This is a selection of my published and unpublished writing.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.
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.
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