“An ode to Passion”
All submissions are welcome here. Published on Tuesday mornings, click here to subscribe!
This week
💦 exceptional savoir-faire
💦 mommy bloggers of the 2000s
💦 salacious women of the bordellos
Events
A lovely week ahead for us! From Polly and Jessica’s Porn talk to Deleted Scenes’ Sex & Art night we promise we don’t have a problem. A relatively calm one, we will make sure not to miss 1) Filet’s opening on Tuesday 2) Studio West’s PV on Weds, & 3) Sherbet Green’s show on Thurs, see you there babies
🧊 23 Jan | 6-9pm | Tommy Camerno: Delirious, Filet [Old Street]
🧊 24 Jan | 6-8pm | The Blush Upon Her Cheek, including Leo Costelloe, Florence Reekie and Ki Yoong, Studio West [Notting Hill]
🧊 24 Jan | 7:30pm | Porn: An Oral History, Polly Barton in conversation with Jessica Andrews, Backstory [Balham]
24 Jan | 7–11pm | Middle Plane Party [Magazine Launch], Yorkton Worshops [Hoxton]
🧊 25 Jan | 6-8.30pm | Li Li Ren: The World Forgetting, by the World Forgot, Sherbet Green [Cambridge Heath]
🧊 25 Jan | 7pm–late | Deleted Scenes: Sex and Art / a night of readings in Soho (Rose Cleary, Róisín Lanigan, Hannah Regel, Oisín McKenna), Trisha’s [Tottenham Court Road]
🧊 25 Feb | 6–9pm | Bitch Magic, (Group show inc. Renate Bertlmann, Cullinan Richards, Ayla Dmyterko, Permindar Kaur, Rebecca Parkin, Tai Shani, Penny Slinger, Georgina Starr, and Unyimeabasi Udoh), Alma Pearl [De Beauvoir]
Exhibition of the Week
CONDO, various locations, until 17 February, info here.
TBH we thought Condo was over - a remnant of ye olden pre-lockdown days - until rumours started spreading about its revival last Autumn. So when the typically post-internet / grownup-goth style maps (note: whoever does their visual identity we are obsessed) started appearing in piles on the floor of participating galleries, a palpable sense of excitement spread through the front desks of London. The question on everyone’s lips, of course, ‘Are you Condo–ing this weekend?’. Desperate to escape the bleak January blues, gallerinas across London braved the blustery, sub-zero streets (on Saturday at least) in packs to IG story their way through the treacherous roads of East London. spittle disagreed with one sassy gin-n-slim-wielding reader describing the 2024 iteration as ‘mid’ at the Union Club soiree on Saturday and enjoyed many art highlights – as well as the sight of international gallerists huddling around plug-in heaters in London’s finest radiator-less galleries. Highs included the sweetly goofy paintings by Claudia Kogachi in custom scalloped frames by Josephine Jelicich at Phillida Reid x Galeria Jacqueline Martins; super cute tiny cat sculptures by Taewon Ahn at Project Native Informant x Gianni Manhattan; paintings that ‘whisper tales of pandemonium, where souls in anguish dance amidst the chaos’ by Haydeh Ayazi via Delgosha Gallery at Greengrassi; steamy photos by Nanténé Traoré at Amanda Wilkinson in collaboration with Sultana; an ethically-dubious performance by Richie Culver in which actors were locked into a pitch black room and forced to watch hours of TikTok at Carlos Ishikawa x Galerie Kandlhofer; gorgeously tender interior environments by Zearo at The Sunday Painter; flood gates erected in Studio M by Christopher Aque & Alexandre Khondji courtesy of Sweetwater Berlin; Stuart Shave x Artbeat’s moody presentation of Nika Kutateladze; Sharona Franklin’s fully-pilled crip time clock at Soft Opening x LambdaLambdaLambda and, finally, an uncannily lifelike hologram of a bird with fun woodwind audio by Deimantas Narkevičius at Maureen Paley (not part of CONDO but we loved) 💋 killing it kids !
Hot Links
🗑️ “Pizza - Garbage heap” – ArtReview launch long-form book reviews with a piece that asks ‘What Is Internet Culture Writing?’ by Michelle Santiago Cortés, who reviews a pair of hot new books: Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld and Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online. In two words? deep and messy…
👼 “what Abrahamic religions that serve nationalist purposes excel at” – Balloon dogs don’t really scream holy sacrament but in his most recent Frieze column Paul Chan makes a case for it, asking the question; Is Jeff Koons the most religious artist of our time? Chan argues it’s not about the content (his Made in Heaven works would make a nun blush) but his work ethic, which is, in Chan’s telling, decidedly protestant. Although this article conflates the loud individuality of American Protestantism with all Christianity (the Calvanists could never) it is a silly yet intelligent article so we love it all the same.
☄️ Are these the end times for London’s art scene? – In TimeOut, Eddy explores why so many galleries are closing; Simon Lee, Fold, Darren Flook, among them. ‘One can no longer blindly follow the blueprints of galleries that were successful in the 2000-10s, but one has to continuously adapt and reinvent one's approach,’ offers Emalin’s Angelina Volk…
🍆 “a perfect storm of aspirational yet achievable luxury, an algorithm boost, and optimized e-commerce” – Prune, one of our favourite interior design ‘sletters, dissect the enduring appeal of the basic bitch coffee table book: Rizzoli’s monochrome Tom Ford doorstopper, which is now seeing a revival on TikTok, with 2 billion views! Savvy content makers have even created Blue Peter-esque guides to make fake versions perfect for IG #homeinterior flexing x
📸 “I notice a transplanted digital mouth” – Ever since chat GPT burst into the mainstream and made us all fear for our jobs, not a week has gone by without some kind of AI-related story that makes our eyes go wide and our stomachs plummet. Nassia Matsa’s latest article for Dazed Beauty was our ‘tech will end the world very soon’ fix for this week, as she explains how advertising has jumped on the ai-generated trend and is threatening to put models out of work… at least in the car insurance ad industry.
Add-to-cart
It’s no secret that spittle thinks about handbags *almost* as much as we think about art. Earlier this month, Dior released their “ode to passion and the beauty of emotions”: 12 new artist-designed Lady Dior bags !! As usual, there are more misses than hits… however highlights include Zadie Xa, Michaela Yearwood-Dan and Mariko Mori. We LOVE Mori’s futuristic, bubble-like bag (pictured). As the press release copy professes: “every detail, thought out with infinite meticulousness, fuses dream and reality through the combined prism of imagination and exceptional savoir-faire, transcending the limits of excellence...” Reads a bit like a Werner Herzog monologue but the bags are available to buy now, in selected stores (including on New Bond Street & in Selfridges) for an undisclosed RRP x
Parting shot
Transparency, openness and honesty are all important qualities to embody while we, the art world, work together to collectively try to reduce the industry’s impact on the environment. We applaud Annka Kultys for her recent insta reel, which was quite unbelievably transparent and honest about her recent air miles (52k in December 2023 alone). Once the initial awe and mortification passed, we were left feeling curious as to how such an astounding lack of critical reflection regarding Kultys’ excessive holibobs (business trips?) might be affecting the planet was not flagged by someone in the gallery - which is a member of the Gallery Climate Coalition. By our calculations, that’s close to 23 tonnes of carbon from flying alone, which is the amount of carbon that 5 average humans would produce in one whole year !! Incredible work. But half of yous reading this could take the same advice…
Degrowth now !!!! x