Digby Warde-Aldam

I love my friends at the loucher fringes of the art world, but every now and again, someone does something so obviously stupid that it calls certain such ties into question. Last week, a pal’s poor judgment engendered a Salo-grade spectacle so nightmarish that I can’t bring myself to elaborate. Suffice to say: some parties present will never shake off the trauma; and that the instigator was extremely lucky to avoid castration. It gets worse, too. I’d just returned from Margate, where I’d spent ages taking notes on the locale’s second-most-famous artist: a noisy, blue-haired ceramicist called Lindsey Mendick (b.1987). Mendick is fluent in the art-historical resonances and material subtleties of her chosen medium.

I miss the New Labour years, when the government gushed money at cultural initiatives and Britain, previously a backwater in the art stakes, began to look like a serious international player. Sculpture was big and inescapable, and for a brief period it felt as though we’d found our groove: the Italians and Spanish had their old masters while New York bagged canonical modernism; France did both. But, from roughly the mid-1990s to whenever it was that Big Brother stopped airing, we had the best of the new – and ‘the new’, in character, was either ribald, bizarre or monumental. This last register, as executed by the likes of Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, was unashamedly populist but given legitimacy via the pseudo-philosophical rationale of its creators.

Grim news from gallery-land, where even Manhattan’s mega-blue chips are shedding jobs by the truckload. ‘The market’s fucked,’ one soundbite-handy dealer told me last week, admitting that the reckoning was probably long overdue. For artists, this is bleak: the oligarchs are stuck in Moscow, public funds have run dry and, short of shilling for the Saudis or tech barons, there remains only one street on which to beg: fashion. The prestige rag trade has always had a synergy with the art biz: both hawk luxury goods, at least nominally underpinned by visionary genius, for ludicrous prices. Artistic careers have been made by shows at tax-efficient fashion foundations and both domains are notoriously exclusive.

The 61st Venice Biennale arrived freighted with portent. To cut a long story short: Russia and Israel were invited to exhibit, and the prize jurors resigned in protest. Then, on preview day, the city was hit by a storm of biblical force. I sat in the Stansted Wetherspoons for hours, oblivious to the fact that the Ryanair ahead of mine was taking a pummelling that ultimately landed it on the wrong side of the Adriatic. ‘It was terrifying,’ a journalist colleague recounted. ‘And apparently, Bjork was on board, too.’ You’ll leave feeling that you’ve spent five hours trapped in the basement of Italy’s most patronising headshop The bad juju had set in last May when Koyo Kouoh, the programme’s curator, dropped dead aged 57.

I’d just emerged from Stratford station when I realised it had been almost a decade to the day since I’d last been here. I thought back to a dismal morning press call in early 2016 to the mangy park landscaped as a visible legacy of the London Olympics. The collected hacks shivered as Mayor Johnson unveiled the latest of the development’s showpiece public sculptures, devoting much of his speech to boosterish predictions of the area’s imminent renaissance. ‘Really?’ I thought as I surveyed the spectral, vaguely Soviet townscape emerging from the mist. ‘In this shithole?’ Years hence, it appears that Boris, for once, wasn’t bluffing. The new-look Stratford resembles an idiot’s doodle of the Chicago skyline, novelty towers sprouting far into the distance.

I was on the way to Cecily Brown’s exhibition at the Serpentine last week when I heard that Kensington Gardens had been locked down. Word was that terrorist drones armed with ‘radioactive material’ were on course to blitz the Israeli embassy, presumably taking out a large part of west London with it. Scary though this was, it was also –  as far as I’m aware – a wholesale fiction: an elaborate psy-op some would-be jihadist had staged to convince us that, yes, it could happen here. That it didn’t, and probably couldn’t, was irrelevant; what struck me was the fact that the security services didn’t consider it wholly improbable.

It occurs to me only now that I might have spent far too much time in France. Indeed, so familiar with Paris did I claim to be that, in 2023, I was contacted by an agency in need of someone who could conduct specialised ‘art tours’ for small groups of foreigners. Most of these clients were Americans, largely from the Midwest, but there was also a number of well-to-do Chinese and the odd Indian. They wanted much the same thing: they’d seen the Eiffel Tower and been ripped off on the Left Bank; they’d eaten at Lipp and some had even bussed out to grottier banlieues to get a real-life taste of La Haine. What they really wanted, however, was someone to hold their hand around the museums.

I got my first paid writing gig back in the early 2010s, for an online magazine fixated on the then-current phenomenon we were already calling ‘post-internet art’. The journal was all but unreadable, its house style both po-mo and po-faced to the extent that contributors were obliged to adopt pseudonymous bylines. I went with ‘Screamin’ Jay Jopling’, which counted for a rare laugh. Yet the tone was very much in tune with the art we covered. Whether it was video, sculpture, photography or pretty much any other medium, it was chiefly concerned with the intrusion of digital technology into – the style guide’s punctuation, not mine – ‘real’ life.

At the end of last week, I caught a budget flight to Milan to see a woman. As soon as I arrived I was bundled into a Fiat Panda and sped southwards for Bologna’s annual art weekend, its events ranging from the reverential to the ridiculous. In the latter camp was MAMbo’s John Giorno retrospective, which – for Giorno is a bona fide hero – promised to be superb. It wasn’t, but a bad homage to Giorno is a homage to Giorno all the same. Born in Brooklyn in 1936, he joined the merchant navy as a young man and, on returning to New York, became both a highwire avant-garde poet and an acolyte of Andy Warhol, who filmed him sleeping for five hours straight and presented the result as mode-shifting cinema.

I met the Tate’s outgoing director Maria Balshaw only once, back when she was in Manchester running both the Whitworth gallery and the city’s municipal art museum. She was given to management-speak and annoying soundbites – she more than once described herself as ‘feisty ’ – but she’d done a superlative job. She was charismatic and supremely competent – in theory, the perfect candidate for the soon-to-be-vacant Tate leadership. She got the job two years later, but the confrontational demeanour that had worked so well up north didn’t wash in London, where the phrase ‘can do’ routinely elicits the same retort: no, you can’t.

Two years ago I was flown to Reykjavik to interview the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson. It was a weird old trip, booked in at 48 hours’ notice, but Ragnar was consistently charming and generous. Indeed, the only slightly touchy moment came when I asked him about his 2012 video installation The Visitors, a berserk undertaking split across nine screens, in which the artist and an entourage of musician friends spend 52 minutes chanting the baleful refrain from a song written by his then recent ex-wife. The artist tensed up as he considered the question. ‘Shit, I gotta go,’ he said. He probably did, but his reticence might also have had something to do with the fact that the work was possibly conceived as a cathartic means of putting his first marriage behind him.

Everyone loves a private view, and I am no exception. I don’t know how many hours I must have spent trudging around central London’s art galleries in search of warm white wine – my social life doesn’t extend much beyond the confines of that circuit to be honest. Lately, however, I’ve been to some dreadful things; shows that seem to exist purely in order to enable their ritzy opening galas. I suppose I have only myself to blame for turning up to an evening at London’s stupidest gallery last week, but it was truly horrible: a party thrown for a scenester artist who turned DJ for the night, spinning butchered mash-ups of 1980s club hits to a scrum of pouting influencers. As for the art: suffice to say I’m not giving anyone the dignity of a namecheck.

Taking place every October in Regent’s Park, the Frieze fair is probably the biggest event in London’s art calendar. It is also, as a spectacle, by far the least enjoyable. With works crammed into cubicle-sized booths, and punters battling a crossfire of air kisses and the palpable stress ricocheting around the flimsy partitions, I struggle to think of a worse context in which to look at art of any stripe. Still, it always used to be an occasion to take the pulse of the contemporary art world, to pick out the visual signatures of the reigning avant-garde tendency and clock what Jeremy Deller was doing with his facial hair at any given moment. This year’s iteration proposed no such insights.

So, the Turner Prize: where do we start? It’s Britain’s most prestigious art award, one that used to mean something and now attracts little more than indifference. Taking place every year, it grants £25,000 to a winner chosen from four shortlisted artists, all of whom are obliged to display work together either at Tate Britain, or at a regional gallery. The latest iteration, at Bradford’s Cartwright Hall, is the best in a while – but before we get to that, some context. The Turner was established in 1984, but only really grabbed anyone’s attention when Channel 4 began televising the prize-giving ceremony in the 1990s.

August is always a crap month for exhibitions in London. The collectors are elsewhere, the dealers are presumably hot on their heels, and the galleries are filled with makeweight group shows staged to hold the fort until the end of the holidays. This year, however, even events of that kind are thin on the ground: many establishments have simply shuttered for the month – and given the dire state of the art market, I’m inclined to wonder how many will reopen come September. The doom-auguring sunflower paintings here would look great on the cover of a Metallica record Still, I caught the two Anselm Kiefer shows running concurrently.

Last month, I got the train down to Margate to interview the Egyptian-Armenian artist Anna Boghiguian (b. 1946), whose exhibition The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories was about to open at the Turner Contemporary. Long story short, the conversation did not go well: Anna reacted to my questions with some irritation, swatting them away like low-flying bluebottles. I got flustered, she got bored, and eventually so did I. We wrapped things up around the 20-minute mark and I ran away to stare into the abyss. It was a shame, because the show was, for the most part, really good.

If you’ve been reading the more excitable pages of the arts press lately, you might be aware that the London gallery scene is having one of its periodic ‘moments’. A fair few spaces, mostly concentrated around Fitzrovia, have sprouted up since the pandemic, notable for their bacchanalian openings and tantalisingly gnomic Instagram posts. Their online presence is at best spectral: the most hyped of the bunch, a Smithfield gallery called Ginny on Frederick, has a holding page in place of a website. Still, I like a scene, and London Gallery Weekend, an annual June event, presented a good opportunity to investigate. Niso gallery, on New Cavendish Street, has put on a seductive showing of the Argentinian conceptualist Martina Quesada (open until 28 June).

A little under a year ago, it emerged that builders working on the redevelopment of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing had discovered an unusual time capsule embedded in a pillar they had been instructed to knock down. It contained a letter signed by Sir John Sainsbury, who, along with his brothers, had thrown the museum a £50 million lifeline to realise the extension in 1990; and clearly, he wasn’t happy with the way his money was being spent. He expressed this with no small amount of elegance: ‘If you have found this note,’ his missive read, ‘you must be engaged in demolishing one of the false columns that have been placed in the foyer of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery.

Not many artists engage in the maintenance of a private militia, and it seems fair to assume that those who do may be bound to polarise. The Scottish poet, sculptor, ‘avant-gardener’ and would-be revolutionary Ian Hamilton Finlay was just such a figure: and boy, did he polarise. To his fans, he is a cult figure in the true sense, a limitlessly inventive visionary whose Lanarkshire home and garden remain a site of pilgrimage. To his detractors – notably, a number of vocal Finlay-bashers in the English press – he was a crank, a provincial megalomaniac possessed of artistic, literary and dictatorial pretensions quite out of proportion to his ability.

Tate Modern’s latest exhibition is a bizarre proposition on so many levels. Its subject, the Australian designer, performer, provocateur and club scenester Leigh Bowery, was by all accounts inescapable in London for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. Standing at well over 6ft and weighing 17st, he would have been a conspicuous presence on the capital’s streets even had he not adopted the berserk sci-fi drag attire that became his signature aesthetic. He appeared on TV, at Sadler’s Wells and in a ponderous suite of portraits by Lucian Freud. His life could be read as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, but he was not an artist in any conventional sense and there’s no explicit evidence here to suggest he ever identified as such.