“YOU’RE DOING AMAZING, SWEETIE”
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This week
💦 Enshittification
💦 Kim giving crime scene
💦 Dean Kissick, the muse
Events
There are only 10 more days of winter ! #scream ! With a SPRING in our step this week we are sashaying to the likes of Neven, Kupfer, Brunette Coleman and Final Hot Desert, & loving seeing lots of new-to-us names on the docket 💋 xo
🧊 21 Feb | 6–8pm | Justin Rui Han: Shatter Zones, The Artist Room [Tottenham Court Road]
🧊 22 Feb | 6–9pm | Checkpoints, group show featuring Callum Hansen, Dorothy Sing Zhang, Julian Kowal, Leo Elia Jung, Nina Hayes, and Skinny, Kupfer [Shoreditch]
🧊 22 Feb | 6–9pm | Konstantin Zhukov: black carnation part three, Neven [Bethnal Green]
🧊 22 Feb | 6–9pm | Linked Out: Logged In, curated by Nina Wong, Gossamer Fog [Deptford]
🧊 22 Feb | 6–9pm | Construct featuring Emma Adler, Bobby Dowler, Sylvie Hayes-Wallace, Ali Glover, Dux Pacifico, Anne Tallentire and Charlotte Thrane, curated by Brooke Wilson, Cob gallery [Camden]
🧊 23 Feb | 6–8pm | Anton Munar: and the birds will continue, Brunette Coleman [Bloomsbury]
🧊 24 Feb | 5–8pm | Pol Wah Tse, Final Hot Desert [Holloway]
Exhibition of the Week
Ruby Dickson: Maybe my fairy-tale has a different ending than I dreamed it would. But that’s OK., at Nicoletti, Until 23 March, info here.
In 2011, following her ‘bombshell divorce’ from the aptly named basketball player Kris (Humphries), Kim Kardashian is recorded by Glamour magazine as saying ‘Maybe my fairy-tale has a different ending than I dreamed it would. But that’s OK.’ After only 72 days of marriage, Kim tells sister Khloe that she has given up on the idea of children, finding a soulmate and true love (I’m paraphrasing). ‘Maybe I'll just be a good aunt’ she muses. Fast forward to 2024 and it becomes apparent that this moment over 10 years ago was just another fantastic storyline in Kim’s character arc. Having gained 4 kids and a net worth of $1.7 billion (up $1.68 billion from 2011), Kim and the klan have konsiderably (sorry) kapitalised from kapturing kontemporary (lol) idolatry and spun over 20 seasons of storylines out of their lives in LA.
Staring at Ruby Dickson’s suite of Kim Kardashians in Nicoletti’s gallery on Vyner Street, we immediately recognise Kim’s strong, familiar visual language and simultaneously freak out at such a chilling, kinda cybernetic line-up. Working from actual photographs, the gestural oil stick backgrounding to Dickson’s paintings very much give crime scene. After all, these are based on actual shots of Kim papped out on the streets. But the cruel and invasive media treatment we grew up with is a thing of the noughties. Now, we are far beyond believing in candid paparazzi shots –mainstream brands were riffing on rife celebrity-pap collusion as far back as 2018.
Apparently, Kim has been self-mythologising since primary school. A true master of her craft, she has made branding and profiteering off your brand kinda respectful. Dickson’s impressionistic painterly style breaks down Kim’s visual language: iconic fashion and media theory moments – from the masochistic Balenciaga-tape-gate to the hand-painted Condo Birkin, and even the distinctively Ye-influenced ‘pantashoes’ looks – are rendered in brisk brushstrokes, the familiar shapes and silhouettes merging into a kind of non-specific Kardashianness.
Further toying with ideas of constant performativity and our personal projection (be that belief, aspiration, cynicism or all of the above), Dickson’s titles hint at the wild speculation conjured by glimpses into the lives of the rich and famous. Kim Kardashian stopped by the Hot & Cool Cafe on Monday with Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, January 25, 2022 (2024) makes us wonder what *really* goes on at lunch with the Clinton girls? Or Kim Kardashian sparkled in an over-the-top coat as she attended a dinner with the “SNL” cast (2024), which has us in overdrive, imagining what viral moment the media moguls who rule our lives could be cooking up next. Drawing from a decade of observation and analysis, this can actually be quite an involved mental process (for example, see the good work MJ Corey aka Kardashian Kolloquium has been doing for years).
We came for the novelty of Kim, queen of intrigue and ruler of the paparazzi, and left with an insidious sense that our long-standing ironic engagement in the KarJenner mythosphere isn’t quite the detached, unserious/passing interest we had thought it was… Looking back, we can not only track culture through Kim, but our own lives. Tragic, but in this godless world what else have we got? 💋
Hot Links
🚬 “I’m just gonna say what we’re all thinking: no more sculptures of antidepressants, please” – Henry Gibbs relays a wild, chaotic trip to Mexico City, where he runs into hotties like Stuart Shave, Motoko Ishibashi and Jack O’Brien. Reported trends include paintings of Zac Efron touching himself, high-heeled Y-Project-esque gaiter boots from Zara, and smoking inside. We’ve definitely had this fever dream before - it will pass soon, Henry x
🎾 “we deny ourselves physical proximity. it’s been a weird experiment. the results haven’t been pretty” – Derek Thompson’s alarming, although not unexpected, deep-dive on the contemporary decline in simply hanging out, for The Atlantic. Filled with cheery takes such as ‘teens are dating less, playing fewer sports, spending less time with friends, and making fewer friends’ (!) Makes one glad to be ageing
🧼 “never before have I seen the denizens of the global art/academia-industry dressed so supportively, sporting official merch” – Adina Glickstein diarises this year’s Transmediale for Spike. She covers #StrikeGermany; artists and curators withdrawing from the festival; the greed-fueled suicide of online platforms; art on a hangover; and ‘enshittification’ - a pathology afflicting the internet today…
🪦 “What does it mean to be a freak? – We loove to see our fav (commercial gallery) exhibition of all time inspire a collection at LFW. Charlie Fox’s My Head is a Haunted House at Sadie Coles HQ in 2019 blew our socks off and Marco Capaldo autumn/winter 2024 show for 16Arlington has done the same – presented at the Barbican too. What more could a girl ask for xo
Parting Shot
Does anyone have any ideas as to why artists KEEP making portraits of NYC-edgelord art critic Dean Kissick?!?! @dean are you asking artists to paint these? Or is there some sort of strange open call we haven’t caught wind of?
