writing

This year's Biennale is in denial of the circumstances that have forced the event to shift from odd to even years. To find artistic politics in Venice, one has to consider form and matter on their own terms: in the long term.

Attempts at overturning or reforming globalisation will fall short of expectations unless they strike at the heart of Davos.

Snow asked his literary colleagues about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. “The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?”

In the biennial, art could do all the things that we like to believe that art can do: deliver us from our concerns, transcend the limits of our imaginations, inspire us, give us hope. Art could do all those things. But often, it doesn't.

Social artists do not have a monopoly over the social. They do not even have a monopoly over art. But they'd sure like to.

I tried to throw a New Year’s Eve party. What could go wrong? The responses I received revealed a deep and lasting trauma among my peers. Is this what is now left of our public sphere?

The philosophy of science, the politics of evidence, and the biases that shape our decisions. For anyone who spent their Christmas trying to fact-check their family into submission.

My generation of gay men has no memory because it never became acquainted with a previous generation whose time came and went leaving a mere caricature as a historical record.

Is the fiction of art's economic value now the key measure of culture? Does it matter that we don't understand the figures? What would Baudrillard say about NFTs? Can we hope to restore aesthetic ideas of value?

OnlyFans went on strike. It wasn’t the workers who threatened to walk out, it was the factory. But this factory's success does not lie in skimming off excess labour from its sex performers. OnlyFans went on strike to demand more capital.

In August 2021, the world gawked at images of Taliban fighters riding around in bumper cars as their forces completed their takeover of Afghanistan. Are these the images which that best symbolise the reality of this latest act in the War on Terror?

Class may be the ultimate English taboo. The understanding and signalling of class or other identity attributes may become an obstacle to classical class analysis. An entirely different political class narrative may be called for that transcends the boundaries of sociological understanding before returning to the discipline once again.

Are art and its institutions ready to desert from the culture wars and engage with the subconscious?There are many places that need to be occupied, but the museum is not on the list.

The deceptive magic of NFTs is that the items they represent – memes, animations, screenshots – can be claimed to be collectable and therefore valuable. But art’s tendency to trade claims of value outside of its own field without check is profoundly worrying.

Contemporary art's profound paradox: the drive to become more inclusive for its audiences ultimately contributed to the inequalities experienced by its workforce.

Are we witnessing a solidarity turn in art production? If artists are workers and workers are artists, who’s standing in solidarity with whom?Artistic solidarity could be a powerful tool, but only if it is twinned with a careful examination of the claims that art makes about its own needs, desires, and abilities.

We need new institutions, not new art, writes Coco Fusco. Who, if not artists, will build them? Could wind power lend an unlikely hand?

Who decides how much culture is enough? Even before the pandemic, the laws of supply and demand could not explain the art industry’s bubble-like growth, nor could the market forces or policy be blamed for the precarisation of artistic labour. 

The relationship of skills to education and employability has been marred for some time by politicised narratives that include immigration, and class, abstract ideas like creativity, and an industry of educators resilient to change.

The arts might have hoped for a clean slate – but the post-pandemic art world is unlikely to be much better than the old one.

Almost fifty years separate the Paris riots of 1968 and the opening of the first WeWork office – but both events could prove useful in preparing for the next revolution in our working lives, which may have already begun.

Now More Than Ever, Help Us Do “Whatever It Takes”

In the Government’s lock-down rules, art is clearly non-essential labour; more: it is voluntarily redundant. The ‘social’ of social arts is simply not the ‘social’ of social workers; the analogy seems ludicrous now and in retrospective.

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Ai WeiWei may be ‘the perfect Asian artist for lazy western curators’. He may also be the lazy marketer’s idea of viral cool, and the lazy politician’s idea of a progressive thinker.

When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer… Eric Bristow's only 27.

It’s a peculiar moment, to recognise so clearly one’s own feeling as belonging to an altogether different story, and in which either version of events could well be true. In my own seaside afternoon, I thought I was playing out some French film classic, perhaps the Louvre scene from À bout de soufflé.

When Marshall McLuhan coined the term ‘global village’ in The Gutenberg Galaxy of 1962, he could not have imagined how quickly reality would outgrow the model he proposed.

Look far enough, and things will begin to appear more red than you’d expect.