Hollywood Superstar publishes Italian director Pier Pasolini's Cosair writings (1973–75). These excerpts examine the international style of counterculture and the political adaptability of fashion via the infamous fascist long-haired males. The second extract is the conclusion to one of the more famous essays from the collection, which identifies the “new fascism” with its “pragmatic” and “American” style. The Corsair Writings remain remarkable, contemporaneous to Pasolini's final film, Sàlo (1975), which depicts the depths of fascist libertine depravity.

It has been nearly 50 years since Pasolini’s body was found on the beach at Ostia. In the film Amore Tossico (1983, dir. Claudio Caligari, Italy), two young heroin addicts overdose, draped together over the memorial to the director. Like the doomed characters of Caligari’s film, Pasolini’s posthumously collected Corsair Writings were written as raids on the public consciousness, steeped in the counter cultural capture of a moment when clandestine state actors were widely suspected of obscuring or enabling far-right terror, cultivating a sense of crisis that would come to define Italy’s long decade of uncertainty. This so called “strategy of tension" cannot be read in history books.

How do you categorise your average political assassin? Computers are seized by government agencies, who release the facts when and how it suits them. Can anyone be certain of the political signs that the Trump shooter, that the Charlie Kirk shooter, left floating in their virtual worlds? British police impregnated left-wing activists, the US government was all over 4chan, and the EDL still gets more cash from government agencies than Stephen Yaxley-Lennon knows what to do with.

This Anonymous Hollywood Superstar feels better for not believing MI5, but that’s just what they’d like...

When we can’t tell who is killing whom, or why, scapegoats are found and order must be seen to be enacted. Pasolini warns us of a “hasty” attribution of blame to those who are treated as “congenitally destined to become fascists,” the “eighteen-year-old boys… who plunged into this horrible adventure simply out of desperation.” Young men are blamed for violence but immigrants are blamed more; the Prime Minister invokes the fear of the illegal worker to justify a totalitarian digital ID system. When the confusion is mundane, when the sense of disorder is complete, when communities are atomised, it is imagined that fear will make them cry out for their own suppression. But an enlightened public does not have to ask for any protection that they are not already capable of giving to each other, and that’s a fact.

"The Discourse of the Longhairs"

January 7, 1973. Published in Corriere della Sera under the title, “Against the Longhairs”.

The first time I saw longhairs was in Prague. Two young foreigners, with hair hanging down over their shoulders, entered the lobby of the hotel where I was staying. They walked across the lobby and sat down at a table in a secluded corner. They sat there for about half an hour, observed by the customers of the hotel, including myself, and then they left. The whole time they sat there, and as they walked through the crowded lobby of the hotel, neither of them said a single word (perhaps—although I don’t recall right now—they whispered a few words to each other: but I suppose if they did it was something strictly practical and pedestrian).

In fact, in that particular situation—which was completely public or social, almost official, so to speak—they did not need to speak at all. Their silence was strictly functional. And it was functional simply because words were superfluous. Both of them, in effect, used a different language from the one that is composed of words to communicate with those who were present, with the observers—with their brothers of the moment.

What replaced traditional verbal language, rendering it superfluous—and immediately finding its place in the broad domain of “signs”, in the domain of semiology—was the language of their hair.
In a single sign—the length of their hair flowing down over their shoulders— all the possible signs of an articulate language were concentrated. What was the meaning of their unspoken and exclusively physical message?

It was this: “We are two longhairs. We belong to a new human category that is now making its appearance in the world, which has its center in America and which is unknown in the provinces (for example—indeed, above all—here in Prague). We are therefore an apparition for you. We are performing our apostolic mission, filled with a knowledge that is both totally overwhelming and totally exhausting. We have nothing to add orally or rationally to what our hair says physically and ontologically. The knowledge that fills us, as we perform our apostolic mission, will belong to you some day, too. For the moment it is something New, a great Novelty, which generates, together with scandal, expectation in the world: it will not be betrayed. The bourgeoisie are right to look at us with hatred and terror, because the length of our hair constitutes an absolute contradiction of their ways. But don’t think of us as uneducated savages: we are well aware of our responsibility. We do not bother with you, we keep to ourselves. You should do the same and await the unfolding of events.”

I was the recipient of this communication and I was immediately able to decipher it: this language that lacked a lexicon, grammar and syntax could be understood immediately, because, semiologically speaking, it was nothing but a form of that “language of physical presence” that men have always known how to use.

I understood, and felt an immediate dislike for both of them.

Later, I had to swallow my hostility and defend the longhairs from attacks by the police and the fascists: I was, of course, as a matter of principle, on the side of the Living Theatre, of the Beats, etc.; and the principle that caused me to side with them was a strictly democratic one.

The longhairs multiplied—like the first Christians—but they remained mysteriously silent; their long hair was their only real language and they felt no need to supplement it with another. Their language coincided with their existence. Ineffability was the ars retorica of their protest.

What did the longhairs say, with their inarticulate language that consisted of the monolithic sign of their hair, between 1966 and 1967?

They said: “Consumer civilisation nauseates us. We are protesting radically. We are creating an antibody against this civilisation by way of our refusal. Everything seems to be going smoothly, right? Our generation is supposed to be integrated, right? But take a look at how things really stand. We refuse to accept the insane fate of becoming ‘executives’. We are creating new religious values within bourgeois entropy, precisely at the moment when it is turning secular and hedonistic. We are doing this loudly and with revolutionary violence (the violence of the nonviolent?) because our critique of today’s society is total and intransigent.”

I don’t think that, if they were to be interrogated in accordance with the traditional system of verbal language, they would have been capable of expressing the meaning of their hair so articulately; but that is essentially what they said. As for me, although I have suspected ever since then that their “system of signs” was the product of a subculture of protest that was opposed to a subculture of power, and that their non-Marxist revolution was suspect, I still stood by their side for a while, finding a place for them at least in the anarchic element of my ideology.

The language of these longhairs expressed, although ineffably, Leftist “themes”. Maybe those of the New Left, born within the world of the bourgeoisie (in a dialectic that was perhaps artificially created by the Mind that rules, beyond the consciousness of particular historical Powers, the fate of the Bourgeoisie).

Then came 1968. The longhairs were absorbed by the Student Movement; they protested with red flags on the barricades. Their language expressed an increasing number of Leftist “themes”. (Che Guevara was a longhair, etc.)

In 1969—with the Milan massacre, the Mafia, the emissaries of the Greek colonels, the complicity of the government Ministers, the trama nera, the provocateurs—the longhairs were everywhere: while they were not yet the majority from the numerical point of view, they were dominant in terms of their ideological impact. Now the longhairs were no longer silent: they no longer delegated the totality of their communicative and expressive capacity to the system of signs of their hair. To the contrary, the physical presence of the longhairs was relegated, in a way, to a different function. They once again returned to the traditional use of verbal language. And I do not use the word, “verbal”, casually. In fact, I place special emphasis on it. They spoke so much between 1968 and 1970 that, for quite a while after that, they would no longer be able to speak at all: they devoted themselves to verbalism, and verbalism was the new ars retorica of the revolution (leftism, the verbal disorder of Marxism!).

Although the longhairs—re-immersed in their verbal storm—no longer addressed their agitated listeners in their former nonverbal way, I somehow summoned the power to sharpen my decoding skills and, amidst all the noise, I tried to focus on the unspoken discourse, evidently uninterrupted, of their hair that was always getting longer.

What did their long hair say now? It said: “Yes, it’s true, we are now speaking of Leftist themes; our meaning—while performing a purely secondary role in support of the meaning of our verbal messages—is a leftist meaning…. But…. But….”
The long-haired discourse stopped there: I had to finish it myself. With that “but” it evidently wanted to say two things:

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.

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.

A few weeks ago, when the Frieze Fair came to London town, Hollywood Superstar sat down (in the DM) with a radical and Instagram-powered neo-gallerist to talk about network painting and speedrunning shows with no nation. Here is the interview with Arden Asher-Tate, aka. Pirates of the Carbomb Infantry.

Best group project since Reena Spaulings...it incidentally, or on purpose, has a overlap with the artists. Like Merlin Carpenter. They also don't priotise silly things like spelling, visual aesthetic cohesion, or neo-liberal graphics, much like the editorial over here in Hollywood.

Have you been asked to submit a project? If you haven't, maybe you need to be:

a) more underground

b) less commercially viable

c) worse at instagram

Access the project here.

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

Hello Percy Jackson's Mom. I am very glad you have liked exhibits. The project is anarcho nomadic space run by myself, sculptor Arden Asher-Taste.

After schooling I went to New York with very romantic idea of finding group of artists like Franco Polish Black Jean Porno Club.

I found painters who piss in corners and galleries in apartments, but you know these kids pay 3000 dollars now for an apartment? That was the case in New York. In Europe provision and scrappiness push against confines of bureaucratic rules but in Brooklyn my friends wanted art lifestyle outside capitalist careerism. I too wanted no rules but my Visa had run out and my money had run out. So now I am back in Berlin and there are painters who piss in corners here too.

HOLLYWOD SUPERSTAR:

What is there to be gained from nomadism in Today's World?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

hen you live nomadic you meet many artists and you become less of a tight ass because you need people to take you to bars and places to sleep. You take the train all over with university rail pass and never graduate and meet many artists and God forbid you see their artwork or you might puke. But you need these friends and they too are contours that help define your own taste.

HSR:

More than travelling between cities, which are all expensive and full of corners of piss- there is travelling through DMs. I have found you coming closer and closer as my friends excitedly report being asked to 'make solo show'. Pirates of the Carbomb Infantry sail the seas of the social fabric to make decisions about programmes? How do you choose?*

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

I follow back artists if I like their work and usually I ask them to make show. Two hundred artists have been asked to do exhibit, and I wait on images from one hundred more. But there are no tags and sales and no open bar. So the whole anarcho nomadic project space continues as decentralised accelerationist system driven by desire to make show.**

HSR:

It’s iPhone realness. And perhaps a way to solve the problem of recording performance/art. You speedrun the opening: it instantly becomes a memory on an iPhone. It is a collective camera roll. One of the reasons why I admire the practice because it is just so lean. What do you say to the idea that The fat that gets cut out to make your lean gallery practice are the people. That it’s a non human and semi anonymous non event. In this case, you are looking for some purity, no? No messy human ‘buzz’ involved?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

I like very much the idea of a speed run. In the states there are massive conferences of streamers who run through video games as fast as possible. They find gaps in wall collision detectors and niche tech to skip cut scenes. Boys in bedrooms spend hours a day breaking the game and finding optimal routes to the endpoint. Reclusive artists like me can watch from my studio in Berlin, and live the route vicariously. I don’t romanticize efficiency programs, but I see value in breaking the game of exhibition and art career.

Now there is need to interrogate networking from the angle of social practice, and while the project cuts out the physical gathering, the event of the iPhone opening is intrinsically social, by means of distribution.

HSR:

One thing that brings your shows together is the printing out of things, the use of printer paper. Do you see any other patterns in what people present to pirates?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

Yes. With printing there is cheapness and informality, but also a rich history of expediency. In the same way this space rethinks need for context and infrastructure, many of these artists are challenging material value structures, focusing instead on communicating. Screaming nonsense is also communication. That is the speaking of growing babies.**

HSR:

Do you want to 'break art career' of 'big' artists for a moment? Or is it more important for these 'small' artists to be together?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

Hito’s show was very good. Over a 10 minute rant the performer linked together Georgia Alliata’s POCBI selfie exhibit, Guzzler, bad Jake Shore work, and her own theoretical oeuvre. These social games of in-jokes, forgery, and trolling are the same strategies the Real Fine Arts artists were playing with Network Painting in the early 2010’s (I use Network Painting from Jana Euler, in how she uses for self/scene-referentiality in her work. Later it was used by Zach Feuer gallery in NYC for the show Context Message, curated by Real Fine Arts.) We are interested in not big or small, but a familial conversation. Everyone points up to their big sister and makes mocking face. That is a part of family love.

Issywoodification...a true generational turn towards the blurring of form, ala greenberg, for 2025. Where artists once tried to reduce form, achieve flatness, break down representation, they now aim for the affect of a camera rubbed with vaseline. While an analysis of causation will be undertaken elsewhere, in the meantime, our recently de-twinked Timothée Shamalet identifies the lack-luster impressions of such formal choices.

The best painting in the National Gallery is obviously George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket. A horse raised on hind legs, trunk shining by some dazzling light, against an entirely beige void – a perfection of realism in an expanse of absurd, estranging nothing. Conceptual iconography in 1762. It’s a shame Stubbs is remembered as a mere ‘equine painter’, but maybe that’s also kind of the point.

I was thinking of jackets, and maybe also horses, at Magic Bullet, Issy Wood’s survey exhibition currently on view at Berlin’s Schinkel Pavilion. Mainly while looking at My neck / my scapula (2025), an A3-ish oil on velvet work of a puffer jacket, structured but wearerless, framed like a classical bust. In the work, and in the room, there’s a notional toplight, but the reflections behave inconsistently. Instead of a shadow within the empty collar, Wood has painted thick lime green. The material is taught around the button poppers, our phantom model’s frame bulging the garment with their very legend. We are the hollow men indeed.

It’s just a coat, dickhead. But it’s a brilliant painting. Partly because the rest of the works here are mildly terrible. Wait, no. There’s also a pair of supersized dentures painted like the Elgin marbles, fine. Also, one work that looks like a flower - drooping low, creases accentuated like the tendons of a hand - stigmata shining like kitchen knives, but also the aliens from that film Arrival.

But back to the point: rooms upon rooms of unquestioning ugliness. D1NNER (2025) stages a kind of post-Carrollian tea party (‘Have always been fond of him’, noted Vladimir Nabokov in Strong Opinions. ‘One would like to have filmed his picnics’; if only Wood were so risky as to engage two of history’s great quasi-nonces) but for whom? Floral teapots, cups and dishes line up across an unattended, almost depthless frame – neither synecdochic nor particularly expressive, they evoke little that’s felt and reveal nothing. Crisis Is (2020) – continuing Wood’s distinctly Y2Kish fixation on twentieth-century cars – is part car-dealership-website-ad as AI-interpreted in the style of Philip Guston, part Lana Del Rey music video mood board. Paintings that just hope you’re thinking what they’re thinking. Wood’s recent portrait of Charli xcx for Vanity Fair postdates the exhibition, but in its ability to capture nothing that we don’t already know about the pop idol from pre-existing footage, it would have done well here.

Wood has a lot to answer for: her style – tight crops, photo-similar faces, kitsch Disneyfication, bathetic scenarios, darkened peripheries like early-Instagram vignette filters – has (to her credit) become ubiquitous in recent painting and image-making. In their homage to earlier image technologies – namely photographic film and notionally cinematic images – they reek of nostalgia. This is all Wood’s ‘hyper-modern visual language’ as per Schinkel’s intro text, a useful reminder of how anything that looks bad – in this case, paintings with the colour palate of Ravensburger jigsaw puzzles or the Ticket to Ride board game – can be reframed as a branding communication system. Schinkel Pavilion is in many ways the perfect site for this, a place benefitting from the sheer vibes of its late 60s German oldness, but with worse lighting.

[Intermission: If at this point you’re struggling with this piece, a reminder that many good painters are still out there – Hayv Kahraman, Nicole Eisenman, R. H. Quaytman, Justin Fitzpatrick, even Julie Mehretu!]

It’s also what career ArtForumer Barry Schwabsky calls ‘perverted realism’, with Wood as a figurehead for a cohort of ‘chromatically dark’ painters evincing a ‘pragmatic apprehension of the incalculable multiplicity of threats stemming from any number of apparently unrelated but equally unavoidable conditions’. Over in good old Londinium, you’ll find it everywhere: Lukasz Stoklosa’s recent show at Rose Easton, which seemed to think the gothic amounts mainly to a spooky mood; a second show at Soft Opening by Shannon Cartier Lucy who, like Chloe Wise, appears to think skin-shine makes a portrait interesting; don’t get me started on Joseph Yaeger’s deflowering of the new Modern Art space. Though, at least Yaeger’s actually look like old films.

Schwabsky cites Michaël Borremans as a forebear of this ‘perverted realism’. Ask yourself, though, would any of the cohort’s proponents be capable of anything like his Fire from the Sun (Four Figures) (2017)? Maybe that’s unfair, maybe they’re just young – or so I hear their gallerists call out from the back, seemingly unsatisfied with the volume of canvases they’re slinging. But nonetheless is it so bad to want it all to be more, well, actually perverted? Wood’s formal ‘perversions’ and autofictional arrangements obscure any real deviance or depravity up for grabs. Instead, we have bunny rabbits painted onto the backs of guitars and muscle tissue depicted in a state neither of preservation nor violent exposure. The grid-pattern in Rough Facetime Study(2025), a bang-for-your-buck technique shared by a contemporary like Louise Giovanelli, makes a briefly perplexing puzzle of the work’s subjects: some bracelet pendants and a porcelain cattle figurine. Are these really the dark recesses of the mind, the memory, or the lived experience they resemble? If Wood & Co’s works are facing the present world’s ‘incalculable multiplicity of threats’, then why are they so flat, so quiet, so fugitive? It’s certainly insufficient to be content with such bland nihilism; art should reach into the dark, not just gawp at it. Reminder: John Berger said that all art reflects its times (what a downgrade today’s public art intellectuals are.

Maybe it’d be better if Wood only did coats. Maybe a whole exhibition of one would work a treat; maybe even a whole career, like Peter Dreher for the Vinted era. (Much the same could be said of Giovanelli and satin shirts.) If Stubbs is the greatest of all horse painters, then Issy Wood will, with any luck, be remembered as champion of puffer jackets.

"Hedi Slimane And The Death Of Documentarian Photography" or "Let's Ban Magazines From Using Scene As An Adverb" is an essay written by our resident photographic commentator, Distrow Kidd, on the infamous photo series released by THE FACE. It purportedly captured "fresh faces" who "brought energy to the scene". Granted, the pics were cool, but why does George Rouy have to be there?

Hedi Slimane’s photography has always consisted of two elements: documentary and fashion/editorial. In an era where a large portion of the fashion image world is informed by famous documentary photography from the 1980s-early 2000s (Nan Goldin for Gucci, Simon Wheatley for Corteiz, Nick Waplington for Self Portrait and Diesel, and so on) fashion can cannibalise the documentarian style. Mainstream fashion like Jaded London, Dazed Editorials, or whatever “MINGA” London is, lusts after the documentary photography's 'I was there' swag to commemorate and translate real events.

Slimane usually spends months with his subjects, producing documentary coverage of tabloid-ready libertine-adjacent musical artists from the 1990s and early-mid 2000s. This lifestyle inevitably bled into his design for Dior and YSL. For “New London”, a Slimane shoot for The Face conducted in August, his signature noirish morosity has been revived by a cast of relatively diverse and interesting faces from London’s artistic, musical (or tbh, party) scene: “Singer” Matt Molotov, and Lux and Wolf Gillespie, who are, to quote attendees “Nepo-baby founders of event where baggy jeans aren’t allowed”.

On a related note: in an incredible feat for a photographer, Slimane has progressed recently to photographing several bands that don't even exist (with some notable exceptions). Here are the strained faces of boys holding guitars in a way that will make you say: "He don't got one song where he needs to be doing all this".

Fakemink graces The Face’s cover with the sexiest (and most high definition) image of him to date. The underground rapper who blew to insane levels of fame in less than a year embodies the evolution of the London Recession Rockstar.

For reasons too numerous to go into here, It-Boys are much rarer than It-Girls. When I look at Mink and his cigarette, I can’t help but feel like Hedi has picked him up where he dropped off the agéd Pete Doherty (2007). Instead of being hounded by paparazzi, London’s prodigal sexyboy saviour is readily stalked by all manner of Instagram creepers, ready to disseminate not the shocking behaviour headlines of the indie era, but lore from the DM.

In fact, after the most recent Death of Live Rock Music as We Previously Knew It, visual and auditory tropes of the genre have become appropriated to inform the cultural Frankenstein that is the ‘new gen music scene’. We went from heroin and acoustic guitars thrown out the windows of Camden flats to the rarest supreme jackets, multiple Instagram accounts (and creative aliases) and the re-popularisation of cocaine for a TikTok generation that mainstream media still label as “sober and sensible". There was not a single rap song in the Billboard top 40: a sign of a cultural victory for rap, which fully merged with pop in the 2010s and at the turn of the decade going underground. Wherever underground is.

In terms of ‘documenting’ the city, the tables of cultural capital have turned. I think all the time about something that maybe goes without saying: that young musicians don’t really need photographers to succeed. The photographer in this equation is not someone who brings new information and personalities to light- that responsibility has been internalised to the artists themselves. Authority is what is conferred, the alternative aesthetic aristocracy is affirmed.

The clouted are figures that have been built from a combination of, variously: inaccessible wealth, aesthetic dissolution and small luxury brand sponsorship. So when we factor in the knowledge that a fair few members of this scene are quite literally children of the previous generation of stars Hedi would’ve photographed, and largely follow suit after their parents' public image, things get meta-freudian.

What separates Hedi’s images now from then is a wave of apathy fuelled by the importance of image over history and acceleration over action. Now, there’s this idea that as long as we can keep up the hype, it might turn into to something solid.

A side note: the nepotism criticism can be applied internationally. London is still the most interesting major city in the world right now, despite, or perhaps because of having 'no cool bars or no cool clubs', according to one Ike Clateman. Artist and trend forecaster Sean Monahan's article on the New Lost Generation of Americans in Paris follows the money and misses out London, perhaps because despite pointing to the fact that mapping out the geography of what's hot kills it, he can't resist doing it: 'The people you wanted to avoid were at La Perle, not Clandestino. The people you wanted to run into were at La Palette, not Funny Bar... Gutter snipes lived in Pigalle, not Bushwick. All of this – it goes without saying – is not supposed to be said. By mapping what is cool, you murder it.' Something to bear in mind in the gloom is that the lack of good spots is what keeps the beauty and the mystery of London. It's the psycho-geography version of the Dark Forest theory of the internet.

Without having any cool bars in London, it becomes difficult for photographers like Slimane to gain access to interesting subjects on street level without them already being connected to his world in some way. Although these images are visually striking, it is difficult for this project to escape the massive shadow cast by his previous books and anthologies: London: Birth of a Cult(2005) or Rock Diary(2008), Portrait of Performer series (2007- ongoing). How is he supposed to access something that is not just a residual aftereffect of a world that is still climbing up to him?

Fakemink points out in his interview that “2025 is the age of…nostalgia”. And I think that sums things up pretty well. On the front page of the issue in clear and cutting text is written: “Love today before it ends”, but it seems that today has already ended. Isn’t that the point?

While thankfully less common than in Berlin, a city replete with smoothened, outsourced objects often mistakenly seen as the end of thoughtful conceptualism rather than as the product of a much lower common denominator—a Ringbahn-bound collective condition of smooth-brained apathetic “coolness”
conceptual art in New York can at times feel like a circle jerk for bisexual men whose flirtations with the same sex are limited to the moments of tantric, pseudointellectual foreplay they partake in at downtown openings.

At Maxwell Graham, a merely aesthetic or self-aggrandising relationship to conceptualism has always been out of the question. While some of the gallery’s roster admittedly does less for me than the work of, say, Hamishi Farah, Ser Serpas, Cameron Rowland, and Tiffany Sia, there is little of the juvenile “I only got into conceptual art through Joseph Beuys” sentiment one often intuits in small downtown galleries. In “Display,” Zoe Leonard’s new exhibition at Maxwell Graham, comprised of only six gelatin silver prints depicting armor housed in nondescript museum and institutional settings, thought—the foundation of good conceptual work—is refreshingly at the forefront.

Much like the cold, detached hubbub sustained by the aforementioned men who sour conceptualism’s current reputation, the objects pictured seem as if they should foreclose sensuality or eroticism altogether in the way they privilege the episteme. And they do. Ranging between 300 BC - 1600 in origins, each piece of armor, even with its voluptuous tassets and faulds, is obviously masculine, immediately neutralizing the knowledge of the erotic, an arguably feminine power that Audre Lorde famously described as being often “misnamed by men and used against women.” Repeat those same forms multiple times within the same sterile vitrines, compositions, or gallery walls without providing historical context, and that repetition amasses into something more monumental: critique.

This is what Leonard’s practice does best—looking, repeating, serialising, aggregating to the point that form, always bound to history, begins to speak for things that transcend history. In the case of “Display,” what first emerges from this continuity of forms spanning 2,000 years in origins is the tired persistence of patriarchal militancy and violence throughout the history of the West—a fact that can be condensed into everything from the objects themselves, such as the muscle cuirass of the Romans and Greeks or the plate armor of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, to the rationalizing containers, such as the ethnographic, imperial museum vitrine, that precipitate their initial formation and absolve the sins that lie in their wake.

Leonard may share convictions with the mechanised, lens-based approach of the Düsseldorf Becher School, but her work is ultimately more aligned with the libidinal sleight of hand wielded by fellow queer conceptualists emerging in the late 20th century, e.g. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Wojnarowicz, Glenn Ligon, than any photography movement or school. Hence, the desire that still bursts out from “Display,” some of her most acerbically mundane work yet.

This rupture is concentrated in one photograph, Display IX (1994/2025), displayed on the wall directly behind the viewer as they descend the stairs to the main gallery dedicated entirely to photographs of garments used in war and feudal contexts. Having been initially confronted with images of statesque armour, frozen in mechanical movement, repeated, doubled, and pictured ever so slightly differently to the point that their historical idiosyncrasies are rendered moot, the act of turning around and seeing the broken ab-laden torso of a broken muscle cuirass depicted in Display IX (1994/2025) wrests the most powerful element from repetition’s grasp—difference. And with it, desire floods the scene, too.

This is hardly the same libidinal or auratic territory underlying Leonard’s 1992 text declaration on the occasion of Eileen Myles’ presidential bid that she wants a “dyke for president,” nor the critical erotics lingering in her early 1990s images of chastity belts, lifted skirts, anatomical models, and the Niagara Falls, or her late 90s images of urban trees breaking through the fences meant to enclose them. Indeed, the desire occasioned by the image of the broken muscle cuirass is more memetic and pornographic than it is erotic. After all, Display IX is still a picture of an object of war.

However, it is precisely because it resides in that unspeakable zone wherein war and desire commingle, that the image also tests the very bounds of acceptable desire, sex, and discursive practices—an equally abstract and material dynamic from which queerness emerges. Keeping with the photographer’s past work, this desire is not only theoretically gay, but empathetically so, in no small part because it immediately evokes the visual schema of Grindr, where one is most likely to stumble upon a naked, cropped, floating male torso today.

But surely one cannot outwardly express gay desire upon seeing the cuirass without entirely betraying Leonard’s searing critique? Leonard’s work somehow convinces me that both positions—the anti-war critic and the shamefully desiring subject—can be held at the same time, however delusionally. After all, the desire that breaks through this particular dusty vitrine is ruled neither by eros, nor agape, nor philia. It seeks release neither through sacrifice nor mutual destruction but instead mistakes the momentary mania of visual possession and pornographic arrest with the inexhaustible wells of the haptic and the erotic.

The cuirass, a form de-eroticised upon its moulded excision from the human body, already reached the artist broken and caged. She furthered this deadening process by capturing the fragment in black and white, transforming it into a fetishistic spoil of history in much the same way that ethnography, the progeny of empire pictured throughout “Display,” has historically relied on violent acts of photographic capture to fix culture as a fetish object as a means to keep it, study it, exploit it, be turned on by it, degrade it, and eventually dispose of it.

Like Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1924-), Aby Warburg’s unfinished project tracking the recurrence of classical images, gestures, and motifs across the history of Western art, Zoe Leonard’s practice often directs our gazes to histories that lie anywhere but the past. In “Display,” she pushes this to discomfiting ends, probing the psychosexual undercurrents of masculinist projects like war and questioning the latent biopolitical violence in 21st-century digital cruising (See the NYPD’s recent usage of Sniffies as a means to track and arrest cruisers at Penn Station) and the torso-directed desires it inculcates in viewers such as myself at even the most inopportune, or dare I say inappropriate, moments. At Maxwell Graham, the conceptual photographer first presents us with this sharp, Warburgian account of antiquity’s violent, pornographic “afterlife.” Then, she shatters things over our heads.

While in London Marina Abramovic is placed in the gallery-as-rave, Tamara Trauermarsch find that in Milan they put Nan Goldin in an airplane hanger, like a can of Bud Light in a 2000s HBO show.

From the raw intimacy of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981) and the celebratory portraits of trans identity in The Other Side (1992), to the haunting memories of Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004) and the childlike melancholy of Fire Leap (2010), each piece builds a fragmented autobiography of survival and loss. Later works such as Memory Lost (2019) and Sirens (2019) plunge into addiction and ecstasy, while her most recent You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024) and Stendhal Syndrome (2024) expand Goldin’s vision toward mythology, abstraction, and the eternal cycles of life and death.

That didn't end well.

What we certainly weren’t craving in Milan was yet another slideshow of Nan Goldin’s portfolio. This format applied to her work is now as tasteful as that piece of Brooklyn gum you've chewed for ten minutes. Please note that, in this case, that piece of gum has been passed from mouth to mouth for at least 20 years. Terrifying.

In the same way I ask myself what was I expecting by having sex with a man on the first date, I wonder about my expectations when, at the entrance of the exhibition, the staff asked me to cover my phone's camera with a branded sticker. Was I in seek of a feeling? Was I supposed to walk around feeling proud to have been there? I don’t identify as a third-grader grappling with his first bruises and sexual experiences.

At that point, I wished the stickers were 'egg shell', so that the core of the exhibition would have been seeing everyone walking around scrubbing their phones camera covers like a desperate with a scratch card.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a second date and neither the satisfaction of a single broken eggshell. Both cases, I got a waste of time.

Worried that the exhibition could have been too lukewarm, they designed a route where every series of photographs was enclosed in a huge felt tent. There were at least seven different ones, each in a different colour and with a different soundtrack. They all had one thing in common though: the heat was nearly deadly and only acceptable if the purpose was to host the naked and afraid in the dead of winter. Even though the most naked and afraid probably couldn't have stand the environment either, and I'm not talking about the temperature.

The show's subtitle should’ve been 'Nightmare tents rotation': who on earth feels the need on a weekday afternoon to be trapped in a tiny, dark, sweaty space with tons of art workers? For Christ.

And anyway, Nan’s crusade finding refuge inside Pirelli Hangar is like hosting a punk funeral inside the Vatican.

The irony burns brighter than the spotlights sweating on those felt walls. Watching rebellion get institutionalised never gets any less obscene.

They love to define this kind of exhibitions “dialogue”. Sure, if by dialogue they mean a pointless monologue echoing through a cathedral of good intentions where the staff whisper about activism as if it’s an artisanal cheese: rare, pungent, perfectly aged for the website’s palette. I wonder if the real performance were the enthusiasts cosplaying empathy, in the need to look radical while staying perfectly respectable like a banker in fishnets, or an terrorist with a press release.

And the crowd applauds, amazed that despite being the size of an airplane hanger: the exhibition was conveniently tote-bag sized.

Apart from that, the last stop of this hour of slaloming Berghain-esquely through alt kids and uncool adults was the only one worth it. And that's probably why I couldn't see anything from how crowded it was. Welcome to Panorama Bar.

For those unaware, the infamous Berlin’s club is the happy alternative: they'll make you cover the camera anyway but you get drugs and can fuck behind the corners.

Pick - A - Boo!

Pre-Party hosted by Hollywood Superstar, Chess Club and Gnossienne Gallery.

Photos by Nick Gogh and someone else

Ft.

No Bra (Live)
Floods in Atlanta (Live)
Born Weekend (Live)
LC (DJ)
Soli City (Live)
Enzo M (DJ)

Acknowledging that is more profitable for Advertisers (and Universities offering Curation MFAs) to encourage us to edge ourselves to our publicised interpretations of each other, the Hollywood Superstar believes, senso generis, in the need for more irl fucking.

So let's hear from an archetype on the problem: the un-fucked 'Contemporary Art Baddie', who suggests that the way to reconcile your feelings with the hot new bods in the gallery with the hot new works on display is to make the whole space less sterile. Riffing on Andrea Fraser's fields of contemporary art diagrams, C.A.B creates a map of the girls that keep the world running.

This is the first in a series on love and exhibition, so get pitching... and bear in mind: the Superstar likes to debate but she also likes to say: Fuck you and your trad wife.

The Baddie Paradox by Contemporary Art Baddie

After the sudden resurrection of my “love” for art in the years post-academy, I’ve found myself in a sexual rut. I am stimulated by the colours, shapes and concepts that present themselves to me in exhibition spaces. I visit artist run galleries, big and thick institutes, tight little spaces, commercial spaces, non profits, churches and more… But everywhere those plain white walls. Guys, get a grip - where is the fun in all of this? The white cube has no sex appeal, it’s sterility doesn’t necessarily create the right ambiance to ask for the new gallery kid's number (we’ve been making sober eye contact for the past 30 minutes) Or is it just me? The “Contemporary Art Baddie” status that intimidates men into not talking to me at openings? At this point, there are only curators in my DMs. And yes, they are there to work.

At my lash-tech appointment, I thought of Elke Krystufek’s 1994 Masturbating in Kunsthalle Vienna. Then Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003), a commissioned work where she videotaped herself having sex with an art collector. He paid for the videotape as an artwork, not for the sex itself. Both works stage the paradox of sexual performance, vital acts are sterilised in the presence of the institution, the commerce and the recording.

Elle Krystufek (Top) Andrea Fraser (Bottom

And that’s the core of The Baddie Paradox:

• High visibility, low approachability: Desired, but rarely approached.
• Sexual aura ≠ sexual access: Style, confidence, and self-possession read as sex, but aren’t the same as sex itself.
• The Madonna–Whore complex still lingers. Baddies are often fantasised about but not pursued sincerely.
• Power dynamics. Owning your space shifts desire: some fetishise it, others retreat.
So is it just me, or are all girls in the arts fucking - except the Contemporary Art Baddie? Or maybe that’s the paradox: she is fucking, but what she really wants is intimacy. Sexual aura does not mean sexual access, and neither guarantees intimacy.

Bruno Zhu and Meme on Hoes

Inspired by Andrea Fraser’s The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram, I developed a 4-Venn diagram to grasp not just the art world but the girls who keep it running: the Indie Literature Hottie, the Gallerina, the Art Hoe, the Community Artist - and, of course, the Contemporary Art Baddie, who encompasses them all. What are they moved by? Their motives? Overlaps? And importantly, do they fuck?

baddie_vendiagram-1.pdf

Q3 Curated by ProblemChild Advisory

September 4 - October 19, 2025

Albert R. Sawit takes us on a journey through "Q-3", an exhibition curated by Problem Child Advisory - another psychologically tortured and semi-autonomous guerrilla art Instagram page - and Alyssa Davis Gallery, the renowned nomadic downtown gallery that’s been curating shows with chic posters since 2016. “Q-3” is a reference to the third quarter of the fiscal year, paired with a selection of artworks whose summary could be described as "post-internet" and "girl-art", "digital grotesquerie" and “machinic fetishistic art akin to transformer toys”. Together, they generate an exhibition geared unabashedly toward Silicon Valley cash flow. Digital solutions to real art world problems!

Featuring work by Diego Gabaldon, Kyle Gallagher, Nina Hartmann, Leif Jones, Gyae Kim, Danka Latorre, Jack Lawler, Sean David Morgan, In June Park and Cameron Spratley

We experienced complete context collapse on Henry St. My father and I, like many of the others assembled on the sidewalk for Q3, had attended the Armoury Art Fair beforehand. By the time an ‘art world enthusiast’ arrives at the exhibition, they have probably seen close to 100 small shows in the form of individual booths dotted across several fairs. Perhaps a few more cohesive openings in Tribeca or Chinatown.

It would be safe to say these viewers have encountered 500 works of art, easily destroying any strong or certain idea about what world we exist in by the time we got to the show. Outside of Q-3, there was a different kind of crowd - dirtier and younger – some kids blowing smoke across the sidewalk, baseball caps with frayed edges – more cargo pant pockets than I care to recall – and the kind of Chinatown glitter that sees rhinestones all over everything – hats, tees, and teeth. Who is Problem Child Advisory? A seemingly ownerless, Instagram-centric sort of whose-who type of visual storytelling-based insights on art, whose niche (or populist) selection of internet artists draws an above-average crowd.

The first thing to grab my attention was a picture frame that looked like it had been made in an auto body shop, Diego Galbadon’s SPEEDFRAME (1,2, and 3) 2025 series. It was as if the people who made the car from Speed Racer had a side hustle in framing. Macho-centric, jacked-up accelerationist framing that appeals to both the consumer critical CSM graduate and the technocrat. Galbadon’s obsession with sport as ritual is reflected in the gargantuan architecture of his framing device, like a baroque baldachino.

I was moving a bit too quickly to actually stop in my tracks, but I did take a picture. Upon further inspection of the image, I realised it was a soccer game – or a rendering of one, with the words "DARE TO DO" spelt out by the fans in the crowd. It was a commentary on the sports industrial complex: the commemorative cups, the scarves, the sea of inevitable merch that comes with being at the top of your ‘field’. The most important part of this deluge of liquid merch is the container that holds it all together - a stadium. Like the football stadiums that accompany the most notable empires, the frame becomes this celebration of the work inside, a protector, a reminder, but most importantly, an indicator of value. V Q3.

The next attention grabber was a furless, silicone deer, covered in overlapping tattoos. Leif Jones, Bed Bugs Cure Laziness (Deer 1) 2025. A work which also appears on the cryptic Instagram account of its maker @leifffffffffffffffffffffff. The tattooed skin recalls a bad stick and poke given by friends - the sort of Instagram grid post to go triple platinum on drainer feeds.

The last work I’ll bring up is a painting I liked because of its transparency and honesty. Sleight of Hand 2025 by the artist In June Park. It was a simple airburst image of a few handshakes occurring simultaneously; it stood out as a reminder of forced exchanges. The art world is for rich white people – it is their playground, and we are all just here because of their ego. No matter how much we stylise or abstract the narrative, at the end of the day, the art world is about creating capital and moving it through various systems so it can accumulate value. Sleight of Hand alludes to the vectors of financial manipulation, but to its formal qualities: slight blurring, JPEG light texture, creating an impression of artists' increasing freedom through digitality.

All of the works in Q-3 can be categorized as "Net Art" - Problem Child Advisory surpasses the traditional gallery system - in a way - by sourcing artists outside of the network, defying the brick and mortar space, Sam Altman style. The works speak to each other through unfiltered internet language - this isn’t super flat - or digitality prematurely re-packaged as a movement, these are, and I quote, a purportedly “anti-establishment” and “anti-gate-kept” forms of art making.

Does this mean that if you see a work on the Problem Child Advisory Instagram, and like it, you can just purchase from the artist directly? Curating in works such as Sleight of Hand (2025) suggests that cutting out the middleman might be welcomed by the page. Would love to know if this is actually the case. Slide in our DM'S.

Correspondent Maria Juana dives into the "Saatchi Yates Rave", or the concept-store gallery's venture into the London underground. Marina gained acclaim for her psychologically terrorising performance art about state oppression, and now she's in the same line up as Fake Mink. If not exactly a net good, the event leant toward the absurd rather than the abyssal. God bless the dichotomy.

In London you either die a hero, or live long enough to put on an event. It seems that upon her return to the city, Marina Abramović has met the same fate. To initiate Saatchi Yates into her exhibiting repertoire, the help of the infamous, London-based collective Virus was enlisted. With its tenuous links to clubby acts on both sides of the Atlantic, I can't deny that my interest was piqued.

Marina is the kind of person I'll always have a soft spot for. Like an ex, or the celebrity crush of my teen years. Nothing awful they might do could ever truly negate how they once made me feel. I stood by her when she attempted to 'raise the vibration of Glastonbury' and consequently 'heal the world' in a custom Riccardo Tisci dress, and if these DJ rumours were true, fuck it, I'll stand by her now.

As my best friend aptly pointed out, we were witnessing "mixed-levels of swag." The well-to-do fashion kids stood in stark contrast with the abundance of quote-unquote 'normies.' Quirked-up women in their 40s and suited blokes in their late 30s lined up right alongside the London ravers and people who- if you squinted hard enough- had an instagram that hovered next to them like a ghostly and well-followed child. In fact, the whole night could have been Phillipa Snow's Trophy Lives: On the Celebrity as Art Object, adapted for a kinaesthetic learner.

As the night grew closer, the plot thinnened. There was still no lineup to be seen. Anyway: a black cab rolled up, and out stepped Marina herself. As the groups of shaggy-haired boys thrashed their not-so-quirky locks into a frenzy, I felt in the flattening flash of a fit pic, a not-quite-profound levelling of worlds.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't have fun - even if Marina didn't end up making her DJ debut. That said, rumours of Lady Gaga's presence in the collectors' room replenished the intrigue. As 11pm hit the clock and the normies dissipated, the real freaks could come out (and listen to LV Sandals). Just another night being on the cutting edge, I guess.

Actually though, the music was really good. The lineup justified itself, Wraith9, Mechatok and Charlie Osbourne tore. Free WhiteClaw on tap gave brief respite from the £16 doubles I'd drunkenly spent. And as I'd so desperately prayed, Marina's aura was left intact.

It’s not hard to see why the PR team took this particular route, as plastic surgery and culture-at-large bring Charli XCX and Abramovic closer and closer together. It makes sense in the meme-marketing landscape that has been cooked up in coked-out Shoreditch new-builds over the last few years. If the intention was to entice the younger ‘alt’ crowd into buying shit from Saatchi Yates, I think that falls flat - especially since some miscreant (allegedly) robbed one of the £1.8k prints. It becomes part of their larger project of art-as-clout-proximity/socially-mediated experience that the gallery are pushing through their buy-in membership system.

According to my elementary calculations, this exhibition would see a gross profit of £2.16m. This largely mystified night kicked off a mega-sale of her works- with 600 blue stills and 600 red stills up for grabs. It's a huge chunk of change to try and make in one go. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know there’s a 2008-style financial bubble about to burst. From an outside financial perspective, it seems like Saatchi Yates’ diversification through their infamous membership scheme needs some interim revenue-smoothing. It’s typical crypto-mentality, applied to pop-culture: buy low and sell high. And get out before the bubble bursts.