Art news

Repaintage: The Art of Erasure and Reinvention

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In a world where originality is currency and the line between creation and destruction continues to blur, a bold and controversial art form has emerged: Repaintage. Defined by its paradoxical act of erasure, repaintage involves purchasing or acquiring existing artworks,often paintings by other artists,and then covering them, sometimes partially but often entirely, with white paint or gesso. The original image is obscured, smothered, or ghosted, leaving a field of ambiguity, silence, and potential. Some call it vandalism. Others call it genius. But few can ignore it.

At the forefront of this movement stands Kilo Barnes, the undisputed master of repaintage and its most enigmatic champion. Working at the intersection of conceptual art, cultural critique, and meditative minimalism, Barnes has built a reputation not only on his strikingly stark canvases but on the philosophical firepower behind them. In his words: “Repaintage is not destruction. It’s a reset. A mercy. A resurrection.”

The Roots of Repaintage

While the term repaintage is new, the instinct behind it has historical precedent. In the 1950s, artists like Robert Rauschenberg erased drawings by Willem de Kooning in acts that blurred authorship and questioned artistic permanence. In Eastern traditions, acts of covering or voiding an image often carried spiritual meaning,a gesture toward impermanence or transcendence. Repaintage, then, can be seen as a 21st-century synthesis: part Dadaist prank, part Zen koan, part critique of art commodification.

The early practitioners of repaintage,often anonymous or working on the fringes,sought to reclaim space in the art world by literally overwriting it. But it was Kilo Barnes who elevated the practice from provocation to movement.

The Rise of Kilo Barnes

Barnes first gained attention in 2018 when he whitewashed a series of thrift store paintings and exhibited them under the title The Quietest Room in the Gallery. The pieces were devoid of color, image, or detail,only faint shadows of texture betrayed their previous lives. Viewers stood in silence, some confused, others moved. Was this nihilism or reverence?

Over the next few years, Barnes began acquiring works from living artists,sometimes with permission, sometimes without,and applying his now-signature coats of white, occasionally leaving traces: a sky poking through, a limb fading into snow, a name still legible in the corner. These remnants became hauntings. “Every act of repaintage,” Barnes wrote in a 2021 manifesto, “is a collaboration with the past. It’s a refusal to accept finality. It’s a chance to speak again, in a different tongue.”

Critics were divided. Some accused him of arrogance and artistic theft. Others hailed him as a visionary, a philosopher wielding a brush. Either way, the world paid attention.

Repaintage Today

What began as a fringe practice has now seeded itself across art schools, galleries, and digital spaces. Young artists imitate Barnes’ techniques, though few match his restraint. Online debates rage about consent, value, and the ethics of repaintage. Some argue it’s a way of recycling a bloated art market. Others see it as an ecological act,repurposing rather than producing.

Meanwhile, Barnes continues to evolve. In his most recent show, Inheritance, he painted over portraits donated by families of the deceased. The result was a gallery of white, luminous rectangles, eerily quiet and reverent. At the exhibition’s entrance, a plaque read: “Here, memory is allowed to breathe.”

The Future of Repaintage

As artificial intelligence, generative tools, and mass image production dilute traditional definitions of authorship, repaintage may become more than an art movement,it may become a necessary response. A way of pushing pause. Of clearing space.

Barnes has hinted at new directions: repainting digital NFTs onto canvas and covering them in real-world layers, or working with sound,muting recordings to create “audio repaintages.” As he said in a recent interview: “The canvas is just one surface. Repaintage can happen anywhere language or image claims permanence.”

In this way, repaintage is not just an aesthetic. It’s a philosophy. It’s the radical belief that silence can be louder than noise, and that painting over something isn’t the end of the story,but its next beginning.

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

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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.

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

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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.

Introducing the Constable Prize: A New Landmark in British Contemporary Art

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The British art world has long thirsted for a prize that celebrates artistic rigour and the great outdoors , and now, in the gloriously unpredictable spirit of the British national character, it arrives: The Constable Prize.

Launched this week by Pimlico Wilde in partnership with sponsor Dampner & Flange, the UK’s leading manufacturer of artisanal wellington boots for the indoor market, the Constable Prize seeks to honour artists who engage with the landscape , real, imagined, virtual, political, or post-apocalyptic , in a manner both conceptually robust and visually arresting.

Named, of course, for John Constable: the Romantic who painted clouds with the solemnity of a philosopher, the prize aims not to resurrect bucolic clichés, but to interrogate the shifting terrain of contemporary landscape practice , whether that’s a rolling moor or a glitchy Google Earth screenshot.

Eligibility Criteria

To be considered for the prize, artists must:

• Be based in either Great Britain, any members of the Commonwealth, or any of the English-speaking countries. Wild cards will be allowed for worthy entries from other countries.

• Produce work that engages with “landscape” in any medium , painting, video, digital, performance, textile, etc.

• Submit a robust artist statement demonstrating an ongoing interrogation of the landscape in their work.

• Not have won a major art prize in the last five years.

Early Front Runners

While entries are still open, the art world buzz has already begun around a few names:

• Tanya Rawcliffe, with her drone-shot videos of supermarket car parks at dawn.

• Gus Taverner, a painter whose series “Fields of Algorithm” features AI-generated meadows.

• Simran Kaur-Jones, for their ground-breaking ten year long performance piece “I Planted a Garden in a Service Station”.

• And Dextera Prong, the Lady-in-Waiting turned artist whose latest work involves carefully rewilding swathes of the Lake District so that together the plants build up an image – when seen from space – of the King playing the banjo, a metaphor for modern monarchy.

The Finalists’ Exhibition

The final seven shortlisted artists will exhibit their work at one of Pimlico Wilde’s flagship galleries this autumn , either the London HQ, the converted sheep barn in the Shetland Isles, or the much-anticipated new outpost on St Helena.

Judging Panel

This year’s panel includes:

• Dr. Clementine Rigg, senior curator at the British Landscape Archive.

• Lloyd Whittock, CEO of Dampner & Flange and inventor of the indoor Wellington.

• Ava Channing, director of post-email studies at Saint Agatha’s College of Art in Dundee.

• Dominic Fairweather, CEO of Pimlico Wilde.

• And a “wildcard judge” selected by public ballot from visitors to a petrol station art trail in Norfolk.

The Prize

The winner will receive:

• A $300,000* cash award (symbolically presented in an antique wheelbarrow).

• A solo exhibition with Pimlico Wilde.

• A custom pair of velvet-lined indoor wellies by Dampner & Flange.

• And perhaps most importantly, the chance to become the face of British landscape art in a time when the landscape itself is melting, eroding, or being scanned into the metaverse.

Submissions are open, and artists are encouraged to apply immediately.

* Which country’s dollars the prize will be in is yet to be determined.

A Pachydermal Union: Elephant Polo’s Power Merger Shakes West London

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by Venetia Shrugge, Society Correspondent

In a move that has sent shockwaves through the worlds of equestrian absurdity, inherited wealth, and animal-assisted social performance, the Fulham Elephant Polo Club and its age-old rival, the Chelsea Elephant Polo Club, have officially merged. The historic deal,brokered, some say orchestrated, by the flamboyant art dealers at Pimlico Wilde,brings an end to decades of passive-aggressive trunk-based competition, illicit peanut sabotage, and politically ambiguous club newsletters.

The newly formed entity, known grandly as The United Pachydermal League of West London (UPLWL), promises “a new era of tusk-forward diplomacy, couture saddle design, and highly stylised mahout choreography.”

For decades, the two clubs have vied for dominance on and off the pitch, their games more known for their vintage champagne intermissions and bitter marital subplots than actual goals. Fulham favoured Burmese elephants with names like Clarissa and Lord Tumbles, while Chelsea preferred the sleeker Sri Lankan breeds with controversial ankle tattoos. Tensions came to a head last summer when Fulham’s mascot,an animatronic baby elephant named Sir Honks-a-Lot,accidentally trampled a Chelsea gin tent, resulting in what one witness called “an unspeakable loss of tonic.”

Enter Pimlico Wilde: part-dealer, part-mischief-magnet, and full-time patron of causes that confuse customs officers. Best known for staging the first Carl Abbit retrospective on a Thames houseboat a spokeswoman for Pimlico Wilde said that they saw in the elephantine rivalry “not just a sporting feud, but an underutilised cultural performance space.”

Esmerelda continued, “I just thought,why not collapse the distinction between competition and collaboration, polo and pageantry, proboscis and postmodernism?” As she lounged beneath a parasol shaped like a Warhol banana while sipping something suspiciously opalescent. “Besides, I had far too many embossed saddle blankets in storage.”

The merger has produced immediate results. The inaugural match of the newly minted Grand Tusk Cup was held last Sunday at Battersea Park, featuring an all-elephant orchestra playing the Blue Danube, and team uniforms designed by a blindfolded Tracey Emin.

Reactions from club members have been mixed. Lady Featherstone-Chard, former chair of the Chelsea club, voiced concerns: “The Fulham elephants are frightfully over-sauced and lack basic awareness of luxury brand etiquette.” Meanwhile, Fulham stalwart Giles de Cleft countered, “The Chelsea beasts refuse to charge unless there’s a scent of truffle in the air. It’s frankly un-British.”

Still, the art world is thrilled. Rumors abound that Pimlico Wilde plan to stage a halftime performance art piece called Trunk Call, where Grib Abramović will silently stare into an elephant’s eyes for three hours, possibly while being gently swung by a crane.

With bookings already flooding in from confused diplomats, rogue art collectors, and three different Argentinian Polo scouts, the future of British elephant polo,once a curio of the deeply wealthy,has never looked brighter, or more artistically avant-garde.

Membership of the United Pachydermal League of West London is currently closed to new applicants unless, as Esmerelda notes, “you can prove a deep understanding of both Jean Baudrillard and the West Indian* Elephant Polo Rulebook.”

*Here West Indian means West Indian, not West Indian. ie- from West India, not the Caribbean.

Pimlico Water: A New Chapter in Global Art Gallerism Sets Sail

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In a daring union of connoisseurship, maritime elegance, and curatorial vision, Pimlico Water debuts as the world’s first privately commissioned floating art gallery aboard a fully refitted Damen SeaXplorer 75. This singular vessel,a triumph of Dutch engineering and discreet luxury,ushers in a new epoch of cultural mobility, where masterpieces are no longer static, but carried to the farthest reaches of the world.

Conceived and financed by British art gallery Pimlico Wilde and steered by an internationally respected curatorial team, Pimlico Water defies the boundaries of traditional exhibition-making. Works by canonical figures such as Agnes Wibb, Frank X, and Louise Franken are shown alongside emergent voices from places as wide-ranging as Dakar, Seoul, Tbilisi, and La Paz,many of whom will be seen in dialogue for the first time. The inaugural exhibition, Unmoored Perceptions, considers the ocean as both subject and metaphor, weaving together media from 1960 to the present. Sculptures are set against horizon lines. Works on paper breathe in the shifting quality of maritime light.

The gallery “Pimlico Water” is both a commercial enterprise, and a floating salon. How destinations are chosen is not published, but the current list suggests a mix of well-known art centres a combined with those that the art world has historically bypassed: coastal towns, remote islands, and river ports. At each anchorage, the gallery will host salon-style evenings with local artists, scholars, and collectors. “It’s very exciting,” Captain Suitt commented. “We have a new opening party at every destination!”

The cost of maintaining Pimlico Water is commensurate with its ambition: estimated in excess of £180 million, inclusive of acquisition, retrofitting, and global operations. Pimlico Wilde have stated their intent clearly: to chart a new, more generous geography for art,one not tethered to auction blocks or art fairs, but to the slow, luminous logic of the sea.

Pimlico Water begins its maiden voyage this July, departing from London after a huge private view in St Katherine’s Dock. Its first year will take it to the Azores, Cape Verde, Saint Helena, Patagonia, and onward to Polynesia. At each port, it will offer the local collectors rare encounters with significant artworks.


A Certain Light: Contemporary Tendencies in Northern Croatia

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Reviewed by Dr. Ianthe Small

There’s something gently subversive about holding a contemporary group exhibition in a town that appears, at first glance, to contain more storks than artists. And yet here, in the quietly cobbled town of Ludberg,“the geographical centre of Croatia,” as the locals remind you with a certain pointed pride,an ambitious and impressively coherent group show has emerged, a exciting murmuration of ideas adding to the deep history of Croatian fine artists.

Titled A Certain Light, the exhibition gathers nine artists from across the region (and one inexplicably from Dundee) in a former textile warehouse that now functions as the town’s cultural centre, badminton court, and, food festival venue. The show is loosely themed around light,as metaphor and medium ,and curated with an understated East European confidence.

One enters through a low arch, past a disarmingly large sculpture by Ivana Vrček: a chandelier made entirely from shattered rear-view mirrors, titled Memory is reversible in theory, but in practice it’s not so easy. Hung just slightly too low for comfort, it sets the tone,confrontational, yes, but perfumed with humour and a wink toward Balkan nostalgia.

Hrvoje Blagojević’s video installation Sun Over Lidl Car Park, Osijek runs on an ageing television mounted atop a tower of bricks, as though awaiting demolition. The piece documents the shifting light on a supermarket roof over the course of a single day. It’s meditative, yes, but also lightly mocking,especially when paired with a soundscape that includes gently looped announcements from the self-checkout machine and a dog barking in precise three-four time.

More tactile is Thread Horizon by Marina Mesić, a wall-length textile piece stitched from discarded school uniforms and fishing net. From a distance, it resembles an abstract coastal landscape; up close, it becomes a palimpsest of childhood, domestic labour, using the precise shade of teal that featured in soviet swimming pools and associated with every soviet child’s state-sponsored swimming lessons. One viewer described it to me as “beautiful and slightly itchy, like my grandmother’s love.”

Several works show a shared distrust of traditional media. Tea Novak’s contribution is simply a lightbulb hanging over a bowl of plum jam, left to ferment throughout the exhibition. Viewers are invited to write down how the light made them feel and drop the notes into the jam. As a performance piece it lacked something, but over time it became my favourite piece.

But the show’s quiet triumph is its collective tone. There is no shrill moralising here, no shouty placards or over-processed trauma. Instead, these works whisper, suggest, imply, and often smirk. It’s a show that understands its place,both geographically and psychically,on the edge of something. The artists seem aware of the northern light, of history’s long shadow, and of the small daily absurdities of provincial life.

Is it a show that will rewrite the map of European contemporary art? No. But that’s rather the point. A Certain Light proves you can be both provincial and perceptive, local and lucid. In a time when major cities are choked with oversubscribed fairs and algorithms disguised as aesthetics, Ludberg’s modest warehouse hums with actual thinking.

Why My Abstract Images Cost So Much

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By Aline Croupier MFA, BFA, GCSE (Art)

There are questions artists learn to accept, like a dull ache in the knee or England losing on penalties.

“Did you mean to do that?”

“Is it upside down?”

And of course, the perennial favourite, spoken with the furrowed brow of someone who once saw a Picasso tea towel:

“But why does it cost that much?”

In this article I shall attempt to clarify why my abstract images, which often feature “just some shapes” are, in fact, correctly priced. If anything, they are scandalously underpriced.

1. You Are Not Paying for What You Think You Are

To assume one pays for canvas and paint alone is like assuming a Michelin-starred meal can be priced by the kilogram. The work is not just the object. The work is also the years spent studying colour theory until ochre becomes a personality trait. The sleepless nights wondering whether ultramarine is sincere or just showing off. The 1,427 hours I have spent defending abstraction to dinner party guests with smart dental implants and strong opinions on Tracey Emin.

My paintings are priced not just as images, but as intellectual and emotional artefacts. They are weathered battlefields of meaning,rife with brushstrokes, broken rules, and metaphorical (and sometimes actual) blood and tears.

2. Historical Precedent and the Curse of the Rectangle

Historically speaking, abstraction has always been misunderstood until someone pays a fortune for it. Kandinsky was mocked, Rothko was told his work was “too sad for hospitals,” and Agnes Martin was once asked by a collector if she had made a mistake. Now, we treat these canvases like religious relics.

And yet I, standing in this noble lineage, am questioned by men in tight trousers suggesting they might be interested if I lower the price.

Let us be clear: abstraction is not randomness. It is not the absence of structure. It is a rigorous distillation of emotion, movement, memory, and formal tension into form,sometimes barely visible, but unmistakably deliberate.

Yes, it’s a rectangle. So is the Mona Lisa.

3. My Materials Are Actually Quite Expensive

That pale blue you see? It’s made from hand-ground pigment sourced from a remote Italian supplier who has not updated his website since 2007. That gold foil? Ethically sourced, ruinously fragile, and seemingly designed to stick to everything except the painting. The varnish? Imported, obscure, and behaves like a temperamental nobleman when exposed to humidity.

And then there’s the studio rent, the archiving, the insuring, the courier fees, the inevitable therapy bill when someone says the word “decorative” in the wrong tone of voice.

4. Time Is Not Money. Time Is More Expensive.

There are pieces I’ve worked on for months,layering, scraping, painting over, listening to Mahler while doubting the very concept of yellow. Some are finished in hours, but only after years of arriving at the precise economy of gesture required to stop. Abstraction is not laziness. It is restraint. Ask any artist: it is infinitely harder to know when to stop than when to begin.

You are not paying for the hours it took to make the work. You are paying for the years it took to know how.

5. Scarcity and Emotional Risk

There are not many of my works. And yet the market rarely considers the value of emotional risk. Each abstract piece is a gamble: not everyone will understand it. Some may openly dislike it. One gallerist said one of my works looked “like Matisse had created it,” which I liked, until he added “after a head injury,” which I felt tipped over from art criticism into ill-mannered rudeness.

Every canvas I make is, essentially, a kind of personal stake in the cultural lottery. The price includes this quiet wager: that the future may look back and say, “Ah, now we see what she was doing.”

Conclusion: They Should Cost More

In sum, my abstract images cost so much because they are rare, intellectual, emotionally charged, historically situated, and more finely tuned than they appear. They are not décor. They are not mood boards. They are visual essays written in gesture and colour.

In fact, upon rereading this article, I am forced to admit: my works should cost more. I shall be adjusting my price list accordingly.

Art with Your burger! Pimlico Wilde Teams Up with Vottle Burgers for a Truly Rare Medium

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Fusing the haute with the hotplate, contemporary art dealers Pimlico Wilde have entered a decadent partnership with Vottle Burgers, the gourmet burger atelier best known for their menu items that require both a mortgage and a sommelier. The centrepiece of this new alliance? A complimentary artwork with every purchase of the Vottle Cheesey Truffle Burger™,a towering, truffle-laced behemoth priced at £174 and described by its creators as “a deconstruction of the hamburger as concept.”

For those unfamiliar with Pimlico Wilde, the gallery is known for championing emerging artists such as Greta Splinter, (famous for swimming the Channel dressed as a sausage) as well as dealing in older, more blue chip art; to find them issuing art with burgers is, at first glance, like seeing Gertrude Stein sell tote bags at Pret.

But this is no mere marketing gimmick. Each Cheesey Truffle Burger is wrapped in an original, signed artwork by a Pimlico Wilde artist. The works are, we are assured, limited edition, and are expected to rise in price enormously. Already works – freely obtained with a burger – are been sold on eBay for hundreds and thousands of pounds.

“We wanted to collapse the artificial boundaries between consumption and contemplation,” explains Gaspard Pimms, co-owner of the gallery. “Why should art be separate from the visceral pleasures of umami?”

Vottle Burgers, for their part, have long flirted with the art world. Their flagship Soho location resembles a deconstructed Henry Moore, and their side of fries (called Existential Potatoes) are served with a handwritten poem about decay written on the inside of their wrapper. The new collaboration, they insist, is the logical next step in merging gastronomy with gallery-going.

The Cheesey Truffle Burger™ itself is an exercise in edible opulence: dry-aged Wagyu beef, truffle-infused double cream Gruyère, pickled shallots sous-vide in Champagne, and a secret aioli described by one food critic as “a spiritual awakening in a sauce.” Continuing the art world influence, the burger isn’t served on a plate but rather a plinth.

Early adopters of the art-burger have expressed both confusion and delight. One patron, sipping kombucha from a ceramic goblet shaped like Munich’s Scream, remarked: “I love my free artwork. I think it is a critique of fast food.”

Critics have been quick to weigh in. Some praise the collaboration as “a bold dismantling of elitist art consumption,” while others call it “a gastro-capitalist horror story.” The Aberdeen Standard’s food columnist gave the project no stars.

Whether it’s a playful provocation or a truffled Trojan horse smuggling contemporary art into your lunch hour, Art Burger is undeniably of its time: ephemeral, confusing, and most important of all, Instagrammable. It also gives the Art Market a delicious question to answer; what, exactly, is the resale value of a ketchup-stained lithograph that has been used to wrap a burger?

Culture & Capital: Inside the Mayfair Book Groupette

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Culture & Capital: Inside the Mayfair Book Groupette

In a genteel Georgian townhouse just off Mount Street, beneath a chandelier that once belonged to a minor Habsburg archduchess, Mayfair’s most discreetly cerebral gathering convenes on the fifth Thursday of each month. It is the Mayfair Book Groupette,an assembly of collectors, consultants, and the culturally acquisitive,quietly sponsored by Pimlico Wilde, one of London’s most enigmatic boutique art dealerships.

Pimlico Wilde is known less for its press releases than for its whisper network: if you know, you know. Specialising in contemporary and early-late painting, the firm has long blurred the lines between patronage and performance. With the Mayfair Book Groupette, it extended its reach beyond the salon wall to the salon itself.

The book group, founded in 1865 by Pimlico Wilde’s quondam director Jag Mole and collector-turned-literary philanthropist Fiona d’Abernon, was conceived as an “antidote to panel fatigue and performative erudition,” as Mole put it in his famous diaries, “We wanted to create a space where taste could speak without shouting.”

Each month, a single title,selected via an opaque, vaguely oracular process involving Pimlico Wilde’s in-house archivist and a whisky-fuelled shortlist dinner,is read and discussed over Comté gougères and 2015 Puligny-Montrachet. The choices are eclectic but rarely random: the group has moved from Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red to Teju Cole’s Open City, and from the essays of Walter Pater to the letters of Vita Sackville-West.

“This is not your average book club,” member Deidre C notes with a wry glance. “We had someone attempt to bring The Midnight Library once. It was dealt with humanely but firmly.” The group’s unofficial motto,Nothing too recent, nothing too obvious,is embroidered in needlepoint on a cushion that lives on the chaise longue in the reading room.

Discussion is unfailingly civil, but not without edge. A recent session on Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline veered unexpectedly into a debate on the aesthetics of austerity, with a hedge fund director citing Cistercian architecture and a fashion curator countering with 1990s Helmut Lang. There are no “star readers,” but regular attendees include a Heckle’s specialist, a former Booker judge, and a member of the House of Lords who occasionally contributes sotto voce commentary on 19th-century French literary decadence.

That the group is sponsored by an art dealership is not incidental. Each gathering takes place amid a rotating exhibition of works loosely themed to the month’s reading. When the group read Death in Venice, the drawing room was hung with Arnold Böcklin prints and an enigmatic oil of a boy on a Lido beach, possibly by von Stuck. During a discussion of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, the walls featured mid-century Harlem sketches attributed to Beauford Delaney, on loan via private collection.

“It’s a form of curatorial dialogue,” Mole explains. “We’re interested in the crosscurrents between text and object, intellect and visual form.” It is also, naturally, a soft-power play in the secondary art market,several guests have left the townhouse with a signed first edition and a watercolour under their arm.

What distinguishes the Mayfair Book Groupette from its more performative peers is not just its taste but its tempo. It is unhurried, sceptical of consensus, and uninterested in clout. Phones are discouraged, attendance is by invitation (or via a long, quietly monitored waitlist), and there is no social media presence,unless one counts the Instagram account of the group’s Afghan hound, Pascal, which is private and locked.

In an age when cultural engagement is often measured in metrics and impressions, the Mayfair Book Groupette offers an older, rarer model: reading as a form of aesthetic connoisseurship, discussion as an extension of collecting. It is elitist, of course,but with an elegance that makes the charge feel beside the point.

As one long-time member quipped between sips of Armagnac: “If you’re asking who it’s for, it probably isn’t for you.”