This is a selection of my published and unpublished writing.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