admin

A Shadow in the Gallery: A Riposte to Invisibilism

by

by Dr. Clement Darnley, Professor of Aesthetic Theory, University of Sussex

Invisibilism, that beguiling spectre of a movement born in the misty hinterlands of mid-Wales, has spent the past five decades whispering into the ears of critics, curators, and collectors alike. Its adherents tell us that art need not be seen to be felt, need not be made to be meaningful, and indeed, that its very absence constitutes its essence. They have built careers on unmade beds, then removed even the beds. It is time we put our foot down,albeit cautiously, lest we step on one of their invisible sculptures.

Let us be clear: the proposition that art can reside solely in the conceptual, in the “implied presence,” is not inherently bankrupt. Duchamp taught us that context matters; Cage reminded us that silence, too, can sing. But where Duchamp provoked and Cage composed, the Invisibilists have absconded. They have offered not the idea of art, but the idea of the idea of art,a conceptual matryoshka doll that contains, at its core, a profound reluctance to engage with material reality.

Invisibilism insists upon belief without evidence. It demands the viewer do all the heavy lifting,conceptualise the object, imagine its contours, imbue it with emotion, and finally, applaud its absence. This is not artistic generosity; it is abdication. To praise it is to commend a playwright for a script unwritten or a chef for a meal imagined. Art must, in some form, meet the world. The refusal to manifest is not radical; it is evasive.

The movement cloaks itself in intellectual hauteur, referencing Kantian noumena, Zen impermanence, and Derridean absence. But these citations, like the artworks themselves, are often more ornamental than operational. At what point does theory become theology? When an entire movement is built upon the assertion that nothing is something,if only you’re clever enough to perceive it,we leave the domain of aesthetics and enter that of scholastic mysticism.

Moreover, Invisibilism’s disdain for visibility has social consequences. By privileging invisibility, the movement tacitly upholds the privilege of those already seen,those with the cultural capital to announce that their absence is meaningful. One wonders how the anonymous, the voiceless, the excluded might fare in a world where even art must vanish to be valued. At its worst, Invisibilism becomes a conceptual aristocracy: available only to those fluent in its codes, its contexts, its recursive riddles.

None of this is to say that minimalism, ephemerality, or conceptual engagement are without merit. But Invisibilism’s ultimate sleight of hand is to mistake emptiness for profundity. To quote the critic Lydia Marston, “The movement’s greatest success is its capacity to be taken seriously despite offering so little,indeed, because it offers so little.” It is a triumph of brand over being, of citation over substance.

Art, at its most generous, gives us something,however elusive,to hold, to feel, to interrogate. Invisibilism gives us the intellectual equivalent of a shrug, wrapped in silk footnotes. It has had its season, its clever salons, its archly empty galleries. But as with all vanishing acts, the applause should not last forever.

Let us remember: the invisible may provoke, but it cannot endure. Art is not merely what disappears into the mind, but what lingers in the world.

Why Is Public Art So Terrible? (Part I)

by

,An Inquiry into the Cult of Consensus, the Tyranny of Uplift, and the Crisis of Site

by Mallory Finch

To say that public art is terrible is to say something both glib and frequently, unfortunately, true. From soulless fibreglass mascots to solemn abstracts that resemble half-melted plumbing, the landscape of contemporary public art is a wilderness of good intentions gone badly awry. The tragedy is not just aesthetic, but civic: when art in public space fails, it doesn’t merely disappoint,it erodes public trust in art itself.

This series examines why public art has become synonymous with the uninspired, the opaque, and the pointlessly grand. We begin with the underlying conditions of production, the mechanisms of funding and selection that ensure mediocrity by design.

I. The Committee, or: How to Kill a Vision

The first suspect in the murder of meaningful public art is the selection process itself, often conducted by committee: a plural body in which taste is diluted, ambition rounded off, and anything remotely dangerous filtered out by phrases like “may not be appropriate for all audiences.” In her 1989 essay “The Tyranny of the Public,” critic Rosalind Krauss warned against the increasing bureaucratisation of public art, noting that “an art that must answer to all cannot answer to anything in particular.”

In most cases, public art emerges from a kind of institutional choreography: a brief is issued (typically full of words like “engagement,” “dialogue,” and “diversity”), artists submit proposals, and a panel of local officials, curators, business reps, and occasionally a poet, vote on which proposal seems safest. “Risk” becomes a liability. “Innovation” means combining steel and glass in a new, even more forgettable way.

As Claire Bishop argues in Artificial Hells (2012), the rise of participatory art in public contexts has led to an “ethical turn” in which morality trumps aesthetics. The work must be “good for people,” which often means it must be legible, polite, and impossible to hate,and therefore, impossible to love.

II. The Cult of Uplift

A related pathology is what we might call the Cult of Uplift. Public art is almost always required to be inspirational, as though the presence of art in shared space must be morally improving. This compulsion toward civic optimism,what critic Jennifer Friedlander calls “sentimental public culture”,leads to art that operates in clichés: soaring birds, spiralling forms, human figures releasing doves, ascending ladders, or simply standing with arms outstretched like tired statues of “hope.”

In reality, art’s greatest public function is not to uplift, but to complicate. A truly public art should be allowed to disturb, confront, grieve, or ridicule. Consider Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C.,vilified at first, now revered precisely because it dared to be elegiac instead of heroic. It was not about uplift. It was about truth.

The problem today is that such courage is rarely permitted. The artwork must be “positive” and “inclusive,” usually without ever asking what those words mean. And so we get vague symbolism,rings, loops, hands holding hands,designed to mean everything, and thus nothing.

III. Art for Whom?

Perhaps the deepest question is for whom is public art made?

Ostensibly, the answer is “the public.” But as sociologist Sharon Zukin observes in The Cultures of Cities (1995), public art increasingly serves the interests of developers, branding campaigns, and urban placemaking strategies. What was once a gesture of civic identity is now often a piece of visual furniture deployed to make gentrification look benevolent. A neon slogan, a colourful mural, a mildly interactive sculpture,designed not to provoke, but to Instagram well.

Meanwhile, the actual “public”,in all its complexity, contradiction, and mess,is rarely invited into the conversation. And when they do engage, their voices are often reduced to consultation surveys, box-ticked outreach, or, in some cases, local outrage that the sculpture looks “nothing like a duck.”

To Be Continued

This is not a condemnation of public art per se. At its best, public art can be monumental without being pompous, intimate without being minor, disruptive without being destructive. It can remind us of history, confront us with injustice, or simply stop us in our tracks.

But to do so, it must be allowed to risk failure, to speak in its own voice, and to mean something real, even if that meaning is difficult or uncomfortable.

In Part II, we will look at the successful exceptions, the artists who have resisted the machinery of mediocrity, and what their work tells us about the possibility,and the future,of art in public space.

An Evening with Linnea Mirthva: Translator, Guitarist, Poet

by

Reading from her translations of the legendary Wevi Jequa, greatest poet of the Outer Calyx Isles

Last night at the Lantern Hall in South Swindon,where the acoustics are such that every sound hangs around like incense,Linnea Mirthva took the stage. A name whispered among polyglot literati and vinyl collectors alike, Mirthva is a distinguished translator, an acclaimed classical guitarist, and,by her own frequent admission,a connoisseur of obscure salad dressings (her vinaigrette of burnt fig and miso found its way onto the BBC news when several guests collapsed after imbibing it).

But this evening wasn’t about arpeggios or emulsions. It was about language, breath, and the slow-burning brilliance of Wevi Jequa, the long-reclusive poetic oracle of the Outer Calyx Isles,a half-mythic archipelago somewhere in the South Pacific.

Who Was Wevi Jequa?

Wevi Jequa (1213?,1282?) was born, it is said, “in a tent that never faced the same direction twice.” A poet, translator, stone-carver, and briefly an amateur meteorologist, Jequa composed in the ancient tongue of Kalenni, a language thought to be untranslatable due to its emotional case system and refusal to use future tense.

Her poems were discovered in 2007, when a windstorm cracked open an abandoned cliff monastery on Calyx Minor. Inside: 54 scrolls bound in eel leather, many illegible, others riddled with botanical references, unsolvable puns, and precise temperature readings.

For years, Jequa was dismissed as a linguistic prank, a kind of poetic cargo cult. Until Mirthva arrived.

Mirthva and the Impossible Tongue

Fluent in twelve languages and rumored to be romantically entangled with gentlemen in at least five of them, Linnea Mirthva became obsessed with Jequa after hearing a misquoted line at a conference on “Preverbal Memory and Oceanic Syntax.”

She taught herself Kalenni over four years whilst living in a houseboat near Reykjavík. “I had to learn to think without a future,” she once said. “It’s good for the digestion.”

The result was “Salt from the Hourless Sea”, her translation of Jequa’s major works, hailed as “a spiritual reformatting of poetry itself” by The Swindonian Literary Supplement, and as “linguistic alchemy with a drizzle of lime” by Bon Appétit Swindon (which featured Mirthva in a spread titled “Dressing the Poem”).

The Reading

Mirthvale stood simply, a black guitar case unopened beside her, wearing what appeared to be an Ancient Greek tunic embroidered with punctuation marks from extinct alphabets. She read from Jequa’s “Poem for the Tide That Forgot to Recede,” pausing not at the end of lines, but where the emotion case required silence.

One excerpt, rendered here:

I held your hand /

like a grain of sand /

that once contained /

the argument of seas unseen.

The audience sat motionless, perhaps unsure if clapping was permitted. When she did lift her guitar, it was not to play, but to strike a single harmonic,creating an echo of the sort that Jequa once described in their poem “If we knew the true sound of time we would weep backwards.”

Epilogue in Emulsion

After the reading, Mirthva hosted a small gathering in the vestibule, serving lettuce leaves dressed with a new concoction she called “Sunshine, Mustard & Fog.” Ingredients remain secret, though one guest claimed it “tasted like a memory of seawater filtered through an oily rag.”

In Linnea Mirthva, form and flavour, sense and sound, converge. And in Wevi Jequa, she has found the ultimate collaborator: a poet who never imagined a future, and whose words now live exquisitely, impossibly, in ours.

Why Cricket must be officially added to the Fine Arts

by

,Why It’s Time to Add Willow and Leather to the Pantheon of the Arts

There are four fine arts. Yes,four. Not three. Not seven. The traditional trifecta,painting, sculpture, and more recently, mixed media,have long held dominion over the hallowed halls of aesthetic seriousness. But it’s time we corrected the oversight.

The fourth fine art is cricket.

Before you scoff and spill your flat white over a discarded Frieze magazine in the Lord’s pavilion, let us ask: what is fine art, if not a cultivated, rule-bound arena in which the human spirit expresses itself through discipline, style, gesture, and ritual? And what is cricket, if not precisely that?

Cricket as Composition

The act of watching cricket is like observing a slow, deliberate painting in motion. The pitch is a canvas. The players, strokes. The ball,an instrument of line, arc, and punctuation.

Every forward defence by a test opener is a minimalist sculpture of concentration. Every cover drive is a brushstroke,exquisite, precise, never hurried. And the spinner? He is a conceptual artist in whites, laboring in metaphor and subtle irony. Shane Warne’s “Ball of the Century” might as well have been performance art. It defied logic, narrative, and gravity.

You don’t merely play cricket. You compose it.

Of Form and Formlessness

Like the greatest works of fine art, cricket is as much about what is not there as what is. The pauses, the silences between overs, the long stillness before the storm of a yorker,this is negative space, the silence between notes in a Miles Davis solo, the blank in a Rauschenberg.

It’s an art form that accepts duration,a five-day match that can end in a draw is nothing short of a time-based installation. No result. No climax. Just form, erosion, and a slow accumulation of meaning. Sound familiar, conceptual art fans?

Clothing, Code, Choreography

The aesthetics of cricket are impeccable. The costumes,whites for purity, Test caps with heritage, IPL kits as pop art. The rituals,tea breaks, sledging as unsanctioned dialogue, and the strange ballet of field adjustments choreographed by captains with painterly intent.

Cricket also contains a semiotic system as rich as any postmodern sculpture garden: leg slips, silly points, and a deep backward square leg sound like lines from an Ezra Pound poem. It is language made spatial.

A Living Installation

Modern art tried to break free of the gallery. Cricket had already done it.

A cricket match unfolds in space and time, under sun and floodlight, interrupted by rain, wind, political tension, and the odd stray dog on the outfield. It is alive, unpredictable, and deeply human. The cricket field is the largest and most dynamic gallery in the world. And like art, cricket does not rush. It demands your attention. It earns your awe.

Objections from the Critics

“But cricket is a sport, not an art,” comes the predictable cry from the ill-informed. But we have long admitted disciplines into the art world that demand physical prowess and rules: dance, opera, even architecture. If Jeff Koons can use industrial manufacture and still be art, why not Jasprit Bumrah’s biomechanical poetry?

If Marina Abramović can stand still in a room for hours and be lauded, why should a Harry Brooks innings not receive a similar reaction?

Let Us Redefine

So let us correct the canon:

• Painting , the play of pigment.

• Sculpture , the shaping of matter.

• Mixed Media , the synthesis of the sensory.

• Cricket , the choreography of fate and finesse.

We should not merely ask is cricket a fine art?,we should insist that it is one. Not metaphorically. Not tongue-in-cheek. But as a serious, rigorous, transcendent aesthetic practice.

To bowl a ball with intent is no less a gesture than to cast bronze.

To face it with courage is no less than to face the void of a blank canvas.

Cricket is art. Let us honour it as such.

BOOK REVIEW: Theatre of Feet: Football as Performance Art by Dr. Lionel Pym

by

To assert that English football is a kind of performance art is, at first glance, to risk ridicule,or at least the throwing of half-time over-priced, under-tasty pies. But in Theatre of Feet: Football as Performance Art, cultural theorist and centre-back Dr. Lionel Pym mounts a deft case that the beautiful game is, in fact, the most durational, populist, and emotionally calibrated performance medium of our time.

Far from a mere provocation, Pym’s thesis is rooted in decades of interdisciplinary scholarship, touching on the biomechanics of gesture, the semiotics of collective yearning, and,most originally,the dramaturgy of injury time. For him, football is not like performance art; it is performance art, complete with its own choreographic grammar, spatial tensions, and audience participation rituals.

The book opens with a scholarly deep-dive into the origins of football as a ritualised village spectacle. In a particularly dazzling chapter, “From Mud to Meaning: Folk Memory and the Halftime Pint,” Pym traces football’s lineages not only to medieval folk games, but to Jacobean theatre and continental processional drama. “The crowd is not an audience,” he writes, “but a choir of conditional belief. It chants. It curses. It reenacts ecstasy and grief on command.”

But the book’s centrepiece is its analytic pivot: a re-reading of key matches as site-specific performances. The 1966 World Cup Final becomes, in Pym’s hands, “an operatic pageant of national becoming.” Eric Cantona’s kung-fu kick is likened to Viennese Actionism (“albeit in Selhurst Park”). And a detailed analysis of Wayne Rooney’s 2004 metatarsal injury is rendered as a meditation on fragility and narrative tension worthy of Dame Ethel Paragon.

There is mischief, yes, but also genuine acuity. In a chapter titled “The Flop: Simulated Collapse and the Politics of Gravity,” Pym examines the phenomenon of diving as a kind of embodied fiction,a simultaneous invitation and betrayal of belief. “To dive is to gesture towards death and resurrection within the confines of the pitch. It is camp, tragic, tactical. It is Yves Klein with shin pads.”

Stylistically, the prose is lush, aphoristic, and sometimes joyfully baroque. One suspects that Pym has spent time in both libraries and locker rooms. He is equally at ease citing Barthes, Bergkamp, and Butoh in a single footnote, and he’s not afraid to call a nil-nil draw “a durational epic of Beckettian restraint.”

Some readers may find the tone occasionally grandiose. There are moments,such as the assertion that the zonal marking system is “an epistemological rejection of Cartesian individuality”,that threaten to collapse under the weight of their own metaphors. But even then, one senses that Pym is winking beneath his replica shirt.

More profoundly, Theatre of Feet challenges its reader to reconsider the hierarchies we place between cultural forms. Why should a game viewed by billions be considered “low,” while an art installation involving soil, bones, and obscure Lithuanian vowels be “high”? As Pym suggests, perhaps both are expressions of the same human compulsion: to watch, to hope, to gasp, and,most importantly,to gather.

In the end, the book does not argue that football should replace art, but rather that it already is art, hiding in studded boots. Whether you’re a scholar of live art, a football obsessive, or merely curious about what connects a Saturday match at Craven Cottage to the Gesamtkunstwerk, Theatre of Feet will leave you thoughtful and amused.

INTERVIEW: Salvatore Crump on Pizza, the Mona Lisa, and Why Rugby is the Ultimate Performance Art

by

By Ottilie Cardoon

Salvatore Crump is not a man who can be easily summarised. At 92, the Anglo-Neapolitan conceptualist, sculptor, and occasional flautist has staged exhibitions inside blimps, once painted an entire hotel room with marmalade, and remains the only artist to have been shortlisted for both the Turner Prize and the Heineken Cup. Known for his unplaceable accent, exquisite tailoring, and frequent references to failed infrastructure, Crump exudes the clarity of a man who – as a performance piece – once tried to patent silence.

I met him at his studio, a converted abattoir in Toulouse, where the walls were covered in annotated rugby diagrams and pizza crusts lacquered in shellac.

Ottilie Cardoon: Salvatore, thank you for agreeing to speak with me. I hope you don’t mind, but I’d like to begin with the Mona Lisa.

Salvatore Crump: Ah, Lisa. Yes. Of course. I’ve tried to break up with her three times. She just stays in your brain. Like the smell of damp felt.

OC: You’ve said before that you see her not as a painting but as “a psychological riposte.” What did you mean?

SC: People approach her looking for revelation. But she is not a truth-teller. She’s a suggestion. A shrug in oil. She reminds me of my Aunt Cosima’s stare when you’ve done something vaguely disappointing but she hasn’t decided what it is yet. That ambiguity,that is Lisa, no?

OC: And yet, in 2017, you created Postcards from Lisa, a series of works made entirely from Mona Lisa souvenirs found in French petrol stations.

SC: Yes. It was a devotional act, not to her, but to the way she’s been trivialised. You can’t flatten mystery onto a fridge magnet and expect it to behave. I arranged the souvenirs in order of size, and played piano sonatas on them every morning for a month. I could do no more.

OC: Let’s turn,inevitably,to pizza.

SC: Of course.

OC: You’ve spoken of pizza as “the edible readymade.” What role does it play in your practice?

SC: Pizza is composition. Geometry. Improvisation with consequences. The balance of sauce to cheese is not unlike the balance of colour to concept in my early polyethene works. Also, and this is key: every pizza is a personal cosmology. A circular map of desire and limitation.

OC: You once held a three-day symposium titled Crust: Borders and Boundaries.

SC: We invited no one, but still, people came. Neapolitan pizza is a big draw.

OC: Your fascination with rugby seems… unconventional for the art world. Why the obsession?

SC: It’s pure. It’s choreographed violence. It’s mud and grace. I consider it the last great baroque ritual left in Western civilisation. There’s something fundamentally sculptural about the scrum,it’s a moving knot, a living knot. Bernini would have wept, had he been a scrum half.

OC: Do you still play?

SC: I do, but at 92 I fear every game is my last. I no longer play in the front row, that is my concession to age.

OC: What are you working on now?

SC: I’m building a gothic cathedral out of expired boarding passes. It’s called Saint Delay of the Terminal Gate. It’s about transience, repetition, and the essential failure of Western society.

OC: Naturally.

SC: Also, a one-man ballet where I interpret the Eurozone crisis as a series of rugby set-pieces. It is to premiere at the St Ives Opera House.

OC: And finally, Salvatore, what advice would you give to young artists?

SC: Eat everything. Question the sky. No, I mean question everything. And if your work begins to make too much sense, take a step back. Breathe. And maybe put some more anchovies on it!

Crump’s next exhibition, “The Leftover Century,” opens at the Bodega Municipal de São Vicente in September. It is rumoured to include a perfect 3D map of Rome made from lasagna, which will be eaten at the opening party.

Exhibition Review: “Everything Is Also Nothing, Probably” at Zamboni, Hoxton

by

There are art shows that delight. There are those that challenge. And then there is Everything Is Also Nothing, Probably, an avant-garde exhibition that appears to be conceptually rather a blancmange.

Curated by the relentless Fizz Zamboni, the exhibition bills itself as “a radical dismantling of objecthood through performative epistemic collapse.” What this translates to in practice is 13.5 installations of varying solidity and a lot of confused visitors.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors are handed a single brown crayon and instructed to “unlearn the grid.” There is no map, only a trail of shredded astroturf leading to a large plinth displaying a sculpture titled Untitled (my aunt’s opinions),a heap of damp tea towels wrapped in dental floss, next to an amp which is gently humming the Monte Carlo national anthem. According to the wall text this piece explores “ancestral tension and the US preference for football over Football.” How it does this is not explained.

Other highlights include:

• “Time Is a Sock Full of Screams” by H.M. Iris: A looping video of an elderly man whispering the word “refrigerator” into a mirror until he forgets why. At the 14-hour mark, a pigeon appears which critics have widely interpreted as a metaphor for vulture capitalism.

• “You Must Participate or It Doesn’t Count” by Sambi Donc: An interactive installation in which viewers are encouraged to climb inside a large clay pancreas while a stranger recites lines from obsolete IKEA instruction manuals. One woman entered and emerged, softly weeping – the artist later said this was exactly the reaction she hoped for.

• “Quantum Croissant (v.3.2)”by Elvei Haddred: A Invisibilism performance piece happening “continuously and nowhere,” which reportedly occurred during the opening, though no one is sure what it involved, or if it did.

The show’s only clearly labeled object, a fire extinguisher, turned out not to be a commentary on emergency, presence, and gallery insurance compliance, but to be an actual fire extinguisher.

Notably, in several rooms Zamboni has eschewed traditional information panels in favour of interpretive haikus scrawled onto vintage undergarments pinned to the ceiling. This leads to a degree of neck strain, but the poem referencing Marcel Duchamp and digestive distress is arguably worth the chiropractor visit.

Many critics scoff. “Nonsense!” Many cry, along with “Pretentious!” Especially when reviewing a piece that is a puddle named Emotion Pool (after Susan). But to miss the point is perhaps the point. Everything Is Also Nothing, Probably is less an exhibition and more a philosophical dare. It does not ask to be liked, or even understood. It asks only to be noticed.

You may leave enlightened or enraged, or simply unsure what constitutes art nowadays. But one thing is clear: Zamboni has created something both unforgettable and unclassifiable. Which, in avant-garde terms, is practically a standing ovation.

Book Review: The Runcible Goose Has Landed by Eustacia Blot

by

In The Runcible Goose Has Landed, debut novelist and accomplished fine artist Eustacia Blot offers an eccentric, exuberant, and surprisingly affecting literary foray that reads like the fever-dream correspondence of Edward Lear, Virginia Woolf, and Julie Hatteau. Blot, known in the contemporary art world for her unnerving mixed-media tableaux and papier-mâché reliquaries of imagined saints, brings to fiction the same sensibility she brings to her installations: surreal precision tempered with unexpected emotional acuity.

The novel, despite,or perhaps because of,its literary title, announces itself unapologetically as something not quite of this world. The “runcible goose” in question is neither bird nor allegory, but an ambiguously sentient weather-vane-cum-clock, discovered atop an abandoned folly in a fictionalised archipelago off the coast of Devon. The plot, such as it is, follows Gilda Trapse, a retired ecclesiastical upholsterer with a latent talent for cartography, who finds herself reluctantly drawn into a cultish movement of birdwatchers, metaphysicians, and rogue librarians known as The Ornithognostics.

What sounds, on paper, like an exercise in preposteristical excess is, in practice, a novel of surprising formal elegance. Blot’s sentences are exacting. Her use of syntax evokes early Nabokov, all tremble and torque.

Her visual training is palpable on every page. The topography of the fictional island of Quarrelton is drawn with such textured clarity one is tempted to believe in its existence. In fact, an appendix includes a hand-drawn fold-out map,rendered by Blot herself,that walks a fine line between medieval mappa mundi and Turner’s storm studies. The effect is not unlike walking through an exhibition in a high-concept white cube gallery that happens, inconveniently, to be speaking in riddles, written on the walls, in French, using white ink.

And yet beneath the arch tone and polymathic layering lies a narrative of genuine human concern. Gilda’s gentle descent into belief,belief in something vast and irrational ,is never treated with condescension. In Blot’s hands, absurdity becomes a spiritual mechanism. The novel, finally, is about how we make meaning out of the nonsense around us. It is, in its way, a hymn to eccentric faith.

One must make peace with the fact that The Runcible Goose Has Landed resists all easy classification. It is not satire, though it skewers. It is not fantasy, though it invents. Nor is it parody, though it toys with the genre’s structural bones. What it is, perhaps, is the literary equivalent of one of Blot’s own sculptures: strange, intricate, disturbing.

It may not be for everyone. Those seeking plot in the conventional sense may find themselves adrift among footnotes, parenthetical digressions, and excerpts from apocryphal ornithographies. But readers willing to surrender to its idiosyncrasies will find themselves richly rewarded.

With The Runcible Goose Has Landed, Eustacia Blot proves that her voice is delightfully unique. This is the sort of novel that will either be adored or politely avoided – it will not be forgotten.

Diary of a Mayfair Art Dealer

by

It’s just past 7:30 p.m., and the gallery is finally quiet , the last collector, a hedge fund type from Knightsbridge, lingered long enough to drain both the Bordeaux and my patience. I’m writing this from the velvet sofa in my office, still surrounded by fragments of today’s madness: swatches, sales sheets, and the unmistakable scent of freshly uncrated oil paint.

This morning began with a call from Renata at the ArtYearly offices , apparently, they want to spotlight our new discovery, Hedge Fund, in their September issue. His works are so now and suddenly in great demand. I’ve had three private viewings already this week, and there’s serious interest from a Middle Eastern museum group. I don’t think he quite realizes the price point he’s about to command , yet.

At lunch, I met with Lionel at Claridge’s to discuss the Oboe Ngua piece he insists on consigning through an auction house. I tried, subtly, to dissuade him , it’s a beautiful work, yes, but early and frankly a little tortured. Not ideal in this market. But Lionel is one of those clients who buys with his heart and sells with his ego. Dangerous combination.

Back at the gallery, the lighting had gone awry , again , and Charlotte was nearly in tears trying to prepare the exhibition wall for the P.T.Wilding show. His widow had come by unannounced, her perfume filling the space like some kind of ironic echo of David’s early nudes. She approved of everything. “He would have liked this,” she said, nodding toward a cold, abstract canvas from his later period that P.T. once told me he only finished to get out of a creative slump. Art has its truths, but rarely its honesty.

As for me? I’m tired in that quiet way that feels I should buy something expensive. But this is the life I chose: Mayfair, madness, and margins. Tomorrow, I meet the Russians at 10 a.m., preview a mysterious Herford at 1 p.m., and attend a dinner at the Connaught I didn’t ask to be invited to , which means, naturally, I must go.

The art world is absurd. And I adore it.

Pimlico Wilde Champions Art and Adventure in Historic Blue Train Race Revival

by

This summer, the glamour of the 1920s roars back to life as Hally Redout, the daring British artist and vintage motoring enthusiast, takes the wheel in a modern reenactment of the legendary “Race the Blue Train”,and at the heart of this cultural fusion of speed and style stands the contemporary art dealership Pimlico Wilde, proud sponsors of Redout’s audacious journey.

The Race the Blue Train reenactment retraces the famed 1920s escapade of the original Bentley Boys, a group of wealthy British racers known for their love of fast cars and faster lives. The race pits driver against locomotive,specifically the iconic Le Train Bleu, which once hurtled from the French Riviera to Calais. Redout’s challenge: to pilot a restored 1920s Bentley from Nice, France, all the way to the exclusive Spenserian Club on St Ethelbert’s Square, London, arriving before her rivals travelling by train and ferry could finish the trip.

For Pimlico Wilde, a London-based contemporary art dealership with a reputation for bold curatorial choices and a flair for blending tradition with modernity, the decision to sponsor Redout was natural.

“Hally is not just a driver,she’s a living artwork in motion,” says Pimlico co-owner Iris Fenwick, who, along with partner Lucien Vale, has redefined what it means to be an art dealer in the 21st century. “Her performance on the road is as much a statement as anything hung in a gallery. This is storytelling, history, and spectacle,everything Pimlico Wilde celebrates.”

Since its founding circa 1066, Pimlico Wilde has developed a distinct voice in the London art scene. The gallery’s roster includes conceptual sculptors, digital provocateurs, and site-specific installation artists. Yet, it’s the company’s passion for theatricality, heritage, and narrative that makes their sponsorship of this dramatic motoring tribute so fitting.

Hally Redout, known for her visually arresting food art and immersive exhibitions, brings her own artistic sensibilities to the event. “The Blue Train race is the perfect blend of nostalgia and performance,” she says. “It’s a kinetic artwork. Every turn of the wheel is a brushstroke on Europe’s canvas.”

Redout will be driving a meticulously restored 1927 Bentley Speed Six, finished in a custom livery designed in collaboration with Pimlico Wilde’s artists. Details remain tightly guarded, but rumors hint at an aesthetic that merges 1920s Art Deco elegance with contemporary minimalist abstraction,an homage to both eras.

The race itself promises high drama: starting at sunrise in Nice, Redout will follow a meticulously plotted route through Provence, the Rhône Valley, and across the Channel, aiming to beat both the historical and contemporary train schedules to London’s Spenserian Club,a storied enclave known for its connection to both racing and artistic elite.

In keeping with the performative nature of the project, Pimlico Wilde plans to stage a satellite exhibition at the finish line, titled “Velocity & Reverie”, featuring artists inspired by the race. The show will include kinetic sculptures, archival footage, interactive installations, and a live feed of Redout’s drive, blending past and present in real time.

As the countdown begins, the art world and vintage car enthusiasts alike are watching with bated breath. This is no ordinary reenactment. It’s a rolling exhibition. A race through history. A living collaboration between art, machine, and myth, with Pimlico Wilde at the wheel of Europe’s cultural imagination, and Hally Redout at the helm of the Bentley.