Best Show in a commercial gallery
Best show in a commercial gallery is by definition the most lucrative one so I guess that would be some third-rate wet ass figurative painting show by a 25-year-old that sold out week in advance via pdfs and has a waiting list of 600 clients. The same painting will be falling like dead birds from the sky with no reserve on secondary market real soon cause the artist was selling them in bulk to third rate advisors straight from the studio only 3 months prior. Emerging commercial galleries are turning into lottery dispensing machines and blue chip galleries are just well… blue chip. It’s strange.
Best Show in a museum
I didn’t see many this year. Was pretty much at home working. In all honesty, I don’t follow art as much as I follow other creative industries such as literature, cinema, music and such. it’s a bit embarrassing to admit but the art world stresses me out.
Best Show in a nonprofit space
Same here, I didn’t follow. I’m sure there is some amazing stuff I missed out on here. I’m trying harder not to know and see than to know and see. Feels like some innocence I’m trying to preserve inside my head.
Best Virtual Show or Best Virtual Art Experience
YouTube
Best NFT
I find the discourse surrounding NFT much more interesting than any NFT in of itself. The growing interest in speculative investments and financial literacy becoming a sort of a pop culture thing really marked this year. It used to be rude to talk about money this much, but now people can’t stop talking about money. Everyone is like ‘oh I got this magic card I bought in 2002 it just sold for one hundred grand or something’. It’s so silly, but it’s really some new economy we woke up to, money means nothing. Debt is the new money, loaning against assets and calling it tax efficiency is. Nothing will ever be the same. I’m still waiting for NBA to start selling tickets as NFTs and banks to loan against the Banksy u got in freeport (do they do that already?) then we can say the infrastructure is in place.
Best Instagram Account
Harperspazaar / streetstyle instagram from Split, my mother’s home town, where I spent huge and meaningful chunks of my childhood. Split has always been a very “fashionable” place. This account really captures its soul. I go there and look at photos and get all nostalgic for my grandma and post war 90s Croatia.
Best Film
I feel all the films this year have been reality shows. Oh, we gonna take this amazing actress, dump her in a middle of a Walmart parking lot and let her interact with “real” people and we got a movie. This obsession with real and struggle got translated into “oh we don’t need to cast anything, pay anyone, we pocket all the profits”. Movie producers realized that they can use this class anxiety and inequality we see blowing up for their profits. Dune was different, I liked that movie a lot. Pity we still need a pretty white boy Timothee to glue all our anxieties into one place. Total mama’s boy, so annoying.
Best Series
Oh, A LOT of them. I love series. I loved Mare of Eastown, because it played these crime cliches so well. Small town, disproportionately big crime, everyone is dying and a crazy detective who is behaving erratic, unprofessional and mad and who got this personal backstory that conveniently weaves thru the plot.
Best Song
I don’t even know what song came out this year, what came out last year and what came out 4 years ago. I’m still busy listening and analyzing albums that came out in 2020. I’m too systematic in my consumption of music I can’t move as fast as the industry moves. I’m still admiring fetch the bolt cutter and to pimp a butterfly and that came out a long time ago.
Best Reading
This insane twitter thread about generational wealth and privilege where people started repenting for receiving 20 bucks from their parents once or a care package from their mom. Like you are supposed to acknowledge the generational privilege that is your poor mom trying hard. A bunch of white people whipping themselves in public in a strangely narcissistic way. What a joke.
Best Fashion show
I’ve been quite plugged out of fashion this year. I had a little fashion OD of sorts. Found myself with an ever so increasing interest in quality materials and tailoring and stitching. Fantasizing about super long cashmere cardi coats and perfectly tailored pants. Feels like fashion has hit some sort of a glass ceiling it doesn’t know how to break. As if luxury is not luxury at this point and that’s the paradox luxury fashion houses will have to deal with. They tried to make sneakers into luxury and that sort of played a big joke on the whole sector. Cynicism is not sustainable design mode unfortunately. I guess fashion has to move somewhere else and craft and quality are the only way at this point. I’m sure this will happen; you can already see the tendency with Balenciaga going couture.
