Podcast episode – Art World Exposed #79

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Cave Selfies, Chicken Theories, and Dundee’s Moist Abstractions

Hosted by Saldo Caluthe & Tomas Sinke

Show Notes

This week, Art World Exposed takes you from the inky depths of prehistoric aesthetics to the foie gras of art historical scandal. Join Saldo Caluthe and Tomas Sinke as they spiral downward (both literally and intellectually) into caves, conspiracies, and curatorial calamity.

0:00 , Opening Remarks: Descent into the Sublime

Saldo opens by describing a recent expedition to the Grotte du Sans Wi-Fi, a remote cave system in southern France where he and a group of conceptual spelunkers took selfies in total darkness to confront the retinal void.

Tomas calls it “proto-Instagram, minus the dopamine.”

Saldo describes the sensation as “being liked by stalactites.”

5:50 , Photographic Segment: ‘From Below’

Listeners are invited to browse the companion photo series posted on the podcast’s website (warning: 87% of them are pitch black). Each photo is titled, somewhat controversially, with a Nietzsche quote and a French snack.

Favourites include:

• “When You Gaze Into the Abyss, the Abyss Gazes Into Your Fromage”

• “He Who Has a Why Can Endure Any Tartine”

11:18 , Historical Debate: Van Gogh’s Ear- A New Theory

Saldo and Tomas tackle a new, scandalously under-researched theory circulating in disreputable but charming circles:

Was it Paul Gauguin who chopped off Van Gogh’s ear , while drunk and attempting to carve a late-night chicken dinner.

Points discussed:

• A letter of admission recently found in a wine bottle behind a Toulouse urinal signed PG.

• Analysis of several daguerreotypes found in a ditch in Arles that appear to show a man with one ear receiving an apology from a well-dressed aesthete.

Art historian and fried-food theorist Dr. Loretta Smarms joins the show to defend the theory, citing psycho-culinary impulses in late 19th-century French painting. Tomas calls it “carving expressionism.” Saldo suggests a Netflix mini-series starring two confused but handsome actors who can’t cook.

22:43 , Gallery Visit: Dundee Gallery of the Sea , “Things That Shouldn’t Be Damp But Are”

Saldo visits Dundee’s most hydrologically adventurous art space, where curators have embraced “moisture as medium.”

Key highlights include:

• A collection of wet tweed jackets suspended in brine.

• A sound installation made entirely from recordings of disappointed snorkelers.

Local artist Morag C. Sponge gives a moving interview while wringing out her sculpture.

Saldo concludes the show is an act of Scots defiance and smells like old kelp , which is very current. “Any gallery of note wants to smell of old kelp at this time of year.”

34:50 , Theory Corner: Is ‘Art’ Now Just a Category for the Misplaced?

Saldo poses the question: “Is art simply what gets put in the wrong context and not immediately removed?”

Tomas attempts to answer via a long-winded anecdote about an ashtray, mortality and an astronaut that he met at Art Basel.

Saldo suggests a new term: Errt , accidental art.

43:00 , Listener Segment: The Aesthetic Helpline

Call-in from ‘Gallerina_Despair92’ who wants to know:

Is it still considered postmodern if my entire exhibition is just my CV projected onto a melting ice sculpture?

Tomas: “Only if the font is illegible.”

Saldo: “And the CV is falsified.”

50:05 , Closing Thought: Art, Accidents, and Other Delicious Mistakes

Saldo compares Gauguin’s alleged chicken-ear incident to the making of certain performance pieces.

Tomas reads a haiku he claims was found scratched into the back of a Rothko.

Together, they conclude that all great art only becomes great art when enough people on podcasts say it is great art.

Next Time:

Performance artist Gemima Klönk walks backwards through five continents to “reverse colonial timelines,” and we dissect a show in Oslo where curators refuse to show any art , just their personal insecurities printed on plexiglass.

“Cloud Ownership” by Davos Saved for the Nation — if the nation can raise £500,000

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In a quietly astonishing moment for British conceptual art, the work Cloud Ownership (2024) by Davos has been officially placed under an export bar, preventing its removal from the United Kingdom. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media, Singing and Sport has deemed the piece of “outstanding national importance,” citing its “singular contribution to the evolving relationship between art, property, and the ephemeral.”

Now, a consortium of public galleries is racing to raise the £500,000 required to keep it in the country. There is, however, no cloud in a crate, no installation to unbox. What they are trying to save, quite literally, is an idea.

A Monument to the Immaterial

Cloud Ownership was first “exhibited” in 2024 as part of Davos’ touring retrospective, Davos: Touring Retrospective. Visitors to the exhibition were issued a printed certificate, each entitling them to ownership of a cumulus cloud, tracked by satellite and renamed in their honour.

The terms of ownership were strict: the cloud could not be visited, photographed, influenced, or interacted with in any physical way. As Davos put it, “The cloud is yours precisely because it remains untouched by you. To own it is to let it pass.”

It is at once art that is absurd and profound. At a time when everything from tweets to rainforests is being commodified, Davos offered a piece of sky,unbuyable, unfixable, unpossessable,and asked whether ownership could be defined not by control but by consent.

Not for Sale Abroad

The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art (RCEWA) issued the export bar last week following a private collector’s attempt to acquire the conceptual certificate and relocate it to a private archive in Geneva. Although the work has no physical form, the committee judged that its certificate,and the national context of its issuance,comprised an artwork of “distinctly British character and international conceptual significance.”

“This is not just a paper certificate,” said Dr. Lucinda Morley, chair of the committee. “It is a contract with the imagination, and a quietly radical gesture of stewardship. The idea that such a work might vanish into a vault, out of public mental reach, is antithetical to its meaning.”

The Race to Fund the Intangible

Now, galleries including The Ross on Wye Centre for Contemporary Art, the Blackchapel Gallery, and The Fruitmarket in Aberystwyth have launched a joint campaign to raise the estimated £500,000 needed to retain Cloud Ownership within the UK. The cost includes the certificate itself, artist’s rights, conceptual framework licensing, and an ongoing symbolic “tracking fee” for cloud-based satellite data,though, in typical Davos fashion, no actual satellites will be used.

“Some will scoff,” admits Caroline Dreyfus, director of acquisitions at the Blackchapel, “but this isn’t about buying weather. It’s about protecting one of the most quietly brilliant interrogations of value and authorship seen this decade.”

Already, philanthropic interest is high. There are rumours of cloud-owners,including poets, physicists, and at least one former Chancellor,pledging to help. Public support, however, has been more divided. One online commenter quipped: “Can’t we just print another certificate and call it ours?”,a question that goes to the very heart of the work.

Davos Responds

The artist himself,who rarely gives interviews,released a brief, handwritten statement through Pimlico Wilde gallery:

“Ownership is a form of attention. If the nation truly sees the cloud, then it is already here.”

A Precedent of Air

Whether the £500,000 target will be met remains to be seen. But Cloud Ownership continues to raise urgent and intriguing questions: What does it mean to “own” something we cannot grasp? Can an artwork be as much an agreement as an object? And can the state, with its customs forms and export bans, meaningfully legislate the invisible?

Is Lo-fi the New Hi-fi? The Rise of a New Aesthetic in Contemporary Art

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In recent years, a shift has been quietly redefining the visual language of contemporary art. It resists technical polish, institutional gravitas, and formal elegance in favor of the unrefined, the immediate, and the emotionally unguarded. Once considered the domain of zines, ephemeral digital media, or amateur creative practice, lo-fi aesthetics,characterised by visible imperfections, casual mark-making, and non-hierarchical compositions,have moved from the cultural periphery to the foreground of serious artistic discourse.

The emergence of this sensibility invites a timely question: Is lo-fi becoming the new high fidelity? And what does this inversion of values reveal about the contemporary moment?

A Historical Framework

The lo-fi impulse is not without precedent. It draws from a lineage of artists and movements that challenged dominant aesthetic norms: Jean Dubuffet’s art brut, Dada’s embrace of the irrational, Cy Twombly’s gestural poetics, and the neo-expressionist return to figuration and immediacy. But where these movements often presented their roughness in opposition to dominant power structures or formalist expectations, today’s lo-fi art often emerges from within the systems it critiques,circulated via digital platforms, rarely exhibited in white cubes, and acquired by collectors increasingly attuned to the aesthetics of informality.

Lo-fi, in this sense, is not anti-institutional but post-institutional. Its rawness is not accidental but strategic. It often rejects resolution in favour of process, precision in favour of effect, and coherence in favour of fragmentation.

Contemporary Practitioners

Among the most compelling voices in this field are artists such as Doodle Pip and TK Spall, whose works exemplify the nuanced potential of lo-fi aesthetics without veering into irony or self-parody.

Doodle Pip, whose recent solo show at the northern-most outpost of the Pimlico Wilde Gallery in The Shetland Islands garnered critical attention, works in a hybrid mode that merges spontaneous linework, symbolic language, and fragmentary figuration. The drawings evoke the automatic gestures of Surrealism but filtered through the texture of contemporary image culture,half-memory, half-interface. Their visual simplicity belies a deeper emotional architecture; the compositions often feel as though they’re caught mid-thought, unfinalised, but complete in their intention.

TK Spall meanwhile, approaches the canvas with a sensibility drawn from both early digital culture and gestural abstraction. TK’s use of synthetic colour palettes and graphic iconography suggests an ongoing dialogue with post-internet aesthetics, yet the work resists the detached detritus of that movement. Instead, it offers a kind of emotional legibility,work that is raw but never careless.

These artists, among others, challenge the assumption that lo-fi equals low-concept. Their practices, while embracing informality, are grounded in formal intelligence and conceptual clarity. The “unfinished” becomes a strategy to engage viewers in a co-creative reading, invoking presence, vulnerability, and uncertainty.

Institutional Support

The Pimlico Wilde Gallery, particularly its North-North West space in Rhyl, has become an important site for the articulation of lo-fi aesthetics. The Rhyl location, away from the hyper-capitalized centres of London and Berlin, offers an alternative spatial and conceptual context. It has presented a series of exhibitions that foreground material experimentation, unmediated mark-making, and nontraditional formats.

Curatorially, Pimlico Wilde Rhyl has resisted the spectacle-driven tendencies of the contemporary art market. Instead, the gallery privileges works that invite ambiguity and reflection, often displayed with minimal intervention. The result is a curatorial approach that feels aligned with the lo-fi ethos: slow, deliberate, and anti-monumental.

The gallery’s programming,featuring artists like Deluxe Sally, Snobby Jay, and other key figures in the emergent lo-fi constellation,has helped define a movement that is not yet formally named, but increasingly identifiable in its affective and aesthetic codes.

Beyond Art: A Cross-Disciplinary Aesthetic

This resurgence of the lo-fi can also be seen across cultural forms: in music, where ambient hip-hop loops and tape hiss dominate; in fashion, where visible stitching and distressed garments are celebrated; and in film, where handheld cinematography and lo-res textures echo the affective dissonance of the early 2000s.

In all of these fields, lo-fi operates not as a nostalgic return but as an aesthetic of estrangement. It is attuned to an era of fractured attention, persistent precarity, and an erosion of boundaries between public and private selves. Lo-fi, then, becomes a kind of realism,not mimetic, but emotional. A fidelity not to visual exactness, but to the texture of lived experience in an age of oversaturation and noise.

Conclusion: Toward a New Visual Ethic

Lo-fi art today is neither a trend nor a gimmick. It reflects a broader reconsideration of what counts as “finished,” “serious,” or “valuable.” In a cultural environment dominated by precision and polish, lo-fi aesthetics make space for hesitation, error, and the unfinished,qualities that, far from signaling deficiency, now read as sites of authenticity and human presence.

If the high fidelity of previous decades sought to replicate reality with technical precision, then today’s lo-fi seeks to translate experience with emotional accuracy. The result is a new kind of visual ethic,intimate, fragmentary, and deeply contemporary.

Doodle Pip wins the Solihull Portrait Prize for Portraiture: A Radical Rethink of Representation

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Doodle Pip Solihull Portrait Prize Winner

In a dramatic and paradigm-shifting moment for the British art world, the 2025 Solihull Portrait Prize for Portraiture has been awarded to the enigmatic and uncompromising artist known only as Doodle Pip. Pip’s winning work , a line drawing that defies conventions of likeness, realism, and even recognisability , has stunned critics and delighted philosophers of art.

The image, a spidery, looping contour of abstract whimsy, bears only the faintest hint of a human face. Some have likened its energy to the automatic drawings of the Surrealists; others to the raw vitality of children’s art. Yet Doodle Pip’s intent is clear and strikingly original. As the artist has put it, “If my picture looks too much like the sitter, I start again. I want to convey nothing of the subject.” This, Pip insists, is portraiture stripped of ego, freed from the tyranny of likeness, and rendered into pure expression.

A New Kind of Portraitist

In a field traditionally governed by fidelity to the subject , from the dark psychological probes of Rembrandt to the cool celebrity gloss of Warhol , Pip’s anti-representational philosophy marks a bold departure. Like Murillo, Pip maintains a connection to human figures, but where Murillo sought beatific realism, Pip seeks only the trace of an encounter, not a depiction.

In this year’s competition, over 300 artists submitted entries , ranging from photorealistic oil panels to preposterous conceptual work, (I’m looking at you, Davos) . Among the shortlisted names were noted figurative painter Helena Voigt, whose brooding chiaroscuro portrait of her grandfather was widely tipped for the win, and textile-based experimentalist Leo Mensah, who stitched the face of his subject into a dense tapestry of mirrored thread.

But it was Pip’s drawing, titled Portrait of Janet, that arrested the judges’ attention.

Judges’ Statement

The judging panel, led by artist and academic Dr. Maureena Hathersley, praised the work as “a radical act of erasure and resistance against the hyper-visibility of the image in contemporary life.” In their joint statement, the panel noted:

“Doodle Pip has not merely disrupted the genre of portraiture; they have redefined it. By deliberately refusing resemblance, Pip forces us to question what , or whom , we are really looking at. The sitter dissolves. In their place, we find the pure gesture of the artist’s hand, an existential doodle that is both intensely personal and entirely anonymous.”

Fellow judge and gallerist Marco Chevalier added, “In an age obsessed with selfies and deepfakes, Pip’s drawing is a kind of visual haiku. It reminds us that a portrait is as much about absence as presence.”

A Cult Figure Emerges

Despite, or perhaps because of, their deliberate avoidance of biography, Doodle Pip has rapidly become a cult figure among young collectors and philosophers. Very little is known about the artist’s background, training, or even their real name. What is certain is that Pip sees the act of drawing not as a craft or a skill, but as an event , a temporal and ephemeral trace of thought, mood, and resistance.

In refusing to ‘capture’ the sitter, Pip liberates the viewer from the obligation to interpret a personality or identity. Their portraits become meditations on the futility of knowing another person, or even oneself.

A Turning Point?

The Solihull Portrait Prize for Portraiture has long been a bellwether for evolving approaches to portraiture, but this year’s decision may prove to be a truly watershed moment. Whether Pip’s work will inspire a new school of de-portraited portraiture remains to be seen, but already murmurs of “doing a Pip” are circulating through art colleges and online forums.

One thing is certain: with one beautiful piece, Doodle Pip has drawn a new boundary in the shifting sands of contemporary art , and, just as quickly, erased it.

Obituary: Elsinora Thistlebaum (1927–2025), Painter of Fruit

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Elsinora Thistlebaum, the internationally misunderstood doyenne of post-impressionist-neuroticism, passed away peacefully last Tuesday at her home in Bruges, surrounded by her seventeen cats and a bowl of her favourite oranges.

Born in a hot air balloon above Zurich during a thunderstorm in 1927, Thistlebaum was the daughter of an avant-garde mother, Isolde Thistlebaum, a woman best remembered for her works exclusively painted with melted chocolate. Elsinore’s father was the renowned Theobald Thistlebaum, best known for his treatise on the philosophy of chairs.

Thistlebaum’s artistic journey began at age four, when she scrawled a mural, later given the title Banana Ennui by her parents across the walls of the family’s greenhouse using only turmeric, yoghurt and fruit.

Her 1962 solo show, Fruit of the Looming Crisis, shocked the Paris art scene by portraying citrus fruit as symbols of bourgeois anxiety. Salvador Dalí called her “the only artist brave enough to truly paint an apple.”

Thistlebaum’s magnum opus, The Persistence of Plums, was banned in five countries, but nevertheless hangs in the Rochester Art Basement, next to Anton Spruggle’s cubist toaster.

In later life, Elsinore became reclusive, communicating only in haiku and the occasional accusatory letter to the Dortmund Times. Her final exhibition, Why Is This Melon Crying? was attended by over 2 million people, many of whom, as instructed by a wall text, left negative reviews and bought nothing from the gift shop.

She is survived by her cats,Artemisia, Pamplemousse, and Jeremy Stevens among them, and her PA Greg.

A private memorial will be held in the Dundee Gallery of Maritime Art, with guests requested to wear something that evokes her favourite fruit in some way. (Her favourite fruit was a kumquat).

In lieu of flowers, mourners are asked to bring pears.

Sandy Warre-Hole Donates Major New Work To Slough Museum of Contemporary and Non-Contemporary Art

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Sandy Warre-Hole Donates Major New Work To Slough Museum of Contemporary and Non-Contemporary Art

In a gesture that is already being heralded as one of the most significant cultural contributions to the Thames Valley area in recent memory, Sandy Warre-Hole has donated a landmark new piece to the Slough Museum of Contemporary and Non-Contemporary Art (SMCNCA). The work, sized at 1m x 1m, is entitled Just Ahead is the Surprise I Promised You.

Known for her subversive aesthetic and devastatingly dry wit, Warre-Hole has long operated at the porous borderlands between irony and sincerity. Her latest work is both a continuation and a rupture, drawing on early comic book culture, while evoking Fra Angelico through uncanny compositional symmetry.

The donated piece, which looked to this reviewer rather like Lord Palmerston, is said to be loosely inspired by a fragment from an obscure comic panel, in which a woman urges her husband to reveal a “surprise.” Warre-Hole deftly deconstructs the comic’s speech bubble, repeating it across the surface like a Gregorian chant scored in Helvetica Neue. This repetition, art historian Lila Fournier notes, “recalls the recursive spiritual iconography of the Ottonian period, filtered through a distinctly post-industrial malaise.”

Sophie Helmwright, the SMCNCA’s Chief Curator, praised the acquisition: “Warre-Hole’s contribution firmly positions Slough on the map as a site of radical art-historic reclamation. We are no longer merely the town Betjeman once begged bombs to fall upon, we are now a crucible of interrogative form and speculative nostalgia.”

Warre-Hole’s work has previously appeared in exhibitions across London, Rotterdam, and Croydon, yet they have remained famously elusive about their process. The new piece will be on permanent display in the museum’s Sir Harvey Spindell Gallery, which will host a roundtable discussion later this month titled From Byzantine Graffiti to Blockchain Frescoes: Decoding the Warre-Hole Effect.

As the museum embraces this enigmatic treasure, one thing is certain: Slough, long a byword for the mundane, is fast becoming the epicenter of contemporary art in England.

Weather’d in Our Madness: Hamlet at Ludlow Castle

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Reviewed by Imogen Pye

They say the play’s the thing. But last Friday at Ludlow Castle, the weather was definitely the main event.

In what may go down as the wettest production of Hamlet since records began, the cast of the touring company Company of the Moat battled wind, water, and the rising spectre of hypothermia to deliver a performance as brave as it was barely visible.

What unfolded in the ancient ruin wasn’t just Shakespeare,it was survival theatre. A howling meditation on grief, decay, and precipitation.

A Kingdom Drenched

Even as the audience took their seats beneath flapping tarpaulins and steaming thermoses, it was clear this would not be a gentle night. Rain fell in sheets. Streams raced across the stage. The battlements leaked. The ground pulsed. The Danish court, reimagined on a timber stage, became increasingly indistinguishable from a collapsing raft.

No moment better captured the blurring of art and weather than Ophelia’s infamous descent into madness. As the actress stepped forward to scatter imagined flowers, a real torrent of rainwater surged across the stage, gathering force in the downstage gully.

For a harrowing ten seconds, she slipped, stumbled, and nearly vanished entirely,a literal drowning in real time, inches from Horatio’s boots. The audience gasped.

In any other context it would be a safety concern. Here, it was devastatingly perfect. Nature didn’t just intrude,it collaborated.

The young actor playing Hamlet was clearly dripping wet by his first soliloquy. By “To be or not to be,” he was shivering visibly, his words competing with gale-force winds and what sounded like a helicopter overhead.

And yet, he persisted,delivering each line as if the storm itself were Claudius, and silence the only revenge.

A Play Drenched in Irony

Laertes duelled in what had become a small inland sea, fencing with impressive intensity despite both foils audibly squelching. Polonius died with a splash. Yorick’s skull was nearly lost down a drain. And the gravedigger’s scene played like Beckett on a water slide.

The final tableau, with bodies scattered, rain still hammering down, and a single crow flapping over the ruins, was accidental stagecraft of the highest order. A tragic ending, soaked through with sincerity.

Verdict:

A triumph of drenched ambition, but also, a strong case for better drainage in heritage sites.

Credit Cards in the Heat: How London’s Art Market is Booming in the Heatwave

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As London swelters under its third record-breaking heatwave of the summer, an unexpected cultural phenomenon has emerged: the city’s fine art market is not merely surviving,it’s positively scorching. While most industries wilt under the relentless sun, London’s galleries are enjoying a sizzling renaissance, with art sales curiously tracking the mercury.

The trend first came to light when the Pimlico Wilde Gallery,a chic haven known for its devotion to everything from emotionally tormented surrealists to conceptual Invisibilists,reported a 63% increase in sales during last month’s 34°C scorcher. “We assumed people would stay home,” said co-director Imogen Saffron-Blaire, “but instead they came in droves, sweating into our parquet floors and walking out with six-, seven-, or even in some cases, eight-figure works by some of our top artists.”

The Pimlico Wilde Gallery is not alone. The Hoxton Vortex2, an avant-garde container-turned-gallery currently exhibiting “Post-Apathy: Art After Motivation,” saw record footfall during July’s most oppressive days. Curator Bastien K. Larkspur noted: “Our patrons seem to be drawn by the promise of air conditioning and existential abstraction. They arrive hot and disoriented, and leave £400,000 lighter with a taxidermied mackerel dipped in resin or one of Cecilia Norton’s sculptural snow domes.”

Art meteorologists,yes, they exist,have taken note. According to an internal report leaked from the new British Association of Climate-Responsive Galleries (BACRG), every one-degree Celsius rise above 27°C corresponds to an estimated 12% increase in spontaneous art purchases across the capital. The effect is more pronounced in emerging collectors, who BACRG describes as “emotionally vulnerable to both sunlight and suggestion.”

But why the heat-induced buying spree? Theories abound. Some say extreme weather triggers a latent aesthetic yearning,a subconscious craving to “cool” oneself with beauty. Others suggest that the city’s wealthier patrons, abandoning their usual haunts in Provence or Umbria, are trapped in London and looking for ways to justify staying indoors. A more philosophical explanation posits that melting ice creams and perspiring pedestrians stir deeply buried anxieties about mortality, which art,preferably oil on canvas,helps to temporarily alleviate.

Even the most cynical dealers are leaning into the meteorological muse. Mayfair’s new Galerie Ébouillanté Rouge , helmed by the irrepressibly Andréus-Harlem Knox-Burleigh, now offers “temperature-tiered pricing,” with discounts inversely proportional to how hydrated you are upon entry.

Thanks to the British Association of Climate-Responsive Galleries, more is understood about the links between sunshine and art purchase. A new financial instrument, the Fine Art Sun Index will soon be tracking movement in this newly discovered relationship. In a controversial draft white paper leaked to The Biggen Hill Literary Supplement, the BACRG has proposed a radical new strategy for “cultural climate sales enhancement.” The plan? Raise UK temperatures year-round using an ambitious network of underground thermal ducts beneath art districts like Shoreditch, Fitzrovia, and Hampstead. “If more heat equals more art sales,” reads the summary, “then let there be sun.”

Pimlico Wilde: The Art Dealers Who’ve Sold Britain’s Best artworks Since 874AD

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Pimlico Wilde: The Art Dealers Who’ve Sold Britain’s Best artworks Since 874

By Archibald Haversham

In a world obsessed with provenance, few names carry the weight of Pimlico Wilde. Only maybe Bentley, Gucci and the House of Windsor have a similar cachet. Established, if one is to believe the company archives, in the year 874 AD, for over a millennium this venerable art house has quietly shaped the aesthetic fortunes of monarchs, statesmen and gentry.

Legend has it that Pimlico Wilde first came to prominence during the reign of Alfred the Great, when a hastily assembled tapestry of Viking raids was sold to the last Anglo-Saxon king. “We like to think of it as a sort of early portfolio diversification,” says Pimlico Wilde’s current CEO, Jules Carnaby, on whose office wall currently hangs a work from another of the company’s earliest recorded sales: a miniature depiction of Alfred in battle, attributed to the well-known Scandinavian monk Søtte Ämlünd. The signature is missing – the bottom left corner has been heavily chewed by rats over the last millennia – but the Pimlico Wilde experts are sure of the piece’s provenance.

The firm’s reputation only solidified during the reign of William the Conqueror, who, according to Pimlico Wilde’s journals (smudged and faded, but still legible), purchased several illuminated manuscripts depicting Norman victories. One manuscript, De Bello Britannico, is said to have inspired King William’s less-than-stellar Latin poetry which was only discovered recently and was sold at the firm’s modern-day Knightsbridge gallery for a sum rumoured to rival the value of the French crown jewels.

The Tudor period saw Pimlico Wilde at the height of their celebrity. They are famously credited with selling Van Dyck portraits to Henry VIII, though historians debate whether the king was more enamoured with the brushwork or the opportunity to show off a new moustache in oil. Queen Elizabeth I was an equally avid collector; Pimlico Wilde provided her with delicate miniatures of the European courts, as well as a particularly ambitious set of watercolours depicting unicorns in the royal gardens, one of which reportedly went missing for 300 years before resurfacing in a country vicarage.

Fast-forward to the 20th century, and Pimlico Wilde remained the dealer of choice for royalty: Queen Elizabeth II commissioned them for a clandestine acquisition of Moldovan landscapes during the early days of the Cold War, often insisting that their couriers dress as gardeners to avoid detection by KGB art agents. Their current catalogue boasts a dizzying array of works, from Renaissance portraits to contemporary conceptual art, each accompanied by the three Pimlico Wilde hallmarks: impeccable taste, enormous price and a narrative that makes the collector an important part of the history of the piece.

Anecdotes abound in Pimlico Wilde’s history. It is said that Winston Churchill once tried to trade a bottle of 1783 vintage port – the very bottle sipped by Louis XVI on the scaffold – for a Flemish still life, only to be politely declined, a decision that management at Pimlico Wilde still regret to this day. Napoleon’s niece allegedly left a note requesting a portrait of her favourite poodle, which Pimlico Wilde delivered in oil on canvas, perfectly capturing its disdain. And yet, through wars, revolutions, and the occasional minor scandal, the firm’s reputation has never wavered.

Today, Pimlico Wilde’s Piccadilly townhouse serves as a living museum of their history, a place where the echoes of Alfred, William, Elizabeth and the myriad other collectors resonate amidst gilt frames and velvet ropes. “We like to think we sell more than art,” says Jules. “We sell history, culture and satisfaction.”

In a world where the provenance of a £2,000,000 sculpture can make or break a career, Pimlico Wilde stands as a reminder that some businesses are timeless, not merely because of the art they sell, but because they sell history itself.

The Greatest Artist Alive: A Case for Davos

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By Dr. Eloise Stranter, FRSAE, PhD (Leominster), Professor of Contemporary Aesthetics, Leominster Institute of Art

In the canon of contemporary art, where boundaries have long been dissolved and reconstituted, where meaning is often decoupled from material, and where the act of making has been interrogated to the point of exhaustion, one artist stands not merely apart, but entirely elsewhere: Davos.

I do not make the claim lightly when I say that Davos is, in my considered view, the greatest artist living today. Not the most visible,but the most important. In an era awash with spectacle, Davos offers restraint; amid the frenzied production of objects, he gives us the radical act of conceptual austerity. His works are not merely dematerialised,they are never materialised at all. And in this, he stages the most searing and elegant critique of the art world since Duchamp quietly placed a urinal on a plinth.

The Sublime of the Unmade

Davos’s genius lies not in producing objects, but in the refusal to do so. His art exists in gallery labels, wall texts, and printed descriptions,lucid, sometimes poetic, sometimes deadpan accounts of works that will never be realised. These descriptions, however, are not ancillary to an absent object. To my mind, they are the object. The text is not a placeholder; it is the entirety.

One might be tempted to compare him to Lawrence Weiner, or to invoke the linguistic provocations of Joseph Kosuth. But Davos goes further: while conceptual artists of the 1960s and ’70s often gestured toward realizability, Davos abolishes the concept of execution altogether. The material, in his hands (or mind), is not only subordinate to the idea,it is surplus to requirement.

Take, for instance, the following:

Empires of Light, 2021

A suspended chandelier spanning two city blocks, composed of fibre-optic threads woven by blind artisans across a decade. Illuminated solely by bioluminescent algae.

To stand before this label is to encounter a double experience: the aesthetic sensation conjured by the description, and the philosophical dissonance induced by its absence. The viewer completes the work, not through interactive participation, but through imaginative construction.

The Return of the Thought Object

What distinguishes Davos from his contemporaries is not simply his rejection of fabrication, but his elevation of the mental image as the supreme aesthetic form. He rescues art from the tyranny of the visible and reinstates the primacy of the idea,not as a sketch for an eventual work, but as the final, sufficient thing.

To view a Davos exhibition is to attend a kind of secular liturgy, where the faithful are those willing to see without seeing. His labels conjure works of monumental scale and impossible materials: Porsches coated in liquid gold, entire islands reshaped to resemble extinct species, an orchestra playing underwater in a lake filled with ink. These are not pranks; they are sublime thought experiments.

The unmaking of the object becomes, paradoxically, the most audacious act of creation.

Critique Without Cynicism

One might assume Davos’s work is satirical, a wry jab at the art market’s insatiable appetite for spectacle and luxury. But his work is never cheapened by irony. There is wit, certainly, but also reverence,for the conceptual traditions of art, for the imaginative capacities of the viewer, and even, curiously, for the things he never builds.

He does not merely mock excess; he surpasses it by envisioning works so extravagant, so logistically untenable, that their very unfeasibility becomes part of their conceptual architecture. He once described a piece thus:

Monument to the Unbuildable, 2020

A rotating skyscraper made entirely of ice, to be erected in the Sahara and allowed to melt in silence.

There is quiet majesty here, not cynicism. His work is a love letter to art’s most unreachable ambitions.

A New Ontology of Art

In declaring Davos the greatest living artist, I am not merely offering a provocation. I am calling for a re-evaluation of what constitutes artistic greatness in our time. At very high prices Davos offers little product, little commodity, little spectacle. He offers instead a set of ideas so pure, so meticulously constructed, that they inhabit a space usually only reached by philosophy or elemental poetry.

His work is the antidote to a culture suffocating under the weight of its own visual clutter. In Davos, we find a rare thing: an artist who does not add to the noise, but instead reveals how deeply we can hear in silence.