This is a selection of my published and unpublished writing. I am the resident art critic in The Critic and my work has also appeared in ArtReview, Artforum, The Spectator, Compact, Arts of the Working Class, and other magazines and book volumes.
The Atonement Complex
The very purpose of remembrance is to facilitate the corruption of memory. We must wary of artists offering simplistic attributions of guilt.
Lube and Liberation
Today’s turn to lube and liberation and the new taboo on the pain of gay sexual has unintended consequences.
The Cathedral and the Museum
The museum is the spiritual successor of the church. But if these institutions are historically entwined, so are their crises today.
Fear, Loathing, and Denunciation
The events sparked by the ArtForum open letter reveal an art world whose gangrenous goings-on threaten the social order.
Benevolent Edgelords
Knee-jerk accusations of fascist thought and the refusal to embrace aesthetic ambiguity have meant that that ‘the left can’t meme’. It’s all Walter Benjamin’s fault – but artist like Joshua Citarealla and Monira Al Qadiri offer alternatives.
Universal Basic Artist
Supporting artists to make art, or make-work for workless artists? The concept of state-provided incomes for artists may be hiding a whole bunch of consequences – unintended and otherwise.
The Dearth of the Clinic
The Monkeypox outbreak exposes the failings of the technocratic biopolitical rule and the erosion of our ability to act as moral agents that plagued the Covid pandemic.
The Discreet Charm of the Artistic Elite
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.
How to be a populist in the art world
Whose job is it to cultivate the distinct aesthetic of a people in the terminal stages of neoliberalism?
Comrades in Art
The ambition of a nearly forgotten art activism group is humbling — but its failures sobering.
The ends of Pan-Africanism
How can twenty-first century Pan-Africanism foster solidarity between people who do not exist? 126 years on from its beginnings, the movement is even more fantastical than Du Bois, Fanon, or Glissant imagined.
The Worst Exhibition in the World
Does revisiting the concept of “degeneration” help us to reevaluate the aestheticisation of politics?
What Would Warhol Do?
The European mind cannot comprehend this.
Zurbarán on Freud’s couch
This acclaimed new exhibition is full of overwrought symbolism and compositional failures. it is they that make it great.
Spectres of Folk
Can the gallery embrace unofficial culture?
Soft Competition
In Minor Keys at the Venice Biennale believes the art world’s battles have been won.
Beauty from the ruins of war
And what use is art in a war?
Never Change
Surveying Emin’s lives is like witnessing someone experience ego death, over and again.
Seeing colour
“Colour” and “blackness” changed register during Locke’s life, becoming the subject of far more explicit discourse than the pigments in his allowed.
Confessions of a reformed art dealer
What responsibility do I bear for not halting art’s decline? This is my mea culpa.
The slow vibe shift
Nation-building will take decades; so might the cultural turn.
The Dead-end Art of Conspiracy
It is too early to debunk conspiracy as an organising principle and too late to distinguish conspiracy theory from truth.
Enclosures
A retrospective of Treister’s work reveals the frictions in the artist’s motivations.
The (Bearable) Weight of Being
The only way to understand how art reflects the mind is through the aesthetic.
The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living
Who would choose to live, to submit themselves to love, to this slower, torturous death?
The Contemporary and the Now
The now of Saatchi has long parted ways with the contemporary of the mainstream art world. Did they ever coincide?
The (too) many deaths of Saint Sebastian
Ming Wong’s retelling of Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom ignores art history—and fails to acknowledge its sources.
Day After Day
When Warhol suggested that “in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes”, he could not have predicted that those fifteen minutes had past.
Why put art in churches?
The presumption of the secularism of contemporary art is so deep that even the church may not be the place to challenge it.
Present futurism
Lawrence Lek’s practice both embraces and critiques acceleration in an aesthetic that deceptively reads as futuristic.
Who owns images?
To a viewer looking with one eye closed, Urgessa paints like a dead white man.
Illness, death, sex, power, and class
The exhibition becomes a morality play in which the viewer must decide whose actions – good or evil – have given rise to which outcomes
Thin Lines
It can take decades for an artistic project to stake its claim on art history. 1985’s The Thin Black Line made its at the outset.
The cart pulling the horse
What if avant-garde artists are the master planners of capital and not merely conformists?
Daddy Issues
A bewildering moralistic call for guilt and hatred of all history.
The Life and Death of Queer Art
If galleries once celebrated difference, their queer programmes today focus on a different agenda: death.
Death, Art, and the Machine
The manifestations of the “uncanny” in Atkins’ work are an inalienable part of living on.
After the Carnival
This year’s edition of Liverpool Biennial marks the end of contemporary art’s authority over contemporary life.
Kindergarten Radicalism
A new brand of childish radicalism is haunting Britain’s cultural institutions, rendering them wholly inadequate to address the peril they’re in, let alone the world outside.
Hotel California
You can leave art school. But you can never leave the institution
Electric Hallucinations
The ‘technological’ art of the 1960s lost control of the scientific ideas that drove aesthetics.
Condo Complex, or Which Way, Art World Man?
That kleptocratic internationalist tendency which until recently made London the capital of the global art trade is now an empty habit.
Eccentric, Viral, Fast?
How does an artist address his generation?
Poor Critics
In this art world, nobody wants to look at art because they’re too absorbed in their fragile subjectivities.
Grief Artists
The art world doesn’t know how to reckon with the failure of #resistance art, still in shock after Trump’s victory. Will this be too much for cultural institutions?
Going, going, gone
In contemporary art criticism, everything is up for grabs again.
The Iconoclast’s Last Defence
We must not rely on art or art history to answer our political questions.
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