicked down around their head with two ugly shanks of hair pasted back over their ears.
What did their hair have to say? It said: “We do not belong to these starving masses, these miserable underdeveloped paupers, held back in the age of barbarism! We work at the bank, we are students, sons of rich people who work for the oil companies; we have been to Europe, we read books. We are bourgeoisie: and here is our long hair that testifies to our privileged international modernity!”
Their long hair therefore alludes to Right-Wing “themes”.
The cycle has come full circle. The subculture of power has absorbed the subculture of opposition and has made it its own: with diabolical skill it has patiently transformed it into a fashion that, if it cannot be called fascist in the classic sense of the word, is nonetheless really a phenomenon of the “extreme right”.
And so to my bitter conclusion. The disgusting masks that the young men put on their faces, making them look obscene like old whores from an absurd iconography, objectively recreate in their physiognomies only what they have themselves always condemned: reminiscent of the old faces of priests, judges, government officials, false anarchists, court jesters, pettifogging lawyers, Don Ferrantes, mercenaries, swindlers, self-righteous weirdos. The radical and indiscriminate condemnation that they pronounce against their parents—who constitute the evolving history and prior culture—by erecting an unbreachable wall against them, has ended up isolating them, preventing them from attaining a dialectical relation with their parents. Only by way of this dialectical relation—even if it is dramatic and extreme—can they attain to a real historical consciousness of themselves and advance beyond, or “supersede”, their parents. Instead, the isolation in which they have enclosed themselves—like a world apart, a ghetto reserved for young people—has severed them from their undeniable historical reality: and it has implied—inevitably—a regression. They have actually regressed from the position of their parents, resurrecting in their souls the terrors and conformities and, in their physical appearance, conventionalisms and miseries that once seemed to have been finally abolished forever.
Now the longhairs are repeating, in their inarticulate and obsessive language of non-verbal signs, in their underworld iconography, the “themes” of television or advertising, where is it currently impossible to find a young man without long hair: something that would today be scandalous for power.
It causes me sincere and immense displeasure to say this (in fact, true desperation): but now, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of the faces of Italian young men are looking more and more like the face of Merlin the Magician. The freedom to wear their hair as long as they like is no longer defensible, because it is no longer freedom. The time has come to say instead to our young men, that the way they wear their hair is horrible, because it is servile and vulgar. The time has come for them to wake up and free themselves of this guilty, anxious yearning to conform to the degrading order of the horde.
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'The Real Fascism and Therefore the real Anti-fascism'
June 24, 1974 in **Corriere della Sera** under the title 'The Power Without a Face.'
Here is one, for example. In the article that gave rise to this controversy (Corriere della Sera, June 10, 1974), I said that those who were really responsible for the Milan and Brescia bombings are the Italian government and the police: because if the government and the police had wanted to prevent them, these attacks would have never taken place at all. This is a commonplace. So, at this time, I will definitely get a few laughs by saying that we, too—progressives, anti-fascists, leftists—are responsible. In fact, in all these years we have done nothing:
because talk of “State-sponsored massacres” did not become a commonplace and everything stopped there;
(and more serious still) we have done nothing because the fascists do not exist. We have condemned them only to gratify our conscience with our indignation; and the more strident and petulant our indignation the more tranquil our conscience.
In reality we have behaved towards the fascists (I am speaking here only of the young ones) hastily and therefore ruthlessly, we wanted to believe that they were congenitally destined to be fascists and, faced with this predestination, there was nothing we could do. And let us not deceive ourselves: we all knew, deep down, that when one of these youths decided to become a fascist, it was purely by accident, it was nothing but a gesture, unmotivated and irrational; one word might have been all it would have taken for this not to happen. But none of us ever spoke with them or to them. We immediately accepted them as inevitable representatives of Evil. And maybe they were adolescents, eighteen-year-old boys, who knew nothing about anything, who plunged into this horrible adventure simply out of desperation.
But we were incapable of distinguishing them from the others (I am not saying that we could not distinguish them from the other extremists, but from everyone else). And this is our appalling justification.
Father Zosima (literature for literature’s sake!) was immediately able to distinguish, among the crowd of people in his monastery’s reception room, Dmitry Karamazov, the parricide. Then he rose from his chair and prostrated himself before him. And he did so (as the younger Karamazov later said) because Dmitry was destined to perform the most horrible act and to endure the most inhuman suffering.
Think (if you have the courage) of that boy or of those boys who planted the bombs at the public square in Brescia. Wouldn’t it be necessary to get up and prostrate oneself before them? But they were youths with long hair, or with Edwardian moustaches, they wore headbands or maybe a cap pulled down over their eyes, they were pale and presumptuous, they were obsessed with dressing fashionably, all alike, to have a Porsche or a Ferrari, or motorcycles so they can drive them like little idiot archangels with their ornamental girlfriends behind them, yes, but modern, in favour of divorce, of women’s liberation, and of development in general….
They were, in short, young people like all the rest: nothing distinguished them in any way. Even if we wanted to, we would not have been able to prostrate ourselves before them.
For the old fascism, even if only by its rhetorical degeneracy, stood out: while the new fascism—which is completely different—has no outstanding qualities at all: it is not rhetorical in a human way, it is pragmatic in the American style. Its goal is the brutally totalitarian reorganisation and homogenisation of the world.
Issywoodification...a true generational turn towards the blurring of form, ala greenberg, for 2025. Where artists once tried to reduce form, achieve flatness, break down representation, they now aim for the affect of a camera rubbed with vaseline. While an analysis of causation will be undertaken elsewhere, in the meantime, our recently de-twinked Timothée Shamalet identifies the lack-luster impressions of such formal choices.
The best painting in the National Gallery is obviously George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket. A horse raised on hind legs, trunk shining by some dazzling light, against an entirely beige void – a perfection of realism in an expanse of absurd, estranging nothing. Conceptual iconography in 1762. It’s a shame Stubbs is remembered as a mere ‘equine painter’, but maybe that’s also kind of the point.
I was thinking of jackets, and maybe also horses, at Magic Bullet, Issy Wood’s survey exhibition currently on view at Berlin’s Schinkel Pavilion. Mainly while looking at My neck / my scapula (2025), an A3-ish oil on velvet work of a puffer jacket, structured but wearerless, framed like a classical bust. In the work, and in the room, there’s a notional toplight, but the reflections behave inconsistently. Instead of a shadow within the empty collar, Wood has painted thick lime green. The material is taught around the button poppers, our phantom model’s frame bulging the garment with their very legend. We are the hollow men indeed.
It’s just a coat, dickhead. But it’s a brilliant painting. Partly because the rest of the works here are mildly terrible. Wait, no. There’s also a pair of supersized dentures painted like the Elgin marbles, fine. Also, one work that looks like a flower - drooping low, creases accentuated like the tendons of a hand - stigmata shining like kitchen knives, but also the aliens from that film Arrival.
But back to the point: rooms upon rooms of unquestioning ugliness. D1NNER (2025) stages a kind of post-Carrollian tea party (‘Have always been fond of him’, noted Vladimir Nabokov in Strong Opinions. ‘One would like to have filmed his picnics’; if only Wood were so risky as to engage two of history’s great quasi-nonces) but for whom? Floral teapots, cups and dishes line up across an unattended, almost depthless frame – neither synecdochic nor particularly expressive, they evoke little that’s felt and reveal nothing. Crisis Is (2020) – continuing Wood’s distinctly Y2Kish fixation on twentieth-century cars – is part car-dealership-website-ad as AI-interpreted in the style of Philip Guston, part Lana Del Rey music video mood board. Paintings that just hope you’re thinking what they’re thinking. Wood’s recent portrait of Charli xcx for Vanity Fair postdates the exhibition, but in its ability to capture nothing that we don’t already know about the pop idol from pre-existing footage, it would have done well here.
Wood has a lot to answer for: her style – tight crops, photo-similar faces, kitsch Disneyfication, bathetic scenarios, darkened peripheries like early-Instagram vignette filters – has (to her credit) become ubiquitous in recent painting and image-making. In their homage to earlier image technologies – namely photographic film and notionally cinematic images – they reek of nostalgia. This is all Wood’s ‘hyper-modern visual language’ as per Schinkel’s intro text, a useful reminder of how anything that looks bad – in this case, paintings with the colour palate of Ravensburger jigsaw puzzles or the Ticket to Ride board game – can be reframed as a branding communication system. Schinkel Pavilion is in many ways the perfect site for this, a place benefitting from the sheer vibes of its late 60s German oldness, but with worse lighting.
[Intermission: If at this point you’re struggling with this piece, a reminder that many good painters are still out there – Hayv Kahraman, Nicole Eisenman, R. H. Quaytman, Justin Fitzpatrick, even Julie Mehretu!]
It’s also what career ArtForumer Barry Schwabsky calls ‘perverted realism’, with Wood as a figurehead for a cohort of ‘chromatically dark’ painters evincing a ‘pragmatic apprehension of the incalculable multiplicity of threats stemming from any number of apparently unrelated but equally unavoidable conditions’. Over in good old Londinium, you’ll find it everywhere: Lukasz Stoklosa’s recent show at Rose Easton, which seemed to think the gothic amounts mainly to a spooky mood; a second show at Soft Opening by Shannon Cartier Lucy who, like Chloe Wise, appears to think skin-shine makes a portrait interesting; don’t get me started on Joseph Yaeger’s deflowering of the new Modern Art space. Though, at least Yaeger’s actually look like old films.
Schwabsky cites Michaël Borremans as a forebear of this ‘perverted realism’. Ask yourself, though, would any of the cohort’s proponents be capable of anything like his Fire from the Sun (Four Figures) (2017)? Maybe that’s unfair, maybe they’re just young – or so I hear their gallerists call out from the back, seemingly unsatisfied with the volume of canvases they’re slinging. But nonetheless is it so bad to want it all to be more, well, actually perverted? Wood’s formal ‘perversions’ and autofictional arrangements obscure any real deviance or depravity up for grabs. Instead, we have bunny rabbits painted onto the backs of guitars and muscle tissue depicted in a state neither of preservation nor violent exposure. The grid-pattern in Rough Facetime Study(2025), a bang-for-your-buck technique shared by a contemporary like Louise Giovanelli, makes a briefly perplexing puzzle of the work’s subjects: some bracelet pendants and a porcelain cattle figurine. Are these really the dark recesses of the mind, the memory, or the lived experience they resemble? If Wood & Co’s works are facing the present world’s ‘incalculable multiplicity of threats’, then why are they so flat, so quiet, so fugitive? It’s certainly insufficient to be content with such bland nihilism; art should reach into the dark, not just gawp at it. Reminder: John Berger said that all art reflects its times (what a downgrade today’s public art intellectuals are.
Maybe it’d be better if Wood only did coats. Maybe a whole exhibition of one would work a treat; maybe even a whole career, like Peter Dreher for the Vinted era. (Much the same could be said of Giovanelli and satin shirts.) If Stubbs is the greatest of all horse painters, then Issy Wood will, with any luck, be remembered as champion of puffer jackets.
"Hedi Slimane And The Death Of Documentarian Photography" or "Let's Ban Magazines From Using Scene As An Adverb" is an essay written by our resident photographic commentator, Distrow Kidd, on the infamous photo series released by THE FACE. It purportedly captured "fresh faces" who "brought energy to the scene". Granted, the pics were cool, but why does George Rouy have to be there?
Hedi Slimane’s photography has always consisted of two elements: documentary and fashion/editorial. In an era where a large portion of the fashion image world is informed by famous documentary photography from the 1980s-early 2000s (Nan Goldin for Gucci, Simon Wheatley for Corteiz, Nick Waplington for Self Portrait and Diesel, and so on) fashion can cannibalise the documentarian style. Mainstream fashion like Jaded London, Dazed Editorials, or whatever “MINGA” London is, lusts after the documentary photography's 'I was there' swag to commemorate and translate real events.
Slimane usually spends months with his subjects, producing documentary coverage of tabloid-ready libertine-adjacent musical artists from the 1990s and early-mid 2000s. This lifestyle inevitably bled into his design for Dior and YSL. For “New London”, a Slimane shoot for The Face conducted in August, his signature noirish morosity has been revived by a cast of relatively diverse and interesting faces from London’s artistic, musical (or tbh, party) scene: “Singer” Matt Molotov, and Lux and Wolf Gillespie, who are, to quote attendees “Nepo-baby founders of event where baggy jeans aren’t allowed”.
On a related note: in an incredible feat for a photographer, Slimane has progressed recently to photographing several bands that don't even exist (with some notable exceptions). Here are the strained faces of boys holding guitars in a way that will make you say: "He don't got one song where he needs to be doing all this".
Fakemink graces The Face’s cover with the sexiest (and most high definition) image of him to date. The underground rapper who blew to insane levels of fame in less than a year embodies the evolution of the London Recession Rockstar.
For reasons too numerous to go into here, It-Boys are much rarer than It-Girls. When I look at Mink and his cigarette, I can’t help but feel like Hedi has picked him up where he dropped off the agéd Pete Doherty (2007). Instead of being hounded by paparazzi, London’s prodigal sexyboy saviour is readily stalked by all manner of Instagram creepers, ready to disseminate not the shocking behaviour headlines of the indie era, but lore from the DM.
In fact, after the most recent Death of Live Rock Music as We Previously Knew It, visual and auditory tropes of the genre have become appropriated to inform the cultural Frankenstein that is the ‘new gen music scene’. We went from heroin and acoustic guitars thrown out the windows of Camden flats to the rarest supreme jackets, multiple Instagram accounts (and creative aliases) and the re-popularisation of cocaine for a TikTok generation that mainstream media still label as “sober and sensible". There was not a single rap song in the Billboard top 40: a sign of a cultural victory for rap, which fully merged with pop in the 2010s and at the turn of the decade going underground. Wherever underground is.
In terms of ‘documenting’ the city, the tables of cultural capital have turned. I think all the time about something that maybe goes without saying: that young musicians don’t really need photographers to succeed. The photographer in this equation is not someone who brings new information and personalities to light- that responsibility has been internalised to the artists themselves. Authority is what is conferred, the alternative aesthetic aristocracy is affirmed.
The clouted are figures that have been built from a combination of, variously: inaccessible wealth, aesthetic dissolution and small luxury brand sponsorship. So when we factor in the knowledge that a fair few members of this scene are quite literally children of the previous generation of stars Hedi would’ve photographed, and largely follow suit after their parents' public image, things get meta-freudian.
What separates Hedi’s images now from then is a wave of apathy fuelled by the importance of image over history and acceleration over action. Now, there’s this idea that as long as we can keep up the hype, it might turn into to something solid.
A side note: the nepotism criticism can be applied internationally. London is still the most interesting major city in the world right now, despite, or perhaps because of having 'no cool bars or no cool clubs', according to one Ike Clateman. Artist and trend forecaster Sean Monahan's article on the New Lost Generation of Americans in Paris follows the money and misses out London, perhaps because despite pointing to the fact that mapping out the geography of what's hot kills it, he can't resist doing it: 'The people you wanted to avoid were at La Perle, not Clandestino. The people you wanted to run into were at La Palette, not Funny Bar... Gutter snipes lived in Pigalle, not Bushwick. All of this – it goes without saying – is not supposed to be said. By mapping what is cool, you murder it.' Something to bear in mind in the gloom is that the lack of good spots is what keeps the beauty and the mystery of London. It's the psycho-geography version of the Dark Forest theory of the internet.
Without having any cool bars in London, it becomes difficult for photographers like Slimane to gain access to interesting subjects on street level without them already being connected to his world in some way. Although these images are visually striking, it is difficult for this project to escape the massive shadow cast by his previous books and anthologies: London: Birth of a Cult(2005) or Rock Diary(2008), Portrait of Performer series (2007- ongoing). How is he supposed to access something that is not just a residual aftereffect of a world that is still climbing up to him?
Fakemink points out in his interview that “2025 is the age of…nostalgia”. And I think that sums things up pretty well. On the front page of the issue in clear and cutting text is written: “Love today before it ends”, but it seems that today has already ended. Isn’t that the point?
Essay
/ 29 October 2025 / By: Contemporary Art Baddie
Acknowledging that is more profitable for Advertisers (and Universities offering Curation MFAs) to encourage us to edge ourselves to our publicised interpretations of each other, the Hollywood Superstar believes, senso generis, in the need for more irl fucking.
So let's hear from an archetype on the problem: the un-fucked 'Contemporary Art Baddie', who suggests that the way to reconcile your feelings with the hot new bods in the gallery with the hot new works on display is to make the whole space less sterile. Riffing on Andrea Fraser's fields of contemporary art diagrams, C.A.B creates a map of the girls that keep the world running.
This is the first in a series on love and exhibition, so get pitching... and bear in mind: the Superstar likes to debate but she also likes to say: Fuck you and your trad wife.
The Baddie Paradox by Contemporary Art Baddie
After the sudden resurrection of my “love” for art in the years post-academy, I’ve found myself in a sexual rut. I am stimulated by the colours, shapes and concepts that present themselves to me in exhibition spaces. I visit artist run galleries, big and thick institutes, tight little spaces, commercial spaces, non profits, churches and more… But everywhere those plain white walls. Guys, get a grip - where is the fun in all of this? The white cube has no sex appeal, it’s sterility doesn’t necessarily create the right ambiance to ask for the new gallery kid's number (we’ve been making sober eye contact for the past 30 minutes) Or is it just me? The “Contemporary Art Baddie” status that intimidates men into not talking to me at openings? At this point, there are only curators in my DMs. And yes, they are there to work.
At my lash-tech appointment, I thought of Elke Krystufek’s 1994 Masturbating in Kunsthalle Vienna. Then Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003), a commissioned work where she videotaped herself having sex with an art collector. He paid for the videotape as an artwork, not for the sex itself. Both works stage the paradox of sexual performance, vital acts are sterilised in the presence of the institution, the commerce and the recording.
Elle Krystufek (Top) Andrea Fraser (Bottom
And that’s the core of The Baddie Paradox:
• High visibility, low approachability: Desired, but rarely approached.
• Sexual aura ≠ sexual access: Style, confidence, and self-possession read as sex, but aren’t the same as sex itself.
• The Madonna–Whore complex still lingers. Baddies are often fantasised about but not pursued sincerely.
• Power dynamics. Owning your space shifts desire: some fetishise it, others retreat.
So is it just me, or are all girls in the arts fucking - except the Contemporary Art Baddie? Or maybe that’s the paradox: she is fucking, but what she really wants is intimacy. Sexual aura does not mean sexual access, and neither guarantees intimacy.
Bruno Zhu and Meme on Hoes
Inspired by Andrea Fraser’s The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram, I developed a 4-Venn diagram to grasp not just the art world but the girls who keep it running: the Indie Literature Hottie, the Gallerina, the Art Hoe, the Community Artist - and, of course, the Contemporary Art Baddie, who encompasses them all. What are they moved by? Their motives? Overlaps? And importantly, do they fuck?
Review of New Cult-Like Images at Collezione Nancy Delroi, Milan
Dispatch from the opening of New Cult-Like Images or Come il patto tra adulti diventa un trattato di strategia affettiva, the Fifteen figures tableaux a show by the Italo-Lebanese duo, Desirée Nakouzi De Monte and Andrea Parenti, A.K.A Collezione Nancy Delroi and Wilhelmina Merante and Leyla Riggio.
New Cult-Like Images saw a staged scene, or tableaux, by Nancy Delroi alongside a series of debut sculptural installations by Merante and Riggio. The staged scene was the centrepiece, doubling as the set for a series of documented neo-realistist filmed moments involving the audience, premiering throughout the following week on a four-monitor CRT display. These unscripted films expand the ongoing film cycle of episodes, scenes, frames and dialogues launched recently by the duo, including You Kill Me Second & Anna Smoking Cigarettes.
On view by appointment until 9 July, it represents a pact between (four) adults, un trattato di strategia affettiva (a treatise on emotional strategy) a New Cult founded on the rhythm of wood, metal, FRP material and plywood. Today, as always, we celebrate despair by painting crosses and drinking red wine.
—
June 23 2025, 8 O’clock: Usual Monday evening, Milan is deserted. When walking down the streets, from the barely illuminated shop windows, mannequins dressed to the nines wink at passers-by; a couple of them look for a cigarette. I can't help but stop for a chat: a woman in military uniform and another individual in gauze, “Future”, insist on accompanying me towards the opening. I long for company - I also need a lighter.
Once there, beyond a wooden gate, a closed metal gate. Beyond that metal gate, more gates and wooden windows, and then, a room filled with undressed to the nines mannequins seated at a banquet table. Too busy alcohol-sinking, they do not turn around as I enter; their desolate body fat percentages are floating in a kind of ED arrogance permeating everyone’s pores and sanity.
The space is staggered by some cheap plywood furniture pieces, arranged as if there is something to hide: a body, a love affair, the true and ultimate meaning of Contemporary Art... for sure not the pornographic side of it, everyone in there is naked and careless.
On the walls, the works of Merante and Riggio, so-called “Metal Paintings”. Full and empty spaces signalling where to hold and where to release the breath: Greek Cross, Red Cross, Medium Shot of a Skeleton, A Rectified Rib Cage, Geometric idol, Rampant bird…
I need the lighter again, but, turning around, I no longer find my two friends: it seems the diners have grown in number, from 15 to 17; I read on the furnished paper sheet: Tableaux of fifteen figures, Every third thought shall be my grave...
I count up to three and Désirée appears, introducing me to the boudoir, specifying that in an hour there would be a performance where something would happen…finally. The Fiber Reinforced Polymer mannequin table seems now a bit inactive, plagued by appetite loss, the hunger drowned with previously overflowing glasses of wine and the lungs stuffed with too many smokes. Forks are lined up along the surface, untouched, like an obstacle course. Or a pew line.
A round, yellowish atmosphere sickens the room, sources of light are a resembling Bauhaus chandelier and a bunch of spotlights burning the air - I later notice a small rectangular skylight in the ceiling - perhaps where the Rampant bird entered from. 20 feathers counted, intact. Despite its flapping of wings, there is no breathing in there. Smells like Mephedrone.
In the previous room I had skipped initially four adults in black shake hands and prepare drinks blended with ice and berries. I wonder if they have agreed on it or it’s just mandatory for artists to wear total black outfits.
A row of unlit televisions reflects guests talking. A girl eating blueberries, then Andrea smoking a cigarette at the door. From the dark screens, the room multiplies, making me think about Borges' Labyrinth – I hope no one tries to enter the television looking for meanings.
After an indefinite period (punctuated only by the emptying of the wildberries tray on the central table), some real-life actors animate the inanimate room: dirty looks, bad words, and gratuitous violence towards those who arrived first and occupy the stage. Forks fly. It's cheesy.
The Ikea furniture of the early 2000s begins to exude squalor: we are all involved, but no one is there. We have lost our hunger and desire, too. No one feels like it but everyone crowds in, it's a feast of empty plates. An orgy of wet cigarette butts. The Rampant Bird gets a wing wound and flies away. The other sculptural paintings remain stoically unbothered,o not moving a muscle except for their tongues, with which they climaxingly spit out “pathetic yet deliberate compositions”.
The four adults are no longer taking part in the action: one for each corner they film the scene, silently sticking to their black clothes choice.
We are harming no one but ourselves; no difference between what was happening previously in the first and the second room: drinking, smoking, and talking about the guests on the opposite side of the wall. We sink together.
If I had not come with someone, I would, having being exposed, feel uncomfortable. LuckilyI recognise Militancy and Future, bending over the table, being bullied.
The latter is now missing an arm.
Images Courtesy of the Gallery, Author and Aitana Blasco
Essay
/ 26 June 2025 / By: Hollywood Superstar Editorial
Hollywood Superstar Categorises Seventeen Trends at Basel
This is the Hollywood Superstar's perspective-heavy appraisal of visual trends which emerged at Art Basel. Also included: The Swiss Art Awards, Liste, Basel Social Club and Maison Clearing. Many of the takes in the below article are reductive and potentially false. Viewed individually, these formal categorisations do not do justice to the work, time and thought that artists have imbued into their practice. And yet...! Identifying broad curatorial trends feels the most appropriate way of describing the clusterfuck of visual culture Basel produces. Culture that is, inevitably, recylced across Instagram feeds via curated and largely unwarranted magazine selections/highlights/carousels. The Superstar has curated this overarching narrative as a response to the phenomena of viewing art across two vectors; the in person fair and the online fair - the latter legitimising the former.
The Superstar is inclined to cherry-pick form and do neologisms.
Starting with the best: Basel Social Club (BSC) is a not-for-profit art fair that platforms young galleries (those under five years old) alongside major, avant-gardist and conceptual-focused galleries. The theme this year was "Bank" - heavy handed irony intended. The Social Club sets the trend for younger happenings across the city, The Swiss Art Awards included, demonstrating that art can still posesss a politically critical, tastefully subversive jouissance. At the younger fairs - visual trends manifested with no-holds-barred experimentation: "Rabelesian Grotesque", "Font Fetish", "Dolls", "Cafe Art Imitation", "Haunted House Immersive"...
One step up in the fair hierarchy is Liste. Liste presented a refined, far more marketable iteration of themes established at smaller fairs. If BSC was childlike, nïave, and optimistic - the larger scale and economic sacrifice required for Liste generated a curatorially adolescent atmosphere. Like a teenage girl, the galleries at Liste permeated a latent anxiety and a nihilistic pre-occupation with self-image. Their booths were good, no doubt, but self-conscious. None of the Da-Da ist abandonment and experimentation at Social Club. The Superstar wonders if the success of the non-mainstream, free fairs will have effect in coming years upon the neat Loosian floor-plan of Liste.
At Art Basel - the behemoth- any oscillations of aesthetic trends were far subtler. There was a very slight curatorial angle amongst the Blue Chips - a nod or gesture to something real. Between the household names on display; Rothko, Picasso, Hockney, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, et al, were artworks whose inclusion and content mirrored the zeitgeist of satellite fairs; Isa Genzken’s Neo-junk sculptures or Sylvie Fleury’s Lacanian pop-collages, Miriam Cahn’s amorphous flayed bodies or Picabia’s leering Americana; the pornographic displays of Cosi Fanni Tutti and Kara Walker; the Tromp l’oeil de-constructions of Jorg Immendorff or the braided canvases of Rosemarie Trockel. Most non-boring art could be found on the second floor. Names whose theoretical rigour and post-modernist attitude, not to mention fiscal success, act as a needed exemplar for (disillusioned) younger artists.
These groupings reflect a broader taste for art that is irreverent and satirical. This year the art which struck the Superstar resembled William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. A works salience was grounded by a tangible, off-kilter beauty.
1 Dolls, or, The Return To Figurative Sculpture
The doll has become a major trope. The emptiness embodied by the maquette, the puppet and the doll in contemporary art is related to its form or function outside of the art space. She has come to embody dissatisfaction or emptiness alongside a semi-erotic appearance and ludic personality.
Figurative sculpture's return is signalled by the influx of doll-type artistic forms - the doll sits halfway between ready-made and full-blown, Grecian verisimilitude. Like prometheus, man creates something in his image to disperse his isolation. A doll, or avatar, has always been a source of transcendental comfort. Its resurgence today signals our need for re-assurance; a humanist symbol in the face of techno-pesssimism. Mannequins are both disruptive and irreverent. In the digital realm, they have achieved the status of uncanny combatants of silicon valley.
A recent suite of exhibitions includes; Gisele Vienne at George Kolbe Museum, Lucy Mackenzie at Atelier E.B., Maya Man’s digital series “Ugly Bitches”, Isabelle Frances Maguire at The Renaissance Society, Pam Hogg at Emalin Gallery, Diego Macron at Kunsthalle Wein, Pierre Hyugher in Venice, Kara Walker’s Fortuna, Sveta Mordovskaya at King’s Leap. Not to mention the greats: Soshiro Matsubara at Croy Nielsen, Pierre Klossowski, Rosemarie Trockel and, of course, Iza Genzken. Documentaries include Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s “Maintenance”, which focuses on the maintenance of sex dolls at a German brothel, and its forerunner, Love Me, Love My Doll (2007), about a group of men whose lives revolve around post-human interaction.
i) Children’s Dolls (humorous, found object play, relates to post-modern fatigue and consumerism)
Alex Bag (Galerie Oskar Weiss & Todd von Ammon) BSC
Ana Viktoria Dzinic (Nicoletti Contemporary) Liste
iii) The Craft Mannequin (a doll made more fetishistic by her materiality - Oskar Kokoschka’s doll, Alma, made of human hair)
Madeline Roger Lacan (galerie_eigenart) Basel
Asma_asma_asma_asma_asma_asma (LA house of Gaga) Basel
Mannequins in the cupboard at the Basel Social Club (artist unknown)
iii) The disturbed
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, The 48 Hours of Kwik & Kwak (Isabella Bortolozzi) Basel
2 Font Fetish or Logo Worship
Artists have become fascinated with the seductive tyranny of the everyday as visualised by the conglomerate logo. Meme branding has pushed us into Post-Luxury, we can look to Helvetica Black revivalism: the American Apparel font.
Sarah Staunton (Galerina) Liste
Bedros Yeretzia (Diana Gallery) Liste
Georgie Netell (Reena Spailings) Basel
Monica Bonvicini (Galleria Reffaella) Basel
Jasmine gregory (Karma international) and (Clearing)
Mohamed Almusibli, Loucia Carlier and Sylvie Fleury (Stick and Poke curated by Alana Alireza) BSC
Georgie Nettel (denitment_zh) BSC
3 “Cafe Art” Imitation
Art which consciously mimics “low” or “amateur” painting styles. The kind once described as hobbyist, usually found on the walls cafés, whose interior has not been updated since the 2008 Financial Crisis. Taste, hierarchy etc. Actually, usually very well painted.
Rita Siegfried (Clearing LA)
Sam Creasey (Andrew Reed Gallery) BSC
Matt Keegan (Magenta Plains) Liste
Realist figurative painting. Everyone loves the figurative! In the peri-menopausal space between Post Woke and Woke 2 we still need it to be slightly subversive or horizontal to the out-right representational. Veering into the kitsch, this style of painting mimics the first and second faculties of what Umberto Eco calls "Ur-Fascism" : the rejection of modernity in favour of tradition and the perpetual re-interpretation of the past.
Jean Nipon (Clearing LA) Maison Clearing
Bill Coulthurst (Plymouth Rock) BSC
Francis Picabia (Galerie Isabella Bertolozzi) Basel
5 Childlike Regression Figurative
Works in which the formal style is childlike. The use of an nïave formal language throughout multiple works acts as a world-building exercise. It’s another indicator of figuration’s traditional language being diluted. What better way to deconstruct hierarchies than to appeal to their antithesis; innocence.
Maya Hewitt (Theta) BSC
Exquisite Corpse (Unknown Gallery) BSC
Gabor Pinter (longtermhandstand) BSC
Reba Maybury (Company Gallery) Liste
Matt Keegan (Magenta Plains)Liste
6 Modern Gothic (Domestic Cruelness is a sub-section of this)
Already defined by Contemporary Art Writing as follows:
“Modern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in Contemporary Art from the early 21st century to this day. Characteristics of Modern Gothic include the presence of banal, irrational, and transgressive thoughts, desires and impulses. Modern Gothic texts also mark a Marxist return of the alienated: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the city's banality of power structures that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of Modern history.”
Jenny Holzer (Spruth Magers)
Franz Burkhardt’s “Bus Stop” (Littmann Kulturprojekte) BSC
Paul Levack’s images of the interiors of Venice Casinos, exacerbated by the presence of a large casino table in the room (Hans Goodrich) BSC
Mia Sanchez (Swiss Art Awards)
Cedric Eisenring (Drei Gallery) BSC
7 Domestic Cruelness
Defined by Connor Crawford in his Liste booth. As a genre, Domestic Cruelness is preoccupied with how domestic space can reflect, trigger or embody psychic disturbance. Objects which should be comforting due to their association with the private realm - the sofa, the bed, the childhood home - appear in the guise of the mass-produced object devoid of auratic presence. As with Modern Gothic, the trope reflects tenets of alienation in relation to mass-individuality.
Mia Sanchez (Sentiment) BSC
Connor Crawford (Shore Gallery) Liste
Gillian Carnegie (Cabinet) Basel
8 Haunted House Immersive
Objects that could be haunted due to their antique effect are shown as animistic, shattered representations of universalist flaws. These are often containers of sorts whose hollowed-out interior spaces have a metabolic significance. Visually, they could be lifted from the decor of a Disneyland Horror house, they are a camp affectation appealing to pop culture.
Also includes the notorious wallpapered accent.
Alexandra Metcalf at (Ginny on Fedrick) Basel
Sophie Jung (Spielzug) BSC
Shamiran Istifan (Swiss Art Awards Winner)
9 The Phantasmagoric-Pop-Pysch Collage
This trend is an artistic investigation of the archive. How our minds archive time spent in domestic or urban spaces - projections of emotion time, place and longing. Found urban objects appear in mounted wall sculpture alongside disposable early 2000s family photographs, or ephemera one might discover, covered in dust, underneath a now-grown-up child's bed. Post-American dream aesthetics collaged with bits from estate sales.
The photograph is often contrasted with the found, unrefined object. Like Sveta Mordovskaya’s photographs, taken from 2005-2008. As Margaret Kross writes of Gregory's work, the pop-psych collage is “hot mess conceptualism”.
It makes use of the ephemera desired by the aspirational middle class; the glimpse of unrealised captialist desire is phantasmagoric. One experiences it as a child, yearning for the boxed barbie behind a plastic screen, only to become dissatisfied once it is unpackaged - the idea is merely a frightenening projection.
Jasmine Gregory (Swiss Art Awards)
Sveta Mordovskaya (Swiss Art Awards)
Sarah Benslimane (Clearing)
Zoe Baranek (Swiss Art Awards)
Samuel Haitz (Triangolo)
10 Tromp L’eoil, Tromp L’eoil, Tromp L’eoil
Self explanatory, probably the trend that will define painting most (if not already) in the next year. Something about false promise, failure and the seduction of illusion.
Lucy Mckenzie (Cabinet) and (Buchloch) Basel
Karolin Braegar (City Galerie Wein) Liste
Issy Wood (Michael Werner) Basel
Matt Keegan (Magenta Plains) Liste
11 Glitch-Romanticism
Taking the digital glitch and pairing it with a longing for sublimity, human connection and the romantic. Digital referents are contained within a emotional, deeply moving practice. Formally, artists make use of the glitch or blur: a shift, movement or break in the system - as a way of transforming ordinary subject matter. In other instances, artists use dated or nostalgic technology (glitch-tech) as a medium in their practice.
A fairytale tale told on a heavy set monitor or a painting with italicised, equally spaced font floating on the picture plane, as if placed by a text-box.
Ana Vik (Nicoletti) Liste
Matthias Groebel, (Mai 36 Galerie) Basel
Mathis Altman (Fitzpatrick gallery) BSC
12 Effervescent Grotesquerie
Abject subject matter depicted in effervescent hues. Paint seems to “evaporate” from the canvas as it is applied in washed out layers. The trauma of an abortion is exacerbated by the genre’s stylistic softness.
Evangeline Turner (A.Squire) Liste
Miriam Cahn (Meyer Riegger) Basel
13 Formally Rabelaisian
Gargantuan distortion. Rabelaisian means “to display earthy humour, Bawdy”. Formally, this manifests in rounded forms and cartoon-like human presentation. Style tends to fear towards kitschiness, commonality or “low” styles akin to Breughal’s representation of the bacchnicalic lower classes. Human figures convey joviality, but this happiness is filled with mirth.
Witt Fetter (Derosia) BSC
Hans Schärer (Galerie Mueller) BSC
Francis Picabia (Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery) Basel
Cosima von Bonin (La houseofgaga) Basel Unlimited
14 Brain Rot Carnivalesque Entertainment
Taking inspiration from the circus where freaks, oddities and societal outcasts are celebrated. Instead, presented to the crowd for amusement are the multifarious “brain rot” functions of the internet. The entertainment of the online masses is translated for the public.
Foreign/domestic mannequins by Jeffrey Dalessandro. Handmade mannequin of Luigi Mangione replete with gun and backpack. (Foreign and Domestic), BSC
South Park/Lacan by Marc Kokopeli (King of Venmo) ( Reena Spaulings) BSC
Urs fischer (The Modern institute) Basel
Noemi Pfister (Forspace) Swiss Art Awards
Paul Fritz and Virginie Sistek (Forspace) Swiss Art Awards
15 Fine Graphic Fetish
Fantastical illustration, usually fetish imagery, elevated by the artists attention to detail and skill with graphite shading.
Painting the context of one’s camera roll. Using the image juxtaposition of John Berger with meme-like screenshotted images.
Al Freeman (56 Henry) Liste
17 Ready Made Shapes
Cookie cutter Shapes. It’s unclear whether the vogue for incorporating patterns or ready made shapes into art directly reflects similar trends in fashion. One reason these shapes have been incorporated is for their immediacy, their cheapness is seductive, but, increasingly repetitive.
A classic high/low motif that sometimes pays off and sometimes appears like an art school interpretation of early 2010’s Word Art Shapes.
The abstract polka dot oscillates between a 2003 prada skirt pattern and a cheerful zombie formalist canvas.
Jutta Koether
Gritli Faulhaber (Maison Clearing)
Jim Lambie (The Modern Institute) Basel
Zoe Baranek (Swiss Art Awards)
18 The Self-Conscious Abstract Painter
Why paint with semi-cubist forms today? What does it mean? What is the point? Is the artist using these modernist forms as a self-conscious reflection on the shifting nature of the avant-garde?
These works are often successful for two reasons: 1) They utilise the succesful moniker of modernist abstraction while 2) The self-mockery contained in using said modernist forms creates an erudite "inside joke" for the connoisseur viewer. "Ha, Ha" the buyer says "This is a very clever commentary on dated notions of abstraction in painting - the gun is a substitute for modernism's brusque machismo energy...
Matt Gess’s Maiden Crimes 1 (2025) and Militia (2025) were shown at Récréations a show by Gnossienne Gallery alongside work by Nayan Patel, Sasha Miasnikova and Jordan Derrien. View the project on Instagram here.
*Maiden Otto*
There’s something that can only be brought out by being locked away: this is the tension that suspends Maiden Crimes. "It’s about yin and yang", said [legendary erotic photographer] Eric Kroll to Matt Gess, who had tracked him down to his kitchen table in Arizona. Balance is a notion that applies just as much to the climbing of chain-link fences as it does to the ecstasy of constrained compositions; these are all driving forces behind Gess's work.
Coming across a Maiden is a revelation that makes the word casting appear sanitised and crass. “You know what Eileen? I think [NAME] might be a Maiden…” We cock our heads, squint our eyes and pout our lips at each other, considering the idea like we just tasted something new. What’s your taste? Matt describes things like trespassing as ‘delicious’. Maidens are discovered, they walk out of the water of their past dripping with becoming; like every crime, they are unique. For example: Maiden Kirsten was sitting on the pavement of Kingsland road, “parked outside Greggs, lipstick defiant”,“she styled herself, quickly stuffing a circus flyer in her bra”. Charlie Osbourne emerged to Matt in another way: the theatricality of her rigid and heartfelt musical performances. These are subjects Matt observes from the anonymous position of an audience member or passerby- Maidens emerge having built their own kinds of stages: Kirsten with her pile of street cardboard, or Charlie at the ICA... Maiden is a project that poses seductively in the field of surveillance, anonymity and consent; no wonder Matt calls it a ‘license to voyeurism’.
*Maiden Kirsten*
His spare captions under his instagram posts are tantalisingly partial origin stories: “I saw Vivi working behind an Irish bar in Helsinki two hours before my flight back home. I asked her if she wanted to come back to my room and play dress-up.” Matt turns to me, “She works in KFC,” he says, breathlessly, “it’s perfect.”
And this is the key to understanding why the pictures have the effect that they do: it is a fetishistic approach to the details of living, of being, that makes Maiden Crimes the realest. The fetish is not the black patent heels, the velvet mask or the nipple cover; it’s not the leather glove, or the absence of a lower arm, it’s not the top of a flesh coloured stocking or the 1930s girdle, or any of the objects Matt plays with - it is none of these things in and of themselves. It’s the focus of an eye on a singular point, it is the tension of bodily concentration until one’s mind empties: not falling from the platforms; the explosion of a stepped-on grape; the expression of breath into an instrument and its contortion into sound, it is the narrowing in on a target until it is the right moment to squeeze the trigger… “you know when you shoot someone you say: I’m going to shoot this person. And it’s like what? With a camera or a gun? It’s the same thing.” This violent metaphor is appropriate for an artist whose alter ego Claudia Speed comes from the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto II.
*Matt Gess in the house of Eric Kroll*
Perhaps it is enough for now, to simply say that the fetish look invests objects with a magical coercive power over individual subjectivity. Matt’s work recognises the addictive determinism generated by Fetish. Careful arrangement of objects set in motion a sequence of events: female clothes on a male body creates certain life-situations. Cross-dressing in West Hollywood, Matt says, “I would find myself climbing over chain-link fences”.L.A plays itself, life seduces itself, one thing leads to another…
“When I was cross dressing and going to these strip clubs I’d literally be getting into these cars with these men and climbing these fences. It wasn’t always sexual. I love iron gates and what it represents of being locked away, and I think that kind of came from growing up in South Africa- the gated compounds with security and it was always just like quite fascinating and really beautiful because you’ve kind of got like these illuminated swimming pools and these big like chunky gates that have, like, electricity going through them.”
Apart from the strip clubs of Hollywood, there is another cinematic influence on the project. In his room in East London, Matt’s nameless Canary likes to perch on his stack of Alan Clarke DVDs. The Yorkshire-born director (1935-1990), whose later minimalist works on topics such as the miner’s strike, Road (1988); childhood heroin use, Christine (1987) and the Troubles in Ireland Elephant(1989) gave the violence of British Social Realist Cinema the Bressonian purity, precision and appeal of a finger dragged across skin, the sound of a dress being unzipped. The video of Osbourne in a prim buttercup-yellow dress spinning and playing her harmonica iconica, is a performance that would not have been amiss from the legendary party scene in Road. There is a clear fascination in Crimes not just with the acting in Clarke’s films, but the social-psychological aura emitted through the stripped-back nature of the sets. Their cheap plain kitchens and unplastered walls, like the pale, rail-thin bodies of Maidens, captivate in their austerity. There is a tension of set and character; history and choice: between the purple pub carpet and aubergine hair; neglected linoleum and patent heels, of weathered junkie skin against orange brick. Clarke’s protagonists and Matt’s Maidens are aesthetic creations that both tenderly embody and fiercely rebel against their surroundings.
We are in a borrowed mansion in Epping Forest, surrounded by chintz and framed photographs of an English family where the mothers wear pearls. Matt is preparing the room, where, in two hours’ time, he will shoot Maiden Rafe. Elusin’s song, silhouette, fills up with the room alongside the smoke machine- the shoegaze haze activates the power of the objects thrown on the bed: Mickey Mouse mask; Eric Stanton Book; black caged hoop skirt; patent heels size 10; a single white gym sock (photographer’s own). Ignoring the still life he had been arranging on the floor, Matt turns to the assemblage on the bed: “accidents are the whole point.” Whilst the shoots are planned carefully, there is a refreshing lack of career-calculation to Maiden Crimes, “I have to hide my phone after I post.” Matt tells me, “quite a few stylists have got in contact, which is nice of them, but a certain part of me is just like… fuck off?”.
This is why Matt’s photos stand out from the scroll; as we are inundated with digital pornography, the analogue fetish adventure endures…
When I was ten years old, I had a babysitter named Shira-Rose. Shira-Rose was in her twenties and part of an improv dance troop. It was 2012. I idolised Shira-Rose in the way that any ten-year-old girl without a sister would idolise a cool babysitter. She was funny and intrepid and spoke to me like an adult, even if I was only ten. She also dressed like no one else I had met before. She wore a lot of neon spandex and what seemed like fifty-thick plexi bangles on one arm at all times. She cut up her t-shirts and tied them back together to make braided cutouts on the side. She wore stilettos to pick me up from the school bus.
Shira-Rose had one pair of heels that I remember distinctly: foamy-looking rubber wedges in bright apricot with a shiny white patent strap. They were the perfect shoe for a babysitter on the move: practical, otherworldly and simultaneously elementary - elementary in their colour scheme and silhouette. Years later, I was scouring the internet for a pair of heels and found Shira-Rose’s apricot pair staring back at me from the screen. I bought the same pair in grey, becoming obsessed, not only with the shoes, but with their strange maker: United Nude.
United Nude was founded in 2003 by Rem D Koolhaas (nephew of postmodern Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas) and Galahad Clark, heir of the Clark’s shoe family. Their website contains a laughably aspirational blurb, citing heritage and architectural pretensions:
“As the brain-child of architecturally-trained designer Rem D. Koolhaas, the nephew and namesake of renowned architect Rem Koolhaas, the brand is guided by an unwavering commitment to pushing the boundaries of footwear design. Each product is a reinterpretation of an architectural object - an exploration of the possibilities offered by movement, colors, and materials.”
In the noughties, United Nude shoes were made in bubblegum pinks, hazy, eggy yellows and electric blues. They had patent straps as shiny as new cars; clean matte leathers like a psychiatrist's sofa. Mylar, PVC, and soft rubbers constructed a feeling of minimalist space-age. Campaigns featured hazy silhouettes with illuminated, glowing feet. The shoes were by no means athletic but displayed some level of corpo-athleticism, the kind that occurs on the floor of a sleazy gallery like the one Marnie works at in Girls. United Nude collaborated with Iris Van Herpen, Zaha Hadid and Viktor & Rolf. In 2011, during Miami Art Basel, they opened their Miami store and ‘gallery’ where they showed photos and sculptural works alongside their shoes. The perfect shoe for an exceptional babysitter could also be a perfect shoe for the aimless dilettante: halfway between the art world, fashion week parties and her own self-delusion.
Iris Van Herpen x United Nude (Source: United Nude Spring Summer 2011 UNCover Publication)
Koolhaas’ Mobius Prototype (Source: United Nude)
United Nude released a line of shoes called ‘Eamz’ in 2011, named after the leather office chair Ray and Charles Eames designed in 1956. This series of shoes featured heels, boots and lace-ups with a protruding steel heel that imitated the base of the chair. The shoe's construction created an illusion of a foot suspended in mid-air, as if the wearer might exist in some zero-gravity space when she slips it on. The ‘Eamz’ shoe concerned itself structurally with negative space, balance and stability. While contemporary clothing design doesn’t necessarily need to respond to the same level of practical parameters, the shoe, as it holds up the foot and aims to keep the wearer balanced, must consider some small feat of engineered function. United Nude shoes were a moving structure, carrying the wearer through the city, from hot pavement to air-conditioned offices to trembling dance floors beside thronging, open bars.
The ‘Eamz’ Shoe (Image 1: eBay, Image 2: United Nude)
Situating themselves within the world of avant-garde design, United Nude also heavily co-opted the aesthetics of futurism, which was rampant following the millennium. The conceptual holo-screen, megapixel or the flash of a DSLR is realised in United Nude’s ‘Lo Res’ shoe. Inspired by early digital 3-D rendering systems that Koolhaas used at university when studying architecture, the shoe took on geometric surface like a glitchy disco ball. United Nude also designed a model for a Lamborghini using the same system, displayed in their flagship stores alongside the shoes. Techno-optimism was central to United Nude’s direction, reflecting a fantasy relevant at the time, that to most of us now feels painfully tired and charged. Actually, Koolhaas recently contributed to the prototype design of Tesla’s Cybertruck. As tech and automation industries become increasingly adjacent to rising fascist aims, garnering the same optimism for a future of technology no longer seems plausible.
The ‘Lo Res’ Shoe (Image 1&2: United Nude)
On Flickr, I found a lot of images of the store displays. At its peak, the brand had flagship stores in New York, London, Miami, Amsterdam and Shanghai. The lighting was akin to swanky downtown clubs, walls lined with shoes nestled into grid cubbies engulfed in glowing LED hues. The store wall concept was trademarked by United Nude in 2009 and called the Wall of Light™. The LEDs were programmed to oscillate with whatever song would be playing inside. One Reddit user described their shopping experience in the Bond Street store as “utterly overwhelming, nauseating and hypnotising… Ladytron was playing so loudly I couldn’t hear myself think.”
The Lamborghini Model, Lo Res Concept Car
Having never visited a United Nude store or any store with such an ambitious concept, I can only fantasise about what kind of feeling a shopping experience like this would have left me with. For those of us born either just before or after the millennium and interested in clothing and shoes of the past, the act of shopping is almost inseparable from another, sometimes arduous and definitely anonymous process of scrolling. Pixelated square images replace the windows of stores that were once designed for consumers to absorb a message, concept or feeling --then buy something. While the stated ambitions of United Nude, to stand as some convergence of architecture, design, fashion and technology are kind of goofy at best and fall ostentatiously flat at worst, this level of considered world-building around the marketing of one product and spatial concept is something that I wish we saw more of now.
By 2016, United Nude closed almost all of their storefronts. The only store left standing today is in Amsterdam. United Nude still makes shoes though much of the vibrancy and bubbliness has now been replaced with safer silhouettes and lackluster beiges. The futurisms of early United Nude, the frenzy around the potential of technology, where shopping in stores was still a default on the precipice of an internet that would become a constant presence in our pocket, have quickly been replaced by rightful skepticism, malaise and nostalgia for something
much older. But the shoes themselves remain, at least to me, as rubbery relics of a strange, playful mirage before the storm.
