This is a selection of my published and unpublished writing. My work has appeared in ArtReview, Compact, The Critic, Arts of the Working Class, The Spectator, Sublation Magazine, and in edited 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.
The Iconoclast’s Last Defence
We must not rely on art or art history to answer our political questions.
Ideas without history
Michael Craig-Martin and the afterlife of conceptual art.
Who should die for public art?
As the plaster in Margolles’ sculpture dissolves into a dirty mess, her monument will be neither beautiful, nor true. It will, however, be gruesome.
Drill Music’s Token Freedoms
Given that I’m involved a campaign for artistic freedom, I thought I might find common principles with a group fighting against the criminalisation of drill music. I was very wrong.
Art as Collateral
After the theft of thousands of objects from the British Museum by a former curator, what does it mean for another to go missing in the name of art?
Do the arts need policy?
Decoupling creativity from policy might give art ambition again.
Christoph Büchel Superstar
Büchel’s work exposes that the endgame of mainstream artistic political sentiment is pure spectacle.
Addicted in Art
Nan Goldin’s oeuvre is a testament to the power of art over an artist in the service of addictive images.
Losing the battle, losing the war
There is no way to exorcise the ghosts of capitalism from art’s institutions. But instead of contending with the museum’s purpose, the art world looks to the HR department.
Which Culture?
If the arts are at a breaking point, the question of what should drive the UK’s culture in the future needs a new answer.
The End of Contemporary Art
The Biennale marks the completion of art’s total ‘decolonisation’ after which no particular aesthetics or politics can take precedence over any other.
Race, Class, and Oil Paint
Identity politics and intersectionality find their limits in the museum.
The Human Condition, in Wales
A studied detachment from the subject has become the art world’s habit as. Wales’ Artes Mundi fails to reverse this trend.
After the Wedding
In Venice and in Warsaw, nationalism only passes if the nation is in peril as it was in Wyspiański.
The death of a concept
As life of truth, beauty, and goodness appears beyond our reach, we may need to write a theory of ugliness before beauty can find its social function again.
No second coming for the arts
Labour will finish the Tories’ work of destroying the arts – only ‘better’
The end of monopoly
This year’s Turner Prize compounds the problems of past editions into one shortlist and in trying to show something for everyone risks pleasing few.
Forever Stuck in the Nineties
Will Sarah Lucas go down in art history as Cool Britannia’s response to Carolee Schneemann and Valie Export?
Culture War Aesthetics
Something has changed in the balance of politics and culture: the culture wars become culture itself.
Growth, Grift, and Speculation
Art and money have come a long way together. But what can art tell us about economics?
The museum tells it how it was
The Czech Republic is barely thirty years old, its earlier 20th century defined by acts of non-heroism and a glorious imperial past that isn’t entirely its own. How does one come up with a marketing slogan for that?
Suicide is Painless
If life becomes unliveable, who would you turn to? A friend? A doctor? A priest? This essay was written with Nina Power.
From the Mountain to the Sea
The sinking of the sublime object.
A Movement, Stillborn
What, if anything, is ‘right-wing’ art?
The Sagan Standard
Liverpool Biennial’s rhetoric forgets about the art
Hive Collapse
The new elites have ruined everything. Now they’re destroying themselves.
Progress and Provocation
When everything is allowed and cancel culture has nothing to do with culture, what would it take for art to truly transgress?
Going Their Own Way
The arts must secede from the creative industries. The sooner the visual arts, dance, or music realise that they must fend against the industrial exploits of giants like gaming or streaming, the higher the chances of them finding and articulating their purpose anew.
A Monument to Itself: Steve McQueen’s ‘Grenfell’
In absence of an official memorial, Steve McQueen’s film Grenfell poses the tower as a hyperreal monument of itself dedicated to those who perished in it, an encounter with both a scene of tragedy and an aesthetic object.
Discomfort and Revelation: Pilvi Takala
Who is this person, exactly, and what is she doing? You’d be surprised how quickly a ‘hey, you alright?’ turns into a declaration of war.
Believe Nothing
Anticipating that the post-truth condition will only deepen, I have decided to believe nothing new from now on unless I’m there to see it with my own eyes. If you want me to think that the Earth isn’t flat, you’d better have a hot air balloon ready to show me the curvature of your so-called…
How to lose a culture war
In the 1960s, the German Marxist activist Rudi Dutschke proposed that the road to the revolution would involve a ‘long march through the institutions’ first. A few decades on, Dutschke got what he wanted but the revolution isn’t coming. In its place, a reactionary backlash.
Review: The African Desperate
In Martine Syms’s art school-insider satire ‘The African Desperate’, clichés such as ‘the work’ or dramatic jeopardy are long gone. Everybody is trying so hard to look like they’re not trying that they nearly succeed.
Maths Attack
Rishi Sunak wants everyone to study Maths. Perhaps he’s a philistine. Perhaps he secretly craves cultural validation. Or maybe he just read Goethe more carefully than I did.
Non-Fungible Token, A Eulogy
The success of the Non-Fungible Token reveals a severe ‘speculative deficit’ haunting our culture. Its passing marks the urgent need for art to break its aesthetic limits.
At arm’s length
Where one is from and who one works for has heavy consequences. The arts are expert at flat-out denying this, but isn’t it time to trial radical transparency and honesty?
The Null Hypothesis
‘Art Saves Lives’. If the physicist Niels Bohr thought that the horseshoe brought good luck whether one believed in or not, the categories of evidence and belief have been collapsed beyond repair.
Reckoning with the Biennial
Who are biennials for? Recent examples suggest that these events put the intellectual and political desires of their organisers ahead of those of their audiences or host cities.
The New Museum, Again
Who really has a say in what museums do and for whom? Will museums heal the wounds inflicted on them and their audiences by the past decade’s political, social, and economic upheavals? At what cost?
The Elusive Dream of Universalism
Sometimes, ‘it’s not race, it’s class’ is the correct response to inequality.
Culture and Capital, Pride Edition
Queer Britain and Queercircle mark capital’s transition from appropriation of queer culture to full-scale colonisation.
Decentralised Non-Autonomous Organisation
Documenta 15 reads like a series of creative workshops staged by corporate HR departments to boost loyalty at the lowest possible cost. Perhaps the next Documenta should be curated by an artist.
De-hy-dra-te! De-co-lo-ni-se!
Kader Attia’s Still Present!, the 12th Berlin Biennale is an attempt to unpick the centuries-long threads of imperialism one by one in the hope that they can reconstitute a universe capable of averting its demise. But this is a vain hope.
(No) Politics in Venice
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.
It’s not the global economy, stupid
Attempts at overturning or reforming globalisation will fall short of expectations unless they strike at the heart of Davos.
Epistemic politics, knowledge warfare
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?”
Stalking the Biennial Zone
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.
The trauma is real, but we could try to dance our way out of it
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?
On not being led by The Science
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.
Gay time, memory, and the death drive
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.
Value in Numbers
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 on Strike
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.
The Taliban in Disneyland: Encounters with Hyperreality
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?
Pyramid scheme meets bubble
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.
Art in solidarity with itself
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.
Defund the museum. Ok, then What?
We need new institutions, not new art, writes Coco Fusco. Who, if not artists, will build them? Could wind power lend an unlikely hand?
Fatima may want to think about cyber for just a minute
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.
Skills are cheap; chemistry is expensive
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.
There will be no miracles here
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.
From the artist’s studio to the factory, WeWork, Zoom, and back again
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
Now More Than Ever, Help Us Do “Whatever It Takes”
Social art in antisocial times
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.
#byeweiwei
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.
The Prophecy of Things
When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer… Eric Bristow’s only 27.
An Afternoon by the Sea
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.
Not Taking Part is Not an Option
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.
Redshift
Look far enough, and things will begin to appear more red than you’d expect.
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