“try a cuddle puddle like Musk”
This week
🧊 capri ciggies
🧊 getting sexy, neurotic and angsty at Frieze
🧊 trickle down economics in action
Events
💦20 Oct | 6–9pm | The Great Wen, Usual Business Gallery [Camden Road]
💦21 Oct | 6–11pm | The Worm at the Core, SET Woolwich [Woolwich]
💦21 Oct | 6–9pm | Poetic Dandruff - Letters to a Young Artist (After Rilke), Barry Gallery [Peckham]
💦22 Oct | 5–8pm | Civil Twilight, Ginny on Frederick [Barbican]
💦22 Oct | 6–8pm | Tommy Harrison: Frozen Mid-Melt, Pipeline Contemporary [Oxford Circus]
💦23 Oct | 2–5pm | Collective Ending hosts A Sci-Fi Curriculum event: 🦑 Glitch, Mutate, Dissolve to Water [Deptford]
FRIEZE WEEK SCENE REPORT
Ok so last week was a ride – we saw some good stuff, some bad stuff, and some ugly stuff, and all in one little marquee. Thanks to everyone who DM’d us how they were doing 😘 One friend of the ‘sletter summed up their personal experience in three words: sexy, neurotic, angsty – who said tween-romance was dead? Spittle LOVED pretty much all of the Focus section tbh: special mentions to Maren Karlson, Rhea Dillon, Michael Ho, Women’s History Museum, Mahmoud Khaled, Nabuqi and Joanna Woś. Rishi Sunak made a surprise appearance – but given his net worth is estimated at £730 million it’s actually pretty inevitable that he collects. Rumours ran rampant in the tent that he purchased a Michael Armitage from White Cube – will we be seeing it in the back of a zoom call cum next pandemic? As you’ve probably heard, the queues were insane on Wednesday which led many-a-collector to lament that they couldn’t get their work of choice because they arrived to the fair too late (it had nothing to do with their shitty collection and lack of institutional ties, surely). In-the-know insta clout-post of the week had to feature that commissioned Issy Wood painting of a pomeranian in Hélène Nguyen-Ban’s regal townhouse, site of the sushi-fuelled emergent magazine party. i-D asked if art fairs are the new fashion week and we witnessed a fair few Frieze friendly fashion trends, including but not limited to: mules (crocs, furry ‘stocks, and clog uggs), Kiko asics, motorbike jackets, geek cardigans, these orange Tom Ford sunnies, and of course the Loro Piana mob was out in full force. PLUS why is Frieze the only occasion where people wear Golden Goose sneakers?? Prize for most chaotic event of the week is awarded to Matches for encouraging Michèle Lamy to serve scrambled eggs to guests at their central townhouse. “There was nothing to make a statement with... but I think my art is to get people together,” Lamy explained. Minor commiserations go to Karla Black (who once represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale); whose sculptures were described by The White Pube as “terrible” on a fleeting but succinct insta-story review. Major commiserations go to Sarah Księska, whose work was STOLEN from Ramiken Crucible’s pop-up at the Averard Hotel in Lancaster Gate. Any tips? There is a £10,000 reward if you do… By Sunday it seemed that some booth gallerinas+dealers were practising the new “quiet quitting” workflow. When one keen spittle contributor asked one European gallerist for the name of an artist on their stand, they were promptly shouted at and told they were “interrupting a meeting” taking place on the booth?! girl plz. The annoying question on everyone riding the European circuit’s lips: see you in Paris next week? With the cheapest Eurostar now priced at £399 return, and a lot of sleep for us to catch up on, absolutely no way xoxo
Hot links
🚉“Liverpool Street station – the bastard lovechild of a 70s shopping precinct and a M. C. Escher painting” – Drawing comparisons between the likes of St Pancras/Kings Cross and prolific murderers Fred & Rose West, Fergus Butler-Gallie takes us on a whistlestop tour of London Tube Stops as Serial Killers. ‘Need the lavatory in Liverpool Street? That’ll be thirty pence to be wanked at by some deviants in a basement’.
🥱“The aesthetic indifference among the wealthy on display here is very depressing… It seems indifference is the core of the matter” – If you’ve spent any time online over the last few years you will have noticed the impending crisis of our interiors. Across the UK, US and further afield, interiors have become muted, drab (yet decidedly mirrored) – as if designed by someone with achromatopsia colour-blindness. Hayley Jean Clark of Dirt investigates the trend which feigns luxury in the most boring way possible. Renters have gone through enough already – this has to stop.
🫂“Elon Musk has tried a cuddle puddle — so should you” – including this article because we’d never heard of the california-weird cuddle puddle. Apparently, at a house party at venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson’s house (soundtracked by Moby) Musk engage in a ‘form of typically non-sexual snuggling’ to encourage production of ‘oxytocin, the “hug hormone”’ with other revellers. spittle likes to imagine how these could change the dynamic at blue chip galleries…
💨“people are at the frontier of my work being some kind of hyped entity” – Issy Wood appeared on the culture-bro podcast How Long Gone - listen to hear her discuss everything from friends flipping her birthday cards at auction and buying works from her Carlos Ishikawa family, to her sobriety and deep love of smoking capri ciggies.
Add to Cart
If you have ever read Susan Sontag’s On Photography and nearly hurt yourself trying to mentally recall each one of the iconic photographs referenced, then wipe that brow and close down google images because The Folio Society have just published the *first-ever* illustrated edition of the seminal text! A gorgeous thing, the book is bound in grey blocked cloth, slots out of a solid lime green sleeve and even has goddamn silver page tops… the perfect gift for those in your life who are a little too trigger happy with their retro analogue and need a good grounding in the medium’s theoretical underpinnings… Available from The Folio Society for £85 here.
Parting shot
Rishi Sunak spotted at frieze lol redistribute those millions where it matters dishi x this is trickle-down economics in action !!