Whilst New York Film Festival got swishly underway, our distinguished Milanese superstar cut her teeth with this write up of what might have been the roughest film festival I've ever heard of. Finding it to be a bit too straight-boy: less Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, more poliziottescho, Holli Would says that you might wanna WIPE your hands after you leave Milan's Amateur film festival.

I want to meet the plug and I meet the plug.

Shortly, I’m half drunk in a taxi bound for a too-many-thousand-meters complex of abandoned offices turned into an artist-run liminal space which is actually patronised by some mysterious entities and led by people with seemingly little control. Most importantly, this space called Bim is far from everything but itself. I don’t go often. I've been literally twice including this one.

Despite the miles of distance we came to take part into this cultural momentum, when we arrive we’re not focused on the independent screening program being held outdoor as much as we are in the provisorily abandoned bar spot that we, just being there, vandalise. I feel people are annoyed by our too open disengagement and we’re annoyed by them judging us.

And so we sit and start watching, and soon enough this turns out to be a terrible idea.

It’s a short movie by Cane Morto, a trio of white Italian guys from (maybe) Geneva, who seem to both endorse and mock a bubbling cauldron of underground signifiers and languages. I feel a little embarrassed for them.

I check them on socials, and what I get is a disturbing level of multi-hyphenation. In what looks like their 16-post-grid chase for artistic recognition, Cane Morto have already done performances, painting shows, video works, public art commissions, organized drawing auctions, happenings… and the list goes on. But none of it seems to really grasp anything reletable, at least to me—and this, trust me, has nothing to do with their possibly being outsiders, naifs, or with whatever backdoor they might have used to get into this world.

I could just call it a case study in ridiculousness—they’re ridiculous amateurs rather than people who actually channel irony within their art practice—but what worries me is the hint of shortcuts being taken.

If anything, they give off an alarming “I-could-do-conceptual-art-too” vibe, like some rookie schoolboys that just want to conquer art—use it, squeeze it, put it to work like a capitalist machine, instead of even sitting down with her, giving her some time, talking with her.

I’m talking about the type of guys who think that they’re smarter than everyone else in the class, including the prof, and this faux belief blinds them to the point that, after the first months of course—maybe after a lesson on Duchamp—they think they’ve already hacked some secret, deep-seated logic behind conceptual art. Fueled by a certain dumb excitement, their little eureka moment convinced them that they can churn out tons of stuff that costs them little personally and can be produced at full speed: this is the conceptual work, this is the concept, the idea, the meaning, and you can multiply is as many times as you want.

Didn’t I deserve an A? Isn’t this how art works, prof?

I need a drink.

Right after, the video we came from far away to watch is finally being screened. Since before it starts, big noise is being made for Loris, Bernardino, and Tres Bones, the trio gravitating around a more expanded Milan-based videoart orbit—operating under the name of NoText Azienda—who, in some capacity, worked on this piece.

Under the lens of a trademark erosive colour treatment, a tough, indigestible story about an immigrant man scammed by his lawyer unfolds. The monologue, describing in first person the experience of the scammed one is poignant, and it keeps it brilliantly simple, it makes me feel the desperation, the hunger, and the praise for revenge, like it was blood in my mouth after I’ve bitten my tongue. It ends into an orgy of sex, abuse, and torture, inflicted to the scammed into the abandoned park of a Milanese suburb.

I stand up and cheer and scream and I couldn’t be more enthusiastic not only because of the coke. I'm so glad these atmospheres can still slip into art realms through those beloved backdoors.

Men dressed like Italian dandies, with 70s suits and haircuts and gelatine in their air, eating in squalid spots with their shirt open to show an hairy chest and a gold chain, bringing on stage their Califano-drama and the squalor of their existential conditions.

Let’s just no bullshit: despite the art world last-decade interest in the last ones, in the ones who lives at the margins, in the long-time misrepresented, these kind of subjects are too ugly, apparently even too virile, and their bad taste is too unredeemable, to be taken into account by Art. No matter how their condition actually is one of misery and crisis, no matter how this world is hurting them, chewing them and spit them on the asphalt.

Downtown New York's Baudelairean beauty has been canonized in Nan Goldin's photobooks, but Italy's national popular discos aren't the ones you'd find there. The poetry rippling through the wrinkles of these old guys ripped straight out of a Poliziotteschifilm resists that kind of canonisation.

The night ends in a bath of drugs, squalor, and misery, to the point that I feel kinda like one of those characters. The day after, a text from Bernardino thanks me for the kind words. I can’t remember those words, but I do believe them now more than I could ever.

ITALIAN TRANSLATION

Ennesimo mansplanning non richiesto né tantomeno necessario di ciò che la donna solitamente nasconde nelle mutande: senza scrupoli ma con tanti salvaslip, così leggiamo la nuova apertura firmata Thaddaeus Ropac a Milano, Sabato 20 Settembre.

Al di là del fatto che non una singola faccia fosse bella o gioiosa durante l’opening, forse data l’assenza di una qualunque bevanda alcolica presso il catering -composto da acqua naturale e succo di pesca- la nuova sede della rinomata galleria è presso Palazzo Belgioioso.

Da depliant, i due artisti dialogano su livelli molteplici nel corso della mostra ma, come sostiene il curatore Luca Massimo Barbero, in definitiva non sono legati da "una prossimità formale né da un'affinità di linguaggio, ma da una tensione condivisa. L'idea, cioè, che l'arte non rappresenti ma annunci, che non descriva ma evochi, che sia prima di tutto, un atto di apertura verso l’origine”. Non occorre una gran immaginazione per ricollegare la apertura al punto dove tutto ha origine, la vulva. Courbet lo sa meglio di chiunque altro. A quanto pare non è il solo.

Le pareti delle sale espositive sono un glory hole fatto e finito ma del resto ognuno ha i suoi gusti. Chi siamo noi per criticare?

Concetti Spaziali di ogni taglia e nazionalità, cavità violate tutte dalle lame di Fontana, che altrimenti non avrebbe venduto più una tela. Sex sells, when not consensual more. I numeri parlano, si invita consultare il sito XNXX.com e il prezzo di vendita di queste opere. Fortunatamente al piano secondo dell’edificio la mostra culmina aprendosi su un ufficio con tavolo, sedie e contratti d’acquisto: qui si ritiene più consona la categoria Anal.

“Woman written by a man”: un’autoreggente spaiata, un orecchino d’oro, un tubino nero con glitter e in ultimo una gomma da masticare Big Bubble che una puttana ha portato a passeggio una nottata intera sotto il tacco a spillo; questo rosa shocking porta il titolo La Fine di Dio (1963) e ci piacerebbe questo Dio fosse il maschilismo.

Nostro alleato Baselitz appende uomini a testa in giù con una tavolozza scrupolosa di bianchi, neri, gialli e rosa. Tutto gli si può rinfacciare meno che il non essere inclusivo, difatti da bravo contemporaneo a colazione mangia cancel culture. E gli uomini appena citati, da titoli, sono in realtà donne, una, Rosa Riposa (2019).

Scrupoloso Georg lo è anche in ritratti espliciti come Ohne Titel del 2024, un inchiostro rosso su carta di una signorina che si copre il sesso. Come biasimarla; l’eccezione che conferma la regola e se ne compiace. Lui non mette titolo perché è senza parole come “non ogni uomo, ma quasi”, davanti al rifiuto.

Un Arlecchino (1950) in terracotta, al servizio dell’amore fa capolino da dietro un arco; sproniamo a far riferimento all’immagine per cogliere suggerite assonanze che purtroppo scadono sempre nel monotematico. Noi dovremmo forse fare di rimando psicoterapia, freudiana. E un test STD.

Lasciando l’edificio, un rivolo di scale foderate di rosso. L’Aurora Viene è il nome dato all’esposizione; se questa Aurora fa riferimento al flusso mestruale, stringo la mano al sig. Barbero. È quel periodo del mese, ma non si preoccupi, come parecchi curatori al giorno d’oggi ho la buona abitudine di lavarmene le mani.

Osservando il palazzo dal cortile, vicino all’entrata una grande scultura fallica, il primo uomo in mezzo a tante donne. Solleva vedere come quantomeno ci avessero avvertito: che fosse una mostra del cazzo era in introduzione, quella che viene spesso saltata nella lettura. Si può dire di questo opening che è un vero e proprio salto della quaglia e di noi che l’abbiamo scampata bella, amiche!

ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Yet another unsolicited, let alone unecessary, example of mansplaining about what women usually hide in their underwear: without scruples, yet so many pantyliners, this is how we must understand the opening by Thaddeus Ropac's in Milan.

The new location of the renowned gallery is at Palazzo Belgioioso (trans. beautiful and happy face building)- despite this fact, everyone looked ugly and unhappy- perhaps due to the lack of alcoholic beverages during the function.

According to the brochure, the two artists engage in dialogue on multiple levels throughout the exhibition but, as curator Luca Massimo Barbero argues, 'The idea is that it the art is first and foremost an act of openness towards the origin’.

It doesn't take much imagination to connect this opening to the vulva. Courbet knows this better than anyone. Apparently, he's not the only one.

The brash masculinity of this 'act of openness', however, turned the exhibition into a glory hole. And anyway, to each his own.

Concetti Spaziali of all sizes and nationalities, cavities violated by Fontana's blades, who otherwise would not have sold another canvas. Sex sells, when not consensual, even more so. The numbers speak for themselves; please consult X.Videos to see the selling price of these works.
Fortunately, on the second floor of the building, the exhibition culminates in an office with a table, chairs and purchase contracts: here, the Anal category is considered more appropriate.

“Woman written by a man” : an unpaired stocking, a gold earring, a little black dress with glitter and, lastly, a piece of Big Bubble chewing gum that a bitch wore all night long under her stiletto heel; this shocking pink piece is entitled La Fine di Dio (The End of God, 1963) and we would like this God-ending to be male chauvinism.

Our ally Baselitz hangs men upside down with a meticulous palette of whites, blacks, yellows and pinks. He can be accused of anything but not being inclusive; in fact, like any good contemporary artist, he eats cancel culture for breakfast. And the men just mentioned in the titles are actually women, one of whom is Rosa Riposa (2019).

Georg is also meticulous in explicit portraits such as Ohne Titel from 2024, a red ink on paper portrait of a young woman covering her genitals. How can we blame her? She is the exception that proves the rule and is pleased with it. He does not give it a title because he is speechless, like “not every man, but almost”, in the face of rejection.

A terracotta Arlecchino (1950), in the service of love, peeks out from behind an arch; we invite you to consult the image for suggested similarities that unfortunately always end up being monothematic. Perhaps we should refer to a Freudian psychotherapist. And take an STD test.

Leaving the building, a trickle of red-lined stairs. L’Aurora Viene is the name given to the exhibition; if this Aurora refers to menstrual flow, I shake Mr Barbero's hand. It's that time of the month, but don't worry, like many curators nowadays, I have the good habit of washing my hands of it.

Observing the building from the courtyard, near the entrance is a large phallic sculpture, the first man among many women. It's good to see that at least they warned us: it's a dick of an exhibition.

We can say that this opening was a close call and that we got off lightly, my girl-friends!

July 12 — September 6
2025

The apparatus of Her Selected Works struck me: railings holding the artworks and the postcards on the rack display as you walk in. They kind of carried the show.

I was under the impression that the works on show were a part of Carlotta’s “collection”. I.e. She was a collector and the works she had purchased were a product of her taste. The curatorial angle is that these are works which could have been collected and kept in storage, so their arrangement is like a hide-and-seek of meaning. As a curator, these works are still, invariably, part of her taste - but it would have been a relief to know that some kind of circular economy existed between the chic state-funded central european art world and the significantly less financially supported London artistic circuit. It would be great if this exhibition signalled that some kind of a) collecting and b) economic transfer had taken place. Gave the vibe of the scene in Tenet (2020) where he breaks into the tax-free hyper-secure non-dom art storage facility. Untaxable offshore funds.

Andreas Schmid’s work Figure Nr 1, 2025 was a highlight: a conttraposto cubist figure whose frame is constructed from various watercoloured ovals is painted on antique card. Schmid constructed a frame for the card, akin to an Ilizarov apparatus, which holds the folds upright with brass poles and screws. Daniel Zeballos’ it’s dark train of thought with too many carriages, 2025 a fine graphite drawing on torn paper, has been seemingly drawn, then torn and re-assembled. This play between material, texture and tromp l’eoil is also present in Gritli Faulhaber’s Ohne Titel (La Solitaire, Zitronengelb) (2024) where 70’s wallpaper-appliqué surrounds the silhouette of a 1920’s flapper. The work was previously shown as part of Les Garçonnes at Gauli Zitter, Brussels, where I think it was better served, contextualised by Faulhaber’s other paintings that muse on the relationship between decorative pattern and depiction of the human form, ala Alois Riegl.

A Deconstructed archive-on-display-type-beat is very cool but actually super hard to execute in principle, especially if the works displayed form a cat and mouse of meaning that is not ever fully deciphered. It would have been great to have some more presence - even heavy handed - from the eponymous "collector".

Kern Samuel, Rough Draft, 12 July–6 September, 2025

If this was a review based upon taste - the show would not score so high. But actually, its hard to fault. Soft Opening‘s curation and programming tend to be pretty exquisite, boasting a museum-level attention to detail that smaller/newer galleries itend to overlook.

No one would forget the catwalk-like structure built for Gina Fischli’s April 2024 show, Love Love Love, or the stainless steel industrial floating frames that housed Maren Karlson’s ectoplasmic graphite drawings for Staub, Storeng. At Soft Opening, it is usually a “no notes” situation, which cannot be said for everyone in the clean-goth-come-gallerist circuit.

In Rough Draft two stretches of stitched canvas hang in the centre of the gallery. Bars and Blocks (Janky Hankies) (L) and ® droops onto the floor three-quarters down, the underside of their stitched panelling clearly on display. You can examine up close Samuel’s building of patchy coloured canvas, sometimes bleached, sometimes block colour. One half of the title, “Janky Hankies” refers to the colour-coded signalling system popular in West Village gay communities of the 70s and 80s. It could mean “top” or “bottom” or - according to Bob Damron’s Address Book (1980) key sexual information:

Left Worn Brown Bandanna = Scat Top

Left Worn Mustard Bandana = Has an 8” plus

Legible at the edge of (R) and (L) is a faint imprint of the artist's foot. Is this historical, homo-social colour coding, paired with his bodily imprint, a biographical component (personal or otherwise).

(R) and (L) imitate strip quilting—a form of piecework quilting originating in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, which was pioneered by a community isolated by systemic racism. In Gee’s Bend, compositions were fabricated using salvage cloth, ultimately resulting in arrangements that rejected both convention and symmetry. Rather than following pre-existing patterns, Gee’s Bend quiltmakers group their works into categories: ‘Abstraction & Improvisation’, ‘Pattern & Geometry’, ‘Housetop & Bricklayer’, ‘Lazy Gal’ and ‘Work Clothes’ - Samuel’s title “Bars and Blocks” references this arrangement.

Samuel builds on the idea of fabric as an everyday communicator of repressed codes, sexual or otherwise…fabric as an identifier, a symbol, an illicit message. Even the display of ® and (L) imitates a code of the past - each spring, the quiltmakers of Gee's Bend would “air the quilts” as a way of exhibiting an otherwise private, domestic object.

In 9 Lives a wall drawing of a nonagon is filled with nine other nonagons in various shades of green chalk. The sketchy wall drawing contributes to the relevance of the exhibition's moniker, Rough Drafts, but also mimics a talisman, beacon, or mural. Hence, I guess, the hermetic reference. The number Nine is also a magic alchemical number which, according to the press release, apparently harnesses “the ephemeral nature of site specificity to enact a tension between resolution and transition”. Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers and alchemy: that’s the esoteric art-history knowledge holy grail.

The pièce de résistance of the show was 3 Stacks. Thirty stacks of brown, well-handled A4 sheets were placed upon a custom-built timber desk, each containing a variety of diagrams, collages, marks and a biscuit in its wrapped labelled "DIA COOKIE". It resembled a children’s workspace, or Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne if he went to steiner school. The nïave, or frantic, gestures of 9 Lives are echoed in the pieces installation. As the night went on the papers found themselves increasingly scattered across the floor. Leafing through these pages felt strangely utilitarian —the opposite of the usual East End gallery space filled with unattainable concepts. Samuel’s work makes me feel like I'm lying on a quilt and catching the stitches with my hands.

3 Stacks has the feeling of rummaging loosely through papers with little purpose other than to feel them flutter.

I wish that all objects had been able to be touched, as quilts are intended. Call me craft centric.

Just as I was starting to get tired of the same shade of beige that seems to wash over every 15 Orient show - I was granted a great show of Hudinilson Jr's exploration of material, queerness, assemblage, abstraction, movement. Above all, a sense of the artist’s own historicity.

One thing about this show I enjoyed was Hudinilson Jrs. use of the Xerox copier in conjunction with bodily movements, that were then integrated into drawings, collages, etc.

Throughout the show it felt like I was involved in understanding his process, research, and culmination of it all, to a body of work that felt heavily considered. A good show for the gays.

Directly lifted from the press release:

"Reclaiming space,”
“a tribute to New York's layered art ecology,”
“a statement of presence”.

There is a reason why the press release reads as horribly as it does, and that's due to a majority of the works falling short of aligning themselves with any of the aforementioned phrases. Perhaps due to the emptiness of these phrases (used ad-infinitum) in today’s art-speak lingo.

I’ll give credit where it’s due, work by artists like Amanda Ba, Cannibal (2025), Tucker Van der Wyden Spiral 3 (2024), Eli Tamarkin Girls (2024), Kembra Pfahler Wall of Vagina II (2004/2018), Aramando Nin, Maggie Lee, Sassy (2024) - great.

Obviously, you throw the New York kids a bone with works from Dash Snow, Young Men with a Future (2007) and Mike Kelley, Extra Curricular Activity Project Reconstruction (2004-5). Predictable.

Yet, unfortunately, if you have also watched this show via an Instagram story post and decide to see the works in person, you’ll walk away with an appreciation of perhaps a few names, but mostly an appreciation for art that is not on display at Market Street.

It’s a predictable show with predictable work, and if you were going to paint Spider-Man getting his dick sucked, at least spare oil paint and use acrylic.

A lot of these works play into the aspect of a “storefront spectacle” as the gallery describes, so much so that Revolve reads more as a “pop-up” store than an exhibition. The works inside are akin to the miscellaneous, mass-produced items for sale in American Candy stores and Soho tourist traps: their bright, eye-catching colours admonish viewers for their short attention span.

Made possible with support from Supreme NYC

I always found it interesting how “art people” dressed.

Body Count - an exhibition by Miriam Simanowitz and Thibault Aedy - imagines individual style as it looks online rather than “IRL”. London-contemporary-young-up-and-coming art scene {that incorporates fractals and subcultural visuals hailing from Camberwell, Goldsmiths, CSM, UCL and UAL et al until ad infinitum] may appear as though they have been transplanted from the 2010s. The reasons for this are twofold: a desire to return to a pre-META Utopia and the all-too rapidly ageing Generation Z. The first work in the show, Miriam Simanowitz’s Mise En Scene (2025), supposedly mocks this dress code.

Simanowitz squeezed her friends’ pelvises, elbows, and spines to gauge the size of their bones before recreating them in metal and covering them in plaster. The result is an almost unrecognisable, disturbingly uncanny deviation from real life. To dress them, Simanowitz opted to trawl Vinted - an app that has overtaken Zara in volume of sales in France, due to the success of its algorithm. Instead of pushing curated resellers, it lulls you into a sense of feigned individuality, seeking out gems in a middle-aged woman’s redundant All Saints collection. In the exhibition, the mannequins wear scuffed-up suede Isabel Marant heels, beaten ballet flats with peeling soles and discoloured slouchy leather bags. Simanowitz included sequinned dresses, bows straight out of 2010, cutey tumblr esq staples and flat caps worn ironically, set against equally ironic slogan t-shirts and hoodies. One black hoodie proclaimed the words “NOT A STEREOTYPE” in white bold writing with a keffiyeh strewn over the top.

Mise en scene fell victim to itself, in the sense that to anyone outside of the bubble of 2010s artschool dress codes, the artwork does not necessarily translate. To employ Roland Barthes' object language, the effect of committing to the total look of a period on the surface connotes an awareness of current trends. However, the metalanguage, or denotation, signifies cultural capital. The result, in my opinion, is a uniform that is not in line with a classical subcultural dress code. I.e, genuine expression. Rather, it appears like a scene, but one that feigns individual style in the absence of genuine ideas.

Past Mise En Scene is where Miriam and Thiabault diverge from sceneology, and the real point of Body Count is unveiled. Here, it borrows far more from the playbook of the 1960s body art movement, but from a contemporary lens, exploring new ways to open up sex as the artistic subject.

Thiabault’s study is rather an abstraction, as he seeks to create “reductions of the body” in “abject subject matter.” Apparently, Thibault’s mum has influenced this fascination with gut health, often bringing out the Bristol Stool Chart for reference. I’ll let you Google that one. Blood in my Stool (2025) is a play on words and form. Thibault seems fascinated with introspecting the relationship to the impenetrable internal world or our insides that we try to decipher or connect to. For example, lying on the floor is a large cylindrical rubber-coated tube that has the appearance of an intestine, but the idea is best encapsulated in the work Suppositoires, a curtain that consists of the anally insertable medications, which he suggests are “more popular on the continent.”

If Thibault explores how the internal body is negated, Miriam’s work appears on the opposite end of the spectrum. It is the first time in a long time that I have walked into a gallery space and been shocked, and to achieve that in our digitised world, I think, deserves commendation. Without spoiling the performance, three screens depict different rooms, one of which is where Miriam plays Mrs Claus. The performance duration is 2 hours, involving around 20 men she knew to varying extents, though some were found via Instagram. Part of the performance was live-streamed on Instagram, which led to a surprisingly productive analysis between the men about their parts in the performance and real life. The experience seemed to have shifted the way they viewed their roles. But more than anything, it was about the dilemma it had caused internally for them, and how they were perceived. The first question they asked one another was, “Did you see people online?” This moved onto “If you start looking with intention, it’s like- okay. But you become conscious again of people watching you after a while.” And “The natural response is more interesting than the more formative response.”

In short, Body Count is best when it’s corporeal.

Hollywood Superstar Reviews London’s latest magazine-to-end-all-magazines, Alex Heard and Middleton Maddocks' satirical, “Fieullieton” (literal translation francais: "Little bit of Paper"). Since a little bit of paper cannot be on Instagram, it has instantly become the most authentic, interesting and fun site of London Art Criticism, fml. It was launched theatrically alongside PLPC's shadow puppetry and a performance from Memory of Speke. Our daring reporter Milly Bobby Brown congratulates the satirists but retains reservations about "performative adolescence".

Teenagers are in history lessons that they don’t want to be in, they don’t like the reading material and they don’t like the teacher, Milly Bobby Brown.

3.5 stars - Puppet Show and Memory of Speke

4 stars - Fieulleton Publication

We arrive at the basement of Bethnal Green Working Men’s club for the launch of Feuilleton, the new print-only publication edited by Middleton Maddocks and Alex Heard. Copies of Feuilleton, whose name is taken from the Arts and Gossip column in 18th-century French newspapers, are crammed into a vintage suitcase at the door. Exaggeratedly passé in style, mimicking Publications of the highest order (The Paris Review, Frieze) this edition features short fiction, essays, and poetry. Text is interspersed with false adverts for DIY galleries, blogs, local wine bars, and Goldsmiths University.

At about seven thirty, we hear from the editors in a letter that seeks to position themselves in relation to institutions, literary readings, commercial art, and the nebulous ‘scene’ that orbits them. “It's not just the woke art that is bad”, Alex reads , "although that's most of it.” Artists, like teenagers, have always forged identities in relation to what they are not.

With juvenile spirit, the launch launches into something lawless; they don’t seem to be able to get the tech to work. T.C. Hell debases children’s characters TinTin and Snowy, in a piece which exploits lapses in audible speech and ambiguous translations to fulfil the narrator’s masochistic fantasy. We hear poetry out of the mouth of a plastic Dalmatian named Cole Denyer, who struggles to get verses out between barking from a malfunctioning hidden speaker. Rachel Fleminger Hudson gives us a playful, girlish striptease. She is telling us about a very sexy lady. As her performance escalates, there is a negotiation of the sexual dynamic; her character forged through claims of aesthetic enjoyment.

After escaping from the smoking area, we return for a shadow-puppet show / ambient road movie. PLPC’s performance takes us on a ride through the desert. Biker gangs, cop cars, and fuel trucks are shadows moving across the makeshift screen, overlaid with a textured soundtrack of chopped up dialogue and music by Memory of Speke. Evoking the slacker absurdity of Beavis and Butthead and the early MTV cartoons, reconstituted in the archaic but equally lowbrow/ populist medium of the puppet show. The result of an asdf movie watched in private. But now, given a full cheek-by-jowl theatrical treatment, watching is a uniquely collective experience. The crowd wave their phone torches at the outro.

Memory of Speke’s later set weaves flamboyant narrative vocals with repetitive grooves. The band’s usual theatrical costumes are swapped out for jeans and shades, a distinctly Royal Trux-ian swag that fits with the cool-Americana of the shadow puppet show. Their catalogue is bouncy, tight-knit, theatre-kid bangers, straddling no-wave, new-wave and ska, in a performance that is perhaps too much of everything (instruments, genres, influences) to feel like anything new.

Coming away from the night, I am thinking about the current trend in art and music of reviving adolescence. Reading Feuilleton, I’m struck by the critical potential the figure of the adolescent actually holds. It is used here as a kind of post-historical device, to read inherited systems and aesthetic codes. Parody and subversion are ways of rebelling against an old order. Whilst Memory of Speke and PLPC also co-opt the aesthetics of childhood, both seem to function primarily to draw us into their own special universe. Struggling to articulate this key difference, I speak to a friend. He offered that “performative adolescence should always be about learning.” I think without this we risk regressing into the confusing blur of nostalgia.

Thirteen Images recalled the RA Summer Show in sentiment only. There was far less garish neon-coloured floral prints (Florals? For Summer? Ground breaking). From the smallest work, Robin Miro’s Hanger (2024), to the largest, I.W. Payne’s Something is rotten in the state of Denmark (2025), nothing felt gratuitous and no detail felt overshadowed, irrelevant or forgotten. It painted a picture of taste within a certain London milieu: artists who are not always full-time artists and whose practice is invariably informed by those limitations. The opening was as packed as a house party. A retrospective survey, but for now, across performance, design, photography, sculpture and drawing (there were a few paintings). The show was held in an empty flat, spanning four antechambers: kitchen, front room, dining room, and bathroom.

Gonna make a call back to Hollywood Superstars ‘17 Trends at Art Basel’ that noted the prevalence of the “Fine Graphite Fetish” at the fair. In this economy (a market barely holding on, driven by weakness, tech bros and Silicon Valley), they’re what’s most likely to sell. Ellen Poppy Hill’s No Point in Making Myself Comfortable (2024) is a mixture of Edward Burra’s post-cubist figures and early Disney animations. Her work as a fashion designer evidently influences her illustrative work - there is a level of caricature that only the sartorial eye can achieve.

The curved, jumping caricatures are drawn on newsprint. Hill’s handling of pencil has a Lee Krasner-esque vibration: moving between scratchy, thin lines and intense, stacked shading. Building on the theme of caricature, Roberto Ronzani’s Miles Davis, 1980s (2025), like Hill’s work, incorporates fantasy with fine marksmanship. Gen Z artists, in comparison to their direct seniors (millenials) have made greater use of cartoon semiotics in their practice, drawing on a nostalgia for a time when animation graphics were a light-hearted reality visualizer, not just visual computer-generated fluff, Pepe or Wojack. I wouldn’t go so far as to use the moniker of “post-internet”. These works emerge from a place of self-containment, an analogue love of the medium of mark-making.

The contrast of works like Miles Davis and Momo Tibes “Once Upon a Time in Babelsberg” (2025), which frames a screenshot of a YouTube clip from Mockingjay (2015), part of the Hunger Games Trilogy, highlights the diversity of form in Thirteen Images. Now the art world is post-history, genre and form collapse. Screenshots emit the same palpable relatability and society-mocking rabalaisian humour as a pencil illustration. Really was post-internet, though!
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Some items generated the feeling of a 1980s World of Interiors slightly spooky childhood playroom (non-derogatory). In I.W. Payne’s cut-out silhouettes, a male and female stand facing one another; their bodies integrated with speech bubbles upon a single MDF panel. The panel itself is covered with a large, multi-coloured polka dot pattern (not in a preteen, pedophilic Lucila Safdie style, but rather a mumsy, West London kitchen, Kath-Kidson-esque style). This theme continues in Anna Plowden’s Miladena Mirror (2025) in which a set of doll-sized blue organza underwear is pinned, Lepidopterologist-style, within a floating acrylic shelf. Miladena Mirror is reminiscent of Rosemarie Trockel’s three-dimensional collages, or perhaps the meticulously made-to-order Mary Janes that Hans Bellmer constructed for La Poupée, 1932-1945. I wondered if Robin Miro’s Hanger was a compliment to this piece - both works are akin in their rendering of sartorial objects in miniature. Baby Reni (a moniker for a designer, artist and apartment gallery) presented two pieces. Girlypop (2025) depicts a child’s white dress on a padded clothes hanger alongside a faux-naïve drawing on an apple shopping bag. Babi Reni’s Foundation saw a mannequin hand jut out from the wall, covered in foundation from a bottle cradled in its palm. The latter two works solidified the developing theme in Thirteen Images: Child’s Play or the ludic spirit.

Charlie Osborne’s work 2 Cariads Dw i wedi Syrthio mewn cariad efo ti (2024) could have been more centralised in the hang. A digital print of a blurred image is stretched on canvas, with much in common to the sample images you find in Snappy Snaps frame displays. A man and a woman, one with a 2012-Greenpeace-style headband, smile at the camera and lean into one another. Its title, in Welsh, translates to “Two darlings, I have fallen in love with you” and completed the romantic, blog-esque ideation I, as viewer, had projected onto the piece.

Osborne’s work with blurred imagery is part post-human, part mid-2010s nostalgia. It surmises how it feels to love while also forgetting oneself amid the battle against face-recognition technology and the harvesting of memory. It also looks like a Tumblr rebloggable image circa 2013, the soft distillation of form reminiscent of the focus adjustment on a YouTuber bloggers digital camera: “Hi! it’s X, and I’m here to talk about heartbreak and data harvesting”. I want to know what it was about this time that matters now - a time when the mask of liberalism was slipping, but still in place, the image carries a nïavety that online cultural production, today, does not.

Hollywood Superstar wonders if this “salon” style should continue in perpetuity - a space where one can sample taste and refract it back to a crowd “IRL” rather than “online”. I’d like to liken this show to the Paris salon of 1767, at the Louvre, which Denis Diderot criticized and praised for its great contribution to (to use an anachronistic term for his time) aesthetic discourse. In writing for Correspondance Littéraire Diderot marked the early development of art criticism, from image to word (ekphrasis) and then from word back into image. Instagram stories are the modern day iteration of eighteenth-century ekphratic writing. Thirteen encouraged Cheek-to-Cheek interactions with artwork only previously seen on an Instagram grid - forcing opinions out of the digital circle-jerk and into the remit of house-party conversing.

“Even if all the works of Europe's painters and sculptors could be brought together, our Salon would not be equalled. Paris is the only city in the world where such a spectacle can be enjoyed every two years.”

I’d like to think that London, and Thirteen Images has the potential for catalysing a series of beginning of equally reactive, or summarising, survey exhibitions. More aesthetic discourse, please, the critique of great work eventually aids the development of new formalisms.

Our very own correspondent goes to see Dean Kissick speak to Rosanna McLaughlin on the eve of her book launch, the surreptitiously named “Against Morality”.

Rosanna McLaughlin, a two-time published author known for her heavy flow of surgical takes dissecting poignant topics within art criticism, is back with another banger. McLaughlin, rocking Vans and flannel, channels a combo skaterboi Lydia Tár and young Paglia.

Her latest work Against Morality takes on the art world’s current mandate to platform only artists whose work centres the tenets of DEI: “I am of X identity, and that experience is like Y, about which I have made this art.” McLaughlin is saying this is the basic axiom that everyone from the Barbican to David Zwirner wants to see in their programmes, which results in press releases comparing George Rouy to Francis Bacon.

McLaughlin calls this tenet “liberal realism”. It weaponises the conceptual inseam of Soviet Realism, where a set of moral virtues, hard work and self-sacrifice, prescribed the aesthetic model for a country’s propaganda. McLaughlin complains that Western art institutions have entered their own era of authoritarianism, which, to her, is just when you are, like, very particular about something. Much like the title of her book, Against Morality, the use of such blatantly sensationalist language to describe a still very niche phenomenon within a small societal margin feels a bit like a broke, left-field musician’s last-ditch attempt at writing a breakout pop song. It is pop-punk and hard to watch.

Interviewing her about this is, of course, cultural marksman, Spike magazine’s golden era’s golden boy and human Grok, Dean Kissick. Amid McLaughlin’s very subdued and very British attempts at transmuting her agginess at the art establishment, Kissick’s job is to ask the smart, complex and nuanced questions about her work.

“Are you a liberal?” Kissick begins.

“Dean has spent too much time in America, it seems,” McLaughlin snaps back quickly, to merry laughs from the audience. “Are you?”

“Yes, of course I am a liberal,” Kissick replies honestly, hoping his contrarianism is a knife. Instead, the audience erupts in genuine cheer.

And now we are locked into this slurry of ever-swelling internet slop. Kissick reads from a review of Against Morality published in Frieze that is mostly about his cannonball, “woke-destroyer” of an essay, “The Painted Protest”.

He unloads his personal beef and brotherly love with Jerry Saltz, all of it over DMs. He quotes the messages.

McLaughlin remains politely transfixed in her place.

“I have this beef in the DMs with Jerry Saltz,” says Kissick.

“You know, Adam Curtis really wants to talk to me,” says Kissick.

McLaughlin tries to make a decent pastoral point about how anti-racism, anti-ableism, anti-etc. are great principles to apply in interpersonal relationships, but, when expected of art production, prevent us from letting difficult ideas exist within the moral greyscale. She does try to make that point, but with her populist book title behind her, glistening in giant yellow letters like a chicken shop menu, and Kissick trying to start a wildfire with his mouth, no one takes that seriously.

Time for the Q&A:

1. A complaint about how, apparently, DEI art is anti-Beauty (in the Platonic sense). Example cited? The Renaissance. A question that could have been asked only by a twink and my Russian mother.

2. An actually good question about why, according to McLaughlin, art institutions have sought to prioritise IDPol-based art (mine). Largely unanswered. A joke is made about how egg pots at Pret had a Pride flag stuck on top of them this past June.

3. At this point, something actually fun happens. A man, from here on known as the Unabomber, pipes up. He accuses McLaughlin and Kissick of opportunism and says that they both secretly know the only art worthy of mention is formalist, so should they pack up their discourse business, or maybe, even better, kill themselves.

I am by no means paraphrasing.

We pour out into the rest of the ICA, where the discourse, said on stage to be “over-legislating art production”, continues.

As the Unabomber (a friend of Kissick’s) towers over me, emanating high-powered yap and the general vibe of an over-tuned cello, I clock an immutable truth. While the art industry may move in swings and roundabouts to accommodate the flow of capital, the actual artists and art groupies (critics) will be forever guided by the instinct to repel the latest set of expectations. To evade understanding in favour of getting drunk on the feeling of otherness they experienced in their suburbs. Of New England, or of London.

Is it like this? No, it is actually more like that. Like that? Well, actually, now that you said it is like that, it has become like this. And, just like that, I am once again intentionally stuck co-loitering with the hurt children of the contrarian bohème.

I snap back into reality from these life realisations and yell at the Unabomber, “Maybe Proust wasn’t the ultimate formalist, but just the ultimate worst editor?”.

To my absolute delight, he explodes again...