Fashion is Alec Monopoly is Art

"Costume Art" is on view through January 10th, 2027.

Read her review of the Met Gala here, where she outlines that...

"I will review the costume institute show at face value, they got blood money and from what I can tell they used it to buy and display the best."

N.B.

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On the second monday in may, I trekked to the upper east side, home to the most fabulous of art hoes of yesteryear (old angry wealthy ladies with puffy lips, hair teased high, and the tiniest frames being engulfed in Miyake’s Pleats Please) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose facade and grand steps just a week before had been transformed into the backdrop that makes up the internet-drenched playground that has morphed into the celebrity/corporate-ego-orgy known as the Met Gala. As it has done since 1947 (although once a humble affair), the 2026 gala (spectacle) was held to celebrate (ego-gorge) the opening of the Met Costume Institute’s May exhibition Costume Art: ‘fashion is art’.

So let’s get into it… First and foremost highlighting the importance of the discussion that is Costuming Art. It has formed the crux of many artists' practices and works over the decades, myself included. First grounded officially in language with Anne Hollander’s Seeing Through Clothes aka a Fashion History 101 textbook and also my own personal bible: my copy a tattered, dog-eared-to-oblivion old thing, replete with highlights and embarrassing notes left in the margins by a girl in her early 20’s. I was pleased and surprised to see it in the giftshop, here she is in all her glory:

For the first time ever, the show pulled from the museums’ 15 other departments, juxtaposing works dating back as far as 5000 BCE, using said works to prop up (metaphorically, the overworked conservators would never!) the clothing displayed, instead of the usual other way around.

I must admit, despite the promise of a face-value review, I was still donning my hater cap, a grey felted beret with oversized deco hat pin, upon my arrival. The show was oversized with goods — a gluttenous display of pockets so deep, you had not 1 or 2 but EIGHT examples of tattooed garments. I could not shake the knowledge that the Costume Institute had blood money, which they so fittingly used in the display of a whole section of blood-related garb entitled the ‘Vital Body,’ (love…) from the second richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos along with his wife Laura Sanchez Bezos, to make the exhibition possible with a donation of ten million dollars to the institute. This amount is the Bezos-equivalent of finding change in your pocket, just saying! Anyways, I guess it is a discussion we can’t count on fashion to fix– but I think if we are trying to make a show that hoists fashion out of the realm of the superficial – the exhibition establishing itself alongside a new wing of the met — it's a pretty damning start.

In case you have not had the privilege of diving into this nerdy ass textbook from the 70s, upon entering the main gallery, there is an automated speaker a la robotic voice overhead, announcing “PLEASE STEP AWAY FROM THE ART,” anytime a viewer got to close to something… which was every goddamn five seconds because it's so crowded in that place. So yes, Fashion is Art, and security agrees. Speaking of surveillance, the mannequins are 1984 chic; something about their presentation-height combined with the chopped off profiles replaced with mirrors, that gives you the eerie sense you are actually the one on display, and those mirrors are, in fact, two way (or two-faced?). What was the conceptual decision for these over-the-top mirror faces? A physical manifestation of the way we project our own societal ideals and ideas onto dress and the dressed body? Sure, but there are pages and pages of pretentious placard text throughout the exhibition that really hammers this idea into your skull for you. It felt gimmicky… and creepy within the framework of amazon money.

Sidenote– drinking game idea: go through the exhibit with your friends: take a shot every time you see the words: liminal, allegorical, abstraction, allegorical abstraction, transcultural, temporal, dialectic, transcend, externalize… leave obliterated. I mean, I loved the text sometimes, but it was a bit much– not to mention even my seasoned in fashion-theory-reading brain had a hard time consuming the word salads with a robot yelling in one ear while simultaneously bopping and weaving between the very thick crowd, this type of culture ingesting is not for the faint of heart (or potentially for the sober).

Vionnet, Adrian and Madame Gres-clad surveillance systems watching down on you plebs!!!!!

Ok ok I can continue to nitpick.. Or, I can show you my favorite parts. I adore and learn so much from looking at fashion through the context of art history; I was a child, and the proverbial candy in the store was archive Vionnet, Madame Gres, 19th century undergarment structures, Archival Mugler, Iranian Iron-age sculpture, a whole section dedicated to the Grecian Stance, 15th century italian temperas, 18th century anatomical drawings, Albrecht Durer, old school Yves Saint Laurant, Miyake, a TON of Undercover, Victorian Mourning mementos, Mcqueen, 4th century BCE Etruscan Armor, and a lot of each. The pockets were DEEP and the show was massive. Please regard some of my own personal highlights- details that made full use of the limitless possibilities Andrew Bolton had to work with; So, I cordially present…. moments that had me forgetting that I was a hater:

Female figurine kneading dough(?)
Cypriot
ca. 600–480 BCE

The section on the Grecian Bend, a by-product of the freaky late 19th century. The lithograph is fabulously juxtaposed with a grecian sculpture from ~500 BCE. There is an entire section on the grecian bend and bodily apparatuses that helped women achieve the booty-as-shelf aesthetic synonymous with this fashion period, hotness is fashion is circular!

This Louise Bourgois Drawing paired with a Marine Serre body suit, I don’t think Louise would have liked Marine Serre Body suits very much… but I do think they were starting to scratch at something here.

This ultra special boil-chic cotton muslin number from the early 19th century, god bless you all for letting this 1981 acquisition see the light of day!!!

Victorian hair mementos; Victorians were true freaks (Valerie Steele writes extensively on their horny weird freak-ness if you are interested), and one of many death-obsessed rituals that came out of this weird time/place are hair mementos. Missed opportunity to incorporate the Mcqueen line from the 90s where Lee incorporated locks of his own hair into the garments, BUT I love any opportunity to see these high drama mementos in real life.

Pairing Munch with fashion… I think Evard would have LOVED the Dress and Psychoanalysis show at the Museum at Fit last year, but I think knowing his work was propping up the fashion lords in the skull section at the Met Fashion exhibit would have the expressionist absolutely furious!!! Which I find charming.

Jacques Fabien Gautier Dagoty (French, 1716-1785)
Plate, from Joseph Guichard Duverney's Myologie Complette en Couleur et
Grandeur Naturelle, 1746

Andy Warhol's torso shot by Irving Penn juxtaposed with a dress by NY contemporary Susan Ciancolo. The scars from surgical sutures mimicking the hand-basted work done by the seasoned artist/designer was highbrow new york.

Wooden carved prosthetic limbs by Alexander Mcqueen

There were lots of beauties not making it into this image carousel- custom Michaela Stark, a plethora of contemporary designers, mannequins displaying underrepresented bodies in fashion, a section on the corpulent body educating one on fat theory- all great things saturating the internet if it's sparking your interest.

The Chopping Block

Ok time to put my hater hat (black cloche adorned with rooster feathers) back on, for just a couple things that I need to get off my Kamali-Clad chest.

Starting with the most literal chopped, how can you show a silhouette like this with a profile like that?? It was so close to being so good. The lack of a profile/face from this victorian dame is in an attention-argument with the shelf-like derriere synonymous with 19th-century dress and a focus point of the Seurat work. In my humble opinion, NOTHING should be distracting from the majestic booty-popping of the bustle.

I also wanted to share an interesting parallel of this display from a mere month ago at the Museum at FIT Art X Fashion show:

Although I do think the victorian dress the Met chose to parallel the painting was much more successful than the Museum at FIT’s, I am most likely hating on the Met’s display because, as my work was curated into the FIT’s show, I am biased and potentially jealous that the Met got a real study from Seurat, and we got an LED display. Alas.

This iconic Margiela tattoo top from 1989 had the CI using the term “liminal space” (drink) to describe the area of skin between arms and shoulders.

Nobody asked them to show Anselm Kiefer paired with Joseph Thimister’s collection addressing the lasting effects of WWI on modern society. You really want to go there? With a current war raging and genocide we are witnessing real time through our phones? To include this, almost as an afterthought, as an element/way to look at the mirror that fashion holds up to society, rips whatever it was you were trying to do right back down, in super-sonic speed, to the superficial realm. Maybe this mannequin's face was chopped after falling flat on it.

Typo alert– Quote from placard on this dark pairing: The disembodied female head emerging from the permafrost suggests a chthonic haunting, recasting the land as a vessel for historical indictment. Yikes.

The copious amounts of dust everywhere… The Costume Institute accomplishing dusty in every sense of the word

The Skims Section

The last room the exhibition ended on was the “Epidermal Body” aka the skims room. This room looked at fashion recontextualizing what the term or color “nude” represents- shifting away from a singular (and white) definition mainstream fashion has adopted for hundreds of years, to one that takes on the multifaceted meaning that it should, seen here for example with Louboutin's “Nude collection.” Also featured were different nude colorways of Telfar Bags. I thought it was extremely interesting to not include Skims, the entire room looking like it had been plucked from the brands’ instagram. I think the Skims brand holds enough cultural relevance in terms of what a contemporary interpretation of undergarmenting looks, the history of “second skin” being one that dates thousands of years, and Skims being the most prominent reflection of how we as a western society approach our once-unmentionables. Certainly not a tragic oversight, just an interesting one is all.

But, I will say, with the “Epidermal Body” room, they did end on a beautiful installation of Miyake’s brand, APOC (or A Piece Of Cloth), and this mid-17th century sketch, so it I was immediately distracted by said shiny object before being ejected back into the museum lobby.

Author Caspar Berthelsen Bartholin Danish
Editor Thomas Bartholin Danish
1651

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Martina Cox reviews the event on the first monday in May, celebrating the opening of the costume instiuttes Spring exhibition, from the perspective of fashion historian, a fashion designer, an artist and an all-round fantastic seer of sartorial history.

Proposed timeline for the Met Gala in coming years —

Fashion is Art (2026)

Fashion is AI (next year)

And then, group suicide (2028)

While Billionaires for a dead planet gathered in May, in the City Capitol donning no budget replete with massively heavy ballgown trains and the peasants that carried them (queue video montage of peasant train-movers, including the five masked models Madonna hired to carry hers, and the unforgivable walk of shame back down the steps they were forced to make when she reached the top, we see you masked angels!! But also Madonna I still love you), I gathered with my lovely studiomates (shout out to Robbie Stinchcomb for many of the one-liners and title) to watch and belligerently shout at the television “FASHION IS ART!!!!!!!” while piled onto a couch giggling and eating Cheez-It Duoz Sharp Cheddar & Parmesan Crackers ™ (we may not have healthcare but this kind of joy is something money can not buy). Sidenote, did you know Ozempic was developed from a hormone found in a Lizards saliva?

Allen Jones (b. 1937) *Hatstand, Table and Chair (i) Hatstand (ii) Table (iii) Chair

Allen Jones (B. 1937), Table, Acrylic paint, glass, metal, mirror, mixed media and tailor made accessories Executed in 1969, this work is from an edition of six plus one artist's proof

The theme licenses that you can literally wear anything. I am a fashion historian, I can historicize and artify the sweatpants I am wearing to write this (but I am also at an unfair advantage because said sweats are 80s Norma Kamali sweatcouture). Some celebs had lovely little anecdotes about paintings their look referenced no matter how abstract, some looked like they were going to kill a dog when they got home, and many had multiple additional limbs mounted atop their person. So I will throw ONE bone- Kylie Jenner was my favorite look.. The look is Schiaparelli (RIP Elsa, if Mae West’s bust-to-waist proportions shocked you, I suggest you look AWAY). Ky’s dress was ripped off (ode to bodice ripping perhaps?), the top half of the dress folded down over her waist, a surreal tan flesh-colored torso emerging hard nips ablaze- a pertinent nod to the Skims dynasty. Another sidetone, the nips of all three sisters are an active part of their looks; I think I freed the nip first when configuring this algorithmic workaround to the automation of nipple detection (See here) but I am glad these girls have caught up and found a way too. The inside of a couture dress, aka the guts, is by far the most beautiful and interesting part, to have it on display while simultaneously wearing the gown, is the craft equivalent of having your cake and eating it too, so Daniel Roseberry I commend you, but also you dress fascist billionaires so you might be going to hell.

Speaking of, another Roseberry look worth mentioning is that of the lady of the hour, the madame who fronted the bill, Mrs. Laura Sanchez Bezos. The gown is in direct reference to Madame X by John Singer Sargent, Sanchez-Besoz’s dress an ode to the ORIGINAL painting that had one sleeve falling off, this suggestive detail painted over post-salon, after Paris was up in arms about it, pun intended.

Vergenie Amelie Avegno Gautteau aka Madame X was a fierce american born parisian socialite who powdered her skin lavender, hennaed her hair and eyebrows and rouged her ears, need I say more? I am probably eager to think this homage to Virgenie is referencing the shared outrage they both sparked, but whether intentional or not, the parallels are certainly there. The comment section of any costume institute social media post is absolutely gorged with malice since the sponsors’ announcement, and similarly to stand in front of the portrait in the 1884 salon was to hear every profanity/vulgarity/obscenity uttered under the sun in the french language. Singer Sargent is a god send in capturing the ephemeral nature of the stuffs known as textile— and in this case freakishly pale skin— but it was the scandal that propped up the success and history making of a decent painting. The outrage of the Parisian public in 1884 was one of a canonized art history phenomenon: Singer-Sargent was ahead of his time, after 20 years in hiding the painting was brought out to the adoration of a new public, ready to face what it hadn’t been able to do before, embracing it with unexpected hunger too. There is something about looking back a generation to see what upset everyone so much— what had everyone’s metaphorical or literal panties in a bunch— and laughing in the face of it. See, this is where the two diverge: will we be looking back in 20 years to laugh? In a fever dream in a parallel universe is this the fate of Sanchez-Bezos and her contribution to the art world? Certainly not. The only canonization I foresee in her future is of the literal kind, from the impending revolutionaries.

But what if the work doesn’t get to enjoy the privileges of time? Fastforward to London in the 1970s, and we have the public in an uproar again— Allen Jones's Hatstand, Table, and Chair were exhibited;

In 1978 his work was attacked by stink bombs. Unlike Madame X, 40 years later and our reactions to these sculptures have not softened, time has not packaged them with a neat little bow of adoration. He said what I was trying to pointpoint with Madame X far more eloquently:

“Fetishism and the transgressive world produced images that I liked because they were dangerous. They were about personal obsessions. They stood outside the accepted canons of artistic expression and they suggested new ways of depicting the figure that weren’t dressed up for public consumption.”

In the interview, Jones cites his favorite word as ‘Grabbable.’ Enter Kim Kardashian, donning the pinnacle of pointy boob a la Allan Jones, her life diligently documented on camera, and one that is far from grabbable. People have rushed to the internet full speed to comment on the shared imagery and references her eskimo sister Bianca Censori has been mining through Allen Jones-esque performance art. But for Kim, she gets to triumphantly step over (stepstool style) Bianca fixed as a furniture object and mainline the OG artist himself. Kim's legacy of exploring sex iconography through an insatiable capitalistic framework leaves much to unpack (will not open up this can of worms here but rec the IG page @kardashian_kolloquium for more), and working with artists like Nadia Lee Cohen or Jurgen Teller warrants a complexity and level of cultural engagement that, whether you like it or not, is aligned with the art world. Bianca’s performance work comparatively is one of shock and silence, saying little to back up a life that can be compared to one big performance piece. I think there is more nuance, conversation, and years of honing that backs up what Kim’s (and Nadia’s) collaboration with Allen Jones does. Kim has been doing this since Bianca was in the womb, taking hit after hit from a patriarchal public like a cyborg walking through a battlefield, and she still infuriates us, at least now from the top.

Allen Jones, Stand – By Me, 2024, Patinated bronze outline with acrylic infill, patinated bronze head, 165 x 58 x 58 cm. Courtesy of Almine Rech Gallery / Photo credit: Manuel Obadia-Wills.

We project our fears, angers and frustrations about the femme torso, sex and power onto these sculptures, honestly, much in the way we have towards Kim over the past two decades as well. This fear is the threatening what society is comfortable with, the objectification of the femme, subverted through using sex, autonomy, and literal casts of the femme torso to turn conservative and deeply objectifying norms onto itself. And at the end of the day, society’s fury over S&M furniture or the suggestive fall of a strap, indicates tragic horseblinders are on– don't look over there at the gross levels of resource hoarding off the backs of thousands of injured amazon workers, free the nipple, just not too much…

Ok, I have spilled the vitriol that are my feelings towards the gala, thank you for bearing with me as I did so, I am a garb lover and like many feel that this event is devoid of magic in the face celebrity delusion and a burning planet- we are in a war, committing a genocide, and here in USKKKA Amazon web services has a contract with and provides the platform ICE uses to store its data…. the people are pissing in bottles at work for christ sake. But, I will review the costume institute show at face value, they got blood money and from what I can tell they used it to buy and display the best.

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 (bitch-goddess of) 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). A great example of this is found in the Press Release Sus Instagram account, that points out when PR texts are AI generated.

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 Frederick
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?*

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.

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(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.

In our Trump/Andrew era, lazy liberal publications might want to drum up nostalgia for the softer and less offensive Special Relationship aesthetics of the Obama/Will+Kate era.

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If the news emerges that Kier Starmer has covered Downing Street entirely in grey crushed velvet, trust that HSR will not give a toss unless he hangs up a big oil painting of Tommy Shelby in place of Thatcher's. In which case, the editorial bitch team might be pleased for a moment. HSR says Kill the Royals, even if they weren't eating babies, they were eating babies.

Here is Hollywood Superstar Regular correspondent and woman-about-town Floss Crossley, we publish here her exhibition text for BestWishes Unlimited's exhibition- 'Simply'.

‘Simply’ Exhibition Text for BestWishes Unlimited Exhibition

Benjamin Slinger, Jib Door

13.02.2026 - 13.03.2026

If Obama was still our daddy, the Epstein Library would look like his White House interior design planner: A scrapbook of beaches replacing potential painting acquisitions, redactions produced of brushstrokes not Google Doc squares.

He really is so tasteful. Did you hear that Trump’s DOJ redacted the fucking Mona Lisa?

If Obama had released the files, I’m sure they would be handled with more tact. A delicate binder of bespoke annotated letters and images would have been slowly dispersed over four to eight years to the major broadsheet journals, a wisened editor would then make the correct curatorial decisions to pick the works that best articulate the agreed upon most relevant and emotionally evocative information which we could then acceses through a support-real-journalism-paywall.

aww Don’t be too sad, I miss him too. I wish we could just go back…

Back in 2009 an anonymous sender delivers an email to Jeffrey Epstein sharing a couple’s holiday with the subject heading: simply, paris. It is one of many update-style emails from presumably young girls about their love lives that the pedophile received while serving his sweetheart-deal for prositution of a minor. In the grand scheme of the three million files, a series of heavily redacted holiday photos would not typically make the news. But in one image, from a trip to the Louvre, it does appear that the DOJ blacked out the Mona Lisa to protect a potentional victim. This begs the perfect late-night-show question: Does the Trump Admin not know the most famous painting in the world?

A binder of Artworks for the Obamas to consider to loan for the White House. Assembled by Micheal Smith in 2008, featured in Elle Magazine in 2020

A phillistine pedophile. At least Bill Clinton likes Jazz.
On closer look, the Arts publications and news anchors that took glee in this story of cultural superiority in the face of sex trafficking may be embarrased to realise, of course, that this painting isn’t the actual Mona Lisa. It is a tourist trap cut out in which a victim’s face is ostensibly peaking through a hole. This should have been fairly obvious. I hope I’m not being pedantic to point out that Da Vinci did not paint his skies neon green.

There is a snob’s trueism regarding Trump’s taste and why his extremely loud displays of wealth don’t alienate his working class support base. He lacks the WASPish sensibility to protect generational wealth behind beige wallpaper and The Rowe sunglasses; instead, he seems to enact the ‘factory worker’s’ fantasy of winning the lottery: driving around their low-income hometown in a sports car yelling about how they’ve made it, throwing a solid gold bar at an old boss. As Fran Lebowitz puts it: “Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person.”

Censored Mona Lisa reproduction from Epstein files, 2009. Originally reported in grayscale, 2025...

The ‘factory worker’ is Lebowitz’s idea of a poor person. The same peple who make this argument and laugh about how naive this perceived relatability to power is buy books like Designing History: The Extraordinary Art and Style of the Obama White House by Michael S. Smith (2020).
Whilst listening to their President’s yearly curated playlist and cooking his wife’s favourite White-House-grown recipes, they see no correlation with their own fantasies of being represenated as the most tasteful, well-read, cultured, and most powerful person in the world with the codes for total nuclear anihilation.

The celebration of Obama’s sense of taste is always framed as that of the aspirational middle-class intelligencia, even when we are discussing a Monet painting in his bedroom or Ali’s boxing gloves watching over staff-cooked meals. The White House itself, under his presidency, transforms into an Ivy League University—a bit much sure—but it’s really just an old revered public institution The East Wing is simply your humble professor’s dorms.

I’m reminded of Will and Kate’s branding strategy nicknamed “the Waitrose Royals” wherein their immense god-bestowed wealth and status is always framed as just allowing them to wear a high quality gillet as they do their weekly shop. When Charles was coronated, the polite public were aghast with how tacky their sashes and gowns really looked in high definition. How very gauche. When Trump strips tears down the White House and blows up Jackie’s Rose garden, is he really blowing up history? Maybe he’s just allowing the Neoclassical palace to appear more true to intention.

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

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

Screenshot of Live readout of USA National debt fromusdebtclock.org

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

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

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

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

So be it. To the real artist, the above is of no concern. They are like the stringy marsupials after the meteor hit Chicxulub: against rational self-interest, they will go on making art. They do not have a choice; to be a real artist is both a vocation and a pathology. Furthermore, the artist must confront, and even love, the present, no matter how ghastly or petty it is served up to them. The pervasive death loop of preening nostalgia and vain nihilism is neither critiquing nor transforming anything.

This is why, standing in Tala Madani’s exhibition ‘Daughter B.W.A.S.M.’ at Pilar Corrias Gallery in London, I felt awash with relief at its humane agitation. The exhibition is ensconced in some prime real estate. Across the street on Savile Row is a lobotomised Nicholas Party exhibition at Hauser & Wirth; to the other side, a Bape store with hoodies slung over chromed mannequins with shark heads. The New Routemaster trundles by, designed by Thomas Heatherwick, one of the most egregious flunkies of the debt-nostalgia tundra. The barbarians are at the gates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.

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"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:

1. “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”;
2. “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.

------ '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.

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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?

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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?