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This week
💦 Politics are in for 2025 babies
💦 DOES THIS ALL LINK BACK TO THE VIBE SHIFT????
💦 Ana Viktoria Dzinic’s cabaret RETURNS
Events
Suda Yoshihiro and Galli are some new names we are happy to be introduced to this week, with openings on Thurs at Sadie Coles HQ and Goldsmiths CCA respectively. Also on our radar is the writer and AIDS activist Gregg Bordowitz, whose show you can see late on Thursday at Camden Art Centre – in case you missed the PV a couple of weeks ago x PLUS Noah Davis at Barbican will be a must see, open late on Fri (after the private PV on Weds). It’s turning out to be a v institutional week, with fab chicas Athen & Nina back at it again on Sat with new work on view at FORMA HQ - as usual, lots to see gorgeous darlings x
🧊 5 Feb | 7:30-9:30pm | Ana Viktoria Dzinic’s cabaret with with Dean Kissick, Adomas Narkevičius, Tosia Leniarska, Antoin Sharkey, Daré Dada and special guest, plus free valentines day gingerbread hearts by Louis Thompson, Ginny on Frederick [Farringdon]
🧊 5 Feb | 6:30-8:30pm | Marcin Dudek: The Ground Harbours the Soul, Oof [White Hart Lane]
🧊 6 Feb | 6-8pm | Kim Chin & Cloth of Gold Archive (Artist Talk, 7pm), Metroland Cultures [Kilburn]
🧊 6 Feb | 6-8pm | Suda Yoshihiro, Sadie Coles HQ Bury St [Green Park]
🧊 6 Feb | 6-8pm | Apollo Painting School 2024, Alice Amati [Great Portland St]
🧊 6 Feb | 6-9pm | Gregg Bordowitz: There: a Feeling (late opening), Camden Art Centre [Finchley Road & Frognal]
🧊6 Feb | 5:30pm–8.30pm | Theaster Gates: 1965: Malcolm in Winter: A Translation Exercise, White Cube (artist talk and opening, RSVP here) [London Bridge]
🧊 6 Feb | 6-9pm | Galli: So, So, So, Goldsmiths CCA [New Cross]
🧊 7 Feb | 5-8pm | Noah Davis (late opening), Barbican [Barbican]
🧊 8 Feb | 4-6pm | Athen Kardashian & Nina Mhach Durban: Captive Heart, FORMA HQ, RSVP here [Bermondsey]
Hot links
Oh to be an editor in another weekly editorial meeting, still failing to grapple with how to develop the discourse following the recent disruptions by edgelord critic and IYKYK model Dean Kissick [identity politics killed contemporary art] and performance artist and President of the United States of America Donald Trump [identity politics killed America]. Undoubtedly, the former is a hook to attend to the latter. No longer can we bury our heads in the sands of ignorance and partying ! Fascism is at every turn !! True to art magazine form, the last few weeks have brought an onslaught of both delicately coded essays that make us think people are too scared/confused to speak openly, and some good attempts at intellectual clarity on this hot mess… In the name of streamlining, we present our top line findings on how art mags are facing up to the dismantling of the liberal world order on which our ecosystem depends 💋💋
💋“Lectures on social issues instead of just amazing art” – JJ Charlesworth throws a grenade at woke snowflakes everywhere with this diatribe in The London Standard that argues we need more pop programming, less identity politics… including some rather liberal framing of the data, i.e. describing the V&A’s ‘bouncing’ return to 89% pre-pandemic visitor figures as barnstorming proof of good programing, but Tate Modern’s 82% figures as evidence of devastating mismanagement by progressive elites…
💋“The mega-exhibition is a form fundamentally unable to bear the weight of its own contradictions” – Tackling the tricky topic of biennials, Joshua Segun Lean gives a dressing down to some of the big dogs, concluding that ‘to critically engage with the social and political life in which it partakes, curatorial practice must examine its implication in an exhibitionary complex for which the representation of catastrophe is itself the goal, rather than a means to struggle against it’... meow x
💋“A faith in a certain type of cultural politics has fallen apart. What comes after, for the moment, is unclear” – For Artnet, Ben Davis also presents a re-run of notable Biennials to point out that dismissing popular criticism of the ‘intellectual weakness of liberal virtue signalling’ is what led us to this godforsaken place, and that progressive liberalism is to most people an incomprehensible bubble – kinda like the art world!!
💋“To take into account the contexts in which a work of art was made is not to reduce it to them” – Diving into the role and relevance of the critic, the editor/s of e-flux Criticism were quick off the mark to issue this ciphered piece, which propounds in icy tones that ‘To act as if art can be understood without reference to politics is at best a privilege born of the conviction that the air breathed by artists and their appreciators is too rarefied to be poisoned by such base concerns’. Ok snow queen
Got a perspective of your own? Submit it to spittlesubmissions@gmail.com tiger x
Add-to-cart
If, like us, you grew up swooning over a silver-skinned blood-sucking thousand-year-old vampire named Edward Cullen you might like this nostalgia-inducing silk scarf featuring Elizabeth Peyton’s sizzlingly angsty painting of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart as Edward and Bella in Twilight. Buy this to unironically show your appreciation for late-noughties fan-fic and your love for contemporary art simultaneously! Available from David Zwirner’s Platform, it’s priced at $475, but you’d better be quick, spider monkies, as it’s a limited edition of 75. We look forward to wearing ours in Paris, reading a related book recommended by ever fab Kembra Pfahler: Tish Weinstock’s How to Be a Goth: Notes on Undead Style x
Parting shot
We often think about the sleeper articles in print magazines that never make it online or get pinged to us via Google Alerts. Last week, Tatler – the British society magazine that is so doggedly obsessed with the upper classes that VICE magazine once introduced a column to dissect it’s gossipy pages – published a story breathlessly announcing the discovery of the ‘next generation of YBAs breathing new life into the British art scene and the gallerists putting them front and centre’. Like ES Mag’s iconic ‘Meet the YLAs’ feature similarly hailing Saatchi Yates, George Rouy and Isaac Benigson (?) as responsible for a British contemporary art renaissance, the bizarre article, including an impressive number of factual errors, celebrates Sahara Longe for being “intensely glamorous and massively social”, India Rose James for being a “property maven”, Louise Giovanelli for being “mullet-sporting”, Alex Margo Arden for being “at Claridges, adorned in jewels and corsets”, Georgina Odell for being “the wife of singer Tom Odell…” and Rocco Ritchie (we know, we are dying) for being in the “right place, [at the] right time”. All in all, a stunning read x
xo