“Smut is trending”
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This Week
💦 daddy-issue dramas
💦 Panto news
💦 Kenny Schachter mocked
Events
On Tuesday, the latest season of Industry launches on BBC iPlayer and while we can only dream for a similarly daddy-issue-coded HBO drama about the artworld, the reality is that it will surely be this Frieze season’s hangover watch… Given it’s the just a week before the seasonal festivities fully kick in, galleries are bringing out the goods, and there is fabness to see x1000 (just as those *cough, us* that work in them have inboxes so full of unreads, the prospect of leaving on time to make such fab events are pretty slim… not so fab 😭)
🧊 2 Oct | 6-8pm | Juliana Huxtable: Heads & Tails in the Struggle for Iconicity, Project Native Informant [Bethnal Green]
🧊 2 Oct | 6:30-8:30pm | Riar Rizaldi: Mirage, Gasworks [Oval]
🧊 3 Oct | 6-8.30pm | Victor Boullet: Dundee Marmalade, The Artist Room [Tottenham Court Road]
🧊 3 Oct | Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit, Tate Modern [Blackfriars]
🧊 3 Oct | 18:22-20:22pm | Hilary Lloyd: Ok darling, show’s over!, Roland Ross [Margate]
🧊 3 Oct | 6-8pm | Olivia Erlanger: Fan Fiction, Soft Opening [Cambridge Heath]
🧊 3 Oct | 6-8pm | Sammy Baloji, Goldsmiths CCA [New Cross] (talk from 5pm, rsvp to rsvp@gold.ac.uk)
🧊 3 Oct | 6-9pm | forum: a group show curated by Louis Newby and Laila Majid featuring Maddy Whitelaw, Hastings & Quinlan, Edward Thomasson, & more. Xxijra Hii [Deptford]
🧊 3 Oct | 6:30-8:30pm | Jack O’Brien | Nicola L, Camden Art Centre [Finchley Road & Frognal]
🧊 4 Oct | 6-9pm | Eli Coplan: US TV AND FILM, A.Squire [Holborn]
🧊 4 Oct | Celia Hempton: Transplant, Phillida Reid [Tottenham Court Road]
🧊 4 Oct | 6-9pm | Emma Rose Schwartz: Old Mortality, Brunette Coleman [Bloomsbury]
🧊 5 Oct | 6-8pm | Spectral Fine Arts Trust, including Ella Rose Flood, Boz Deseo Garden and Graham Wiebe, Final Hot Desert [Holloway Road]
🧊 6 Oct | 4-9pm | I ♥ my girls, Sissy at Flat 7 [Hackney Wick] 🚨*new space alert* 🚨
🧊 6 Oct | 11am-6pm | Frieze East End Day, including: NıCOLETTı; Project Native Informant; South Parade; Emalin; Public Gallery; Rose Easton; The Approach; Maureen Paley; Hales; Auto Italia; and Modern Art [East…]
🧊 6 Oct | 5-7pm | émergent magazine new issue launch party x Maureen Paley x Herald St ! [Bethnal Green]
Exhibition of the Week
Tarek Lakhrissi: SPIT, at Nicoletti’s new space until November 2, 2024, info here.
A show about saliva! We couldn’t wait to get stuck into this one, as you might imagine, and were some of the first through the door on the day of the opening of Nicoletti’s brand new space, on Paul Street in Shoreditch. Dominating the room, sprawling across the centre of the floor, is a 2 metre long shiny incarnation of the purple devil emoji. Pacman-like, the emoji appears frozen mid-munch through the gallery floor. The cavity of its open mouth forms a dark void and, swaying from having drunk two glasses of champagne in quick succession, we briefly fantasise about crawling into those jaws and taking a nap inside. Horned, fanged and false-lashed, this cutesy-evil hybrid thing plays at both ends of the spectrum – simultaneously giving satanism and offering protection. Toying with duality is characteristic of Lakhrissi’s work, which often takes tricky subjects and explores them with humour. As we hoped, the exhibition dives deep into bodily fluids - spittle to be precise !! - and how liquid exchanges can and do mean so much to us. Think kissing! Think… – ok we won’t go there, but you take our meaning. Sucking on a vape in the smoking area, we learn that the show developed from a traumatic experience at Paris Pride this year, where Tarek Lakhrissi was verbally attacked and spat on. Marching with friends and visibly embodying queerness and Arabness – carrying Palestinian and Algerian flags – was “disgusting” according to the attacker. Immediately enveloped by his friends and by the crowd, the story ends with love and protection. It is this complete 180 switch from one second to the next that Lakhrissi captures so well. It is there in the smattering of fragile glass works across opposing walls. On one side, two tongues reach for each other but never quite touch; on the other, a spray of glass globules with what look to be door knockers (or ring piercings) fused to their fronts hint at ideas of both permission and subversion. Across the back wall, a series of charcoal drawings suggest a stream of consciousness alternate reality where horned figures are benevolent and spittle rains down from the sky… sigh, a girl can dream 💋
Hot Links
🛩️ “He developed a hunger for and expectation of luxury travel that grew increasingly feverish and detail-oriented over the years” – New York mayor Eric Adams has been accused of accepting free luxury travel in exchange for political favours. But how large was he living? The New York Times’ Sarah Lyall puts the experience to the test, forcing down chocolate-covered strawberries dusted with crushed pistachios in the name of journalism. @NYT – Art world edition please??
🧀 “I would happily jump into bed with him… if only he weren’t such a textbook heterosexual” – in Artforum, spittle-fave Oskar Oprey reviews ageing enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq’s new novel. ‘Houellebecq shouldn’t be read by anyone under the age of thirty,’ says Oprey. ‘The reader needs to have matured, like a stinky block of French cheese’. Totally x
🚫 “Time to return this embarrassment of a prize” – The Times’s Laura Freeman did not enjoy the Turner Prize exhibition, describing how ‘little excites’, complaining about how ‘unartfully arranged’ it appears, concluding the prize “remains incomprehensible and adolescent” and even going so far to say it ‘feels utterly moribund’. Opinion clapbacks about the increasingly less-scandalous event’s relevancy were published in both Frieze and Plaster… And they say criticism is over!
🐍 “the internet—that is, people who are somehow still on Twitter” – spittle’s fav new substack DEEZ LINKS delivers scalding take after scalding take, on this occasion starting with RFK's scandalous affair with New York mag rising star writer Olivia Nuzzi ☕ and finishing with an interview with The Cobrasnake revealing they haven’t even cracked open their archives from the 2010s: ‘Everyone thought my 2000s photos were lit. You should see what 2010 to 2015 looked like.’ !!!
🐒 “I… I like it” –spittle’s favourite fossilised it-girl, ötza, has released two new chapters of her fanfic, and we are obsessed! Pour yourself a glass of wine, run a hot bath and get lost in the prehistoric world of chimps, crusty cumrags and tax havens.
Add-to-Cart
Babe, Kerry Katona x Katie Price panto tickets just dropped !! As Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters (with outfits surely inspired by Kenzo’s 2016 H&M collab), these iconic gels and famed frenemies are single handedly reviving both the panto industry and the humble town of Northwich. Fingers crossed Pricey throws it back to 2016 and gives an on stage finale speech, as reported by Popbitch: "Sorry I've been such a cunt in rehearsals. To make it up to you all, I'm having a party and you're all invited to come... in my mouth!"
Buy tickets here, for £15!
Parting Shot
This week, we ask: should Kenny Schachter be allowed to write a column for Artnet in which he shamelessly plugs his own show? In this week’s advertorial, Kenny reminisces: ‘Prior to the exhibition, when I sought feedback about a body of paintings I intended to feature, I was told by someone I deeply respect and admire, in no uncertain terms, that I should not only forever refrain from painting, but from drawing, as well.’ Who could possibly have told Kenny to put down the paintbrush? Surely not the subject of White Cube Bermondsey’s current show of paintings… Kenny’s former flame and lockdown romance, Tracey Emin? Gutting. Surprisingly, Kenny managed to get through 11 paragraphs before mentioning Inigo Philbrick, and a whopping 20 before mentioning NFTs… must be a new record. xoxo
