Best Show in a commercial gallery
Pamela Rosenkranz, “Healer”, at Sprueth Magers London.
The snake that graced the Flash Art cover was out action the day I visited Rosenkranz’s extraordinary show, but it was almost just as well – it allowed us to take in her acrylics-on-aluminum, without being worried about venom bites, standing in front of them until they turned into landscape paintings.
Best Show in a museum
“Dürer’s Journeys” at The National Gallery, London & Memphis: Plastic Field at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes.
This year was stuck in the UK – less oppressively than last year, but culturally perhaps even more limiting, with formal institutions stuck in a deadenly loop; blockbusters without the , for reasons that are obvious and over-trodden.
One show that shook this sense was the staging of Memphis: Plastic Field in Milton Keynes, a fascinating and much maligned new town just outside London’s dread orbit. The other was an exhibition of Dürer’s work between Venice and the Low Countries. Both were fairly straight shows – no pyrotechnics or dazzling curatorial concepts. But both were quite extraordinary, and felt like they spoke to our time: how networks work, when commerce acts as rocket fuel and when it acts as a corrosive agent; vitality and chaos before and after the modern.
Best Virtual Show or Best Virtual Art Experience
Is it too much to call Game Stonks the best virtual show / art experience? Is the Donda album launch? Or the first flash of FOMO in years, when I saw e v e r y o n e at the Anne Imhof Carte Blanche apart from lil ol’ me? Maybe Grace Wales Bonner’s launch of Black Sunlight in January, with the quoting of Derek Walcott that made me finally read Omeros, and gift it to my dad a week later? Or you know, talking about Scarpa with a friend, and sharing pics of his installation at the Hayward from 50 years ago?
I honestly don’t know where it begins and where it ends; when you can meaningfully talk about a performance artwork or an event; when something is online or off; when everything exists on the same place; the same surface; do you? In a way, discreetly carving off a moment as fully “art” or fully “online” seems the most regressive gesture one could make; do you know what I mean? Feel free to cut this, maybe I’m being boring.
Two moments do stand out, though – Louis Vuitton’s presentation for AW21 in January, and the moment when I saw the drones marking out a palm tree for Virgil, and then melting away like LED fireflies. Fruity, imaginative, almost too much moments that bookended a year of grief and possibility; life and its opposite.
Best NFT
Sarah Friend’s Off.
I absolutely love my mate Sarah Friend’s series Off, in which she minted a series of 155 contracts for a JPGs with the same pixel dimensions as a range of screens, with an embodied message, and collectors who decide, collectively, what to do with them – collaborate to reveal a shared secret message, or hoard them. It’s super cool and super clever and super super super beautiful!
Best Film
James Bond – No Time To Die.
Best TV Series
Vikings (2013-2020).
Best Song
Off The Grid by Ye, Playboi Carti and Fivio Foreign.
Honestly, I just love this track, and the entire Donda industrial system, so so so so much.
Best Reading
The joy of books is that they’re so much less time-bound than other media, so it’s tricky isolating just recent ones. But here’s a set of books that I’ve rushed through, fell asleep with, returned to this year:
• The Merchant of Prato by Iris Origo
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• The Buddha in the Machine by R John Williams
• Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis
• Medium Design by Keller Easterling
• Atlas of Autonomous AI by Ben Vickers & K Allado-McDowall
• Stalin: Paradoxes of Power by Stephen Kotkin
• A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman
• Seeing Like A State by James C Scott
• Billy Budd by Herman Melville
• Mercury Retrograde by Emily Segal
Best Text on Art Criticism
New Models Codex and The Age of You by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist
These amazing publications are best thought of as group shows in books, as HUO called the books he has worked on with Douglas Coupland and Flash Art collaborator Shumon Basar, and love them both. Neither are really about art, so much as grounded in the media of today, with visual culture one plane of combat among many. The emotional, the attentional, the militaristic, the ideological, the financial all offering other competing or coalescing as ways of viewing the world contemporary art, let alone critique, has struggled to keep pace with.
Yet perhaps thinking of these as mega-commentaries that use the thinking of art criticism turned to anything apart from art makes us value it even more –the navigation of symbols; its syncretic dimension, the ultra-personal and inherently dialogic nature of the practice make it seem like a perfect rubric, somehow.
Best Fashion show
• Maximillion AW21
• Miu Miu SS22
• Balenciaga Couture AW21
As time melted away, with fashion weeks these kind of weird, mirage objects, it’s funny that the fashion events that really stuck in my head were all kind of proper fashion shows – walks, looks, schedules, seasons. Is that funny? I don’t know, maybe.
Anyway – these shows all felt like flashes of incredible, thrilling, jaw dropping beauty, and all three were moments that when I saw them, I just jumped up and down with excitement over. It’s a bit silly to lump them all together and shoehorn a narrative to encompass such different moments and designers. The insane deconstructed grunge cutaways of Miu Miu, the soulful, space age elegance of Maximilian, the sheer power and silence of Demna’s collection and staging – three divergent strategies, three incredible incredible incredible moments.
