Art theory

Is Abstract Art Tosh? A Refutation

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Is Abstract Art Tosh? A Refutation

To pose the question “Is Abstract Art Tosh?” is already to have surrendered to the most enfeebled species of philistinism. The interrogative itself is unworthy, an ill-bred mongrel of tabloid cynicism and barroom banter. One might as well ask, “Is mathematics mere scribbling?” or “Is music mere noise?”—for such queries betray not so much scepticism as cognitive bankruptcy.

The word tosh, that dismal monosyllable of Cockney provenance, is particularly ill-suited to the gravitas of aesthetic discourse. It functions here as a rhetorical cudgel wielded by those incapable of recognising that abstraction is not the negation of art, but rather its sublimation: the Aufhebung of mere representation into the pure realm of form, colour, rhythm, and metaphysical inquiry.¹ To denounce abstraction as “nonsense” is tantamount to castigating Pythagoras for preferring numbers to potatoes.

Consider the lineage: from Malevich’s Black Square—that silent icon of metaphysical negation²—through Mondrian’s theosophical grids, to Rothko’s numinous fields of trembling colour. Each gesture, far from “tosh,” is a deliberate confrontation with the limits of visibility, a hermeneutics of the void.³ To reduce such ventures to “gibberish” is to reveal one’s own incapacity to see, to think, indeed to feel beyond the merely mimetic.

The question also rests on a false presupposition: that the measure of art lies in its resemblance to nature. But was not Plato’s cave a parable against such slavish imitation? *Ars non est natura servilis, sed natura transfigurata.*⁴ To demand recognisable cows and teapots on every canvas is to regress into aesthetic bovarism, a craving for pretty trifles over ontological revelation.

Furthermore, the sneer “tosh” discloses a profound insecurity: an anxious defence of the everyday against the incursion of the sublime. For abstract art dislocates; it unsettles; it ruptures the soporific continuum of bourgeois existence. To dismiss it with a grunt is not critique, but cowardice—an argumentum ad timorem.

One is reminded of the Athenians who mocked Socrates for his ceaseless questioning, only to find themselves the objects of his irony. Similarly, those who deride abstraction unwittingly display their own unexamined assumptions. The true scandal is not that abstract art exists, but that so many persist in responding to it with clichés scavenged from pub chatter.

Is abstract art “tosh”? Only to the incurious, the intellectually malnourished, the spiritually tone-deaf. To all others, it remains what it was from the beginning: a theatre of the infinite, a cryptogram of Being, a silent liturgy painted upon canvas.

Notes

1. Cf. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), on the dialectical supersession of immediacy.

2. See Bowlt, J.E., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism (1976), for the theological implications of Malevich’s icon of non-being.

3. Compare Rothko’s letters in Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (1993), wherein colour fields are described as “dramas.”

4. “Art is not the slavish copy of nature, but the transfigured nature.” A maxim attributed, dubiously, to Alberti.

About the Author

Dr. Severinus Archimandrite, D.Phil. (Leintwardine Polytechnic)

Adjunct Professor of Aesthetico-Metaphysical Hermeneutics,

Institute for Obscure and Rebarbative Studies, Luxembourg.

The Shape of Cool by Alaric Montjoy

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The Shape of Cool by Alaric Montjoy

It has always seemed to me that the problem with cool is ontological. To ask what is cool? is to place oneself in the same quixotic category as those who ask what is truth? or what is beauty?—worthy questions, but ones destined to collapse under the weight of their own self-consciousness. Cool is the most mercurial of cultural states, not unlike what Roland Barthes once said of myth: it exists to the extent that it is believed in, and it evaporates the moment it is explained.

I was reminded of this years ago, in a basement bar in Kreuzberg, where I had gone ostensibly to interview a DJ, but in truth to avoid the stultifying academic conference I was meant to be attending up the road. The DJ in question—an émigré from São Paulo with an encyclopaedic knowledge of French structuralism—looked me in the eye and declared, “Cool is the refusal to flinch.” He then proceeded to spill beer down his vintage Comme des Garçons shirt and not acknowledge it. And for a brief moment, I believed him.

Cool has always been about refusal. Think of Miles Davis, sunglasses in near-darkness, back turned to the audience as if to say, your gaze cannot touch me. Think of James Dean, smouldering against the backdrop of post-war conformity. Think of David Bowie, who—more than anyone—reminded us that cool could be constructed, demolished, and reassembled with every album sleeve. But refusal is never enough; cool also requires recognition. Without the hungry eyes of others, the refusal falls into obscurity.

The paradox, then, is that cool exists in a state of perpetual tension: between effort and effortlessness, visibility and withdrawal, performance and accident. It is not a fixed quality but a relation, a dance, even a duel. Susan Sontag, in her essay on camp, suggested that seriousness and frivolity can coexist in the same gesture. I would extend this to cool: the moment we decide something is cool, we are half in awe of it and half mocking ourselves for caring.

When politicians reach for cool, the results are often comic. One remembers Harold Wilson puffing his pipe in what was supposed to be a gesture of working-class authenticity, or Tony Blair grinning beside Noel Gallagher as though Oasis had been waiting all along to validate neoliberalism. Angela Merkel never bothered, which may be why she remains oddly untouched by ridicule. Cool, I think, is allergic to overt power; it thrives only on the margins.

Technology has, of course, accelerated the life cycle of cool beyond recognition. Where once the jazz club or the nightclub could incubate style for months, even years, now TikTok reduces every gesture to a fleeting meme. I have seen teenagers declare an item of clothing cool, kill it through ubiquity, and bury it in irony all in the space of a fortnight. In this sense, the internet is not a curator of cool but its embalmer. Baudrillard would no doubt have had a field day.

And yet—despite the acceleration, despite the irony—we still pursue it. Why? Perhaps because, as Walter Benjamin suggested of aura, cool reminds us of presence, of uniqueness, of being in a particular place at a particular time. To witness cool is to be part of a tiny conspiracy with others: to say, “we saw it, we felt it, we were there.”

I return, finally, to something the Japanese designer Yohiro Tanaka once told me in Tokyo: “Cool is the absence of sweat.” I laughed at the time, but the line has never left me. It speaks to that strange paradox of effortlessness—the countless hours behind every ‘spontaneous’ move, the artifice behind every ‘natural’ performance. Cool is not authenticity but the appearance of authenticity, staged so deftly that even sceptics (and cultural commentators) are seduced.

In the end, cool may be less about style, fashion, or sound than about connection. The neighbour singing Puccini on her balcony during lockdown was cool. The teenager who resurrects an obsolete dance move in defiance of trend cycles is cool. Even the shy glance across a crowded room—shared recognition, fleeting solidarity—is cool.

To call something cool is simply to say: I wish I could be inside that moment with you. And perhaps that is why, even in our endlessly mediated, algorithmic world, we still need it. Because cool, for all its slipperiness, is really just another word for longing. And longing, as Proust knew, is the only state that never goes out of fashion.

Discombobulationism: The Peripheral Dislocations of Aurelia Kaspár

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Discombobulationism: The Peripheral Dislocations of Aurelia Kaspár

If Discombobulationism has come to designate an aesthetics of bewilderment—works that dislodge the viewer from systems of coherence and perceptual stability—then Aurelia Kaspár remains one of its most enigmatic fellow travelers: an artist both intimately entangled with the movement and fundamentally resistant to its orthodoxies. Kaspár’s practice, which traverses performance, fragile installation, and what she herself terms “quasi-literature,” must be read as an exploration of the conditions of dislocation that hover at the peripheries of discombobulated form.

Born in Brno in 1985 and trained as a linguist before turning to art, Kaspár approaches language less as a communicative tool than as a site of fracture, an unstable architecture of failed promises. Her early performance Lexicon of Broken Entrances (2016)—a durational piece in which she recited etymologies of doors and thresholds in twenty-two languages, whilst gradually erasing them with sandpaper—already signalled a method grounded in the simultaneous invocation and destruction of sense. While the Discombobulationists of Rotterdam and Brooklyn embraced cacophony and absurdity as performative strategies, Kaspár cultivated a quieter, more insidious form of dislocation: a semantic erosion that renders language itself porous.

Critically, her work cannot really be assimilated to the core tenets of Discombobulationism. Where figures such as Marietta Voss or Diego Armenta revel in spectacular bewilderment—machines screaming, loops collapsing, maps that refuse orientation—Kaspár inhabits what might be called the threshold of discombobulation: not the vertiginous plunge into incoherence, but the suspended moment just before the fall, when comprehension begins to shimmer and fracture. In this sense, her practice bears closer affinity to the negative capabilities of Romantic poetics or to the Derridean différance than to the slapstick refusal of logic characteristic of the mainstream movement.

Her installation Syntax for an Abandoned Room (2019), presented at the Prague Biennial, remains exemplary. Comprised of transparent sheets of glass etched with incomplete grammatical structures—“if only…,” “because without…,” “when not yet…”—the work filled the space with clauses perpetually awaiting completion. As visitors moved among them, their reflections fragmented into unfinished propositions, subject and object refusing to meet. The piece destabilized not through overload but through insufficiency, a poetics of the incomplete that left the viewer suspended in grammatical expectation.

It is precisely this engagement with the liminal and the unfinishable that situates Kaspár on the fringes of Discombobulationism. While the central figures of the movement stage bewilderment as a theatrical spectacle, she transforms it into a condition of intimacy, almost of vulnerability. One might argue that her oeuvre functions as the melancholic underside of the movement’s exuberant chaos, its spectral double.

Historiographically, Kaspár’s position invites comparison with those peripheral figures who haunt the margins of every avant-garde: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven vis-à-vis Dada, Leonora Carrington vis-à-vis Surrealism, or Agnes Denes vis-à-vis Land Art. In each case, the artist troubles the internal consistency of the movement by embodying its contradictions in forms that resist canonical assimilation. Kaspár, too, offers Discombobulationism its necessary shadow—a practice that insists on hesitation, pause, and the slow unraveling of meaning, rather than its explosive collapse.

If Discombobulationism can be said to dramatize the crisis of sense in the digital age—its overloads, contradictions, and algorithmic vertigos—then Kaspár articulates a different register: the quiet disorientation of language itself, the subtle erosion of our capacity to name, to begin, to conclude. In her work, bewilderment is not spectacle but condition; not noise, but silence fissured by the ghost of grammar.

One might even say that Kaspár embodies what philosopher Claudine Marchal has termed “para-discombobulation”: the practice of dwelling beside bewilderment without surrendering entirely to its centrifugal force. Her art, in this sense, is not simply on the margins of the movement; it is the margin as such—the line at which sense falters, not with a scream but with a whisper.

A Review of “Discombobulationism: The Newest -ism in Art”

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A Review of “Discombobulationism: The Newest -ism in Art”

To watch the recent television exploration of Discombobulationism was to experience something that felt less like art criticism and more like the witnessing of a seismic shift. The programme’s premise was simple: here is a new movement, born of the chaos of our moment, gathering momentum with startling speed. Yet what emerged over the course of the hour was something far more arresting—a sense that this was not merely a fleeting avant-garde curiosity but a phenomenon that may stand, in time, alongside the great artistic ruptures of the past.

The producers wisely avoided the trap of treating Discombobulationism as novelty. Instead, they presented it as a broad and surprisingly coherent mood, one that thrives on incoherence. Marietta Voss’s now-famous performance of ascending a staircase backwards in a gown of shredded instruction manuals while reciting emergency exit regulations in reverse was given pride of place. What might once have been dismissed as a surreal prank was reframed as a moment of origin: the point at which disorientation itself became not a problem to be solved but the very subject of the work.

From there, the programme moved fluidly across continents and media. Diego Armenta’s Tuesday Never Ends (Except on Thursday), a looping video where each day bleeds into the next and every sentence collapses into stutter, was introduced as an exploration of time’s refusal to stabilise. Leonie Krantz’s paintings, grids of classical perspective that slide into collapse before reassembling at impossible angles, were well described as “Cubism in freefall.” Rafael Mota’s olfactory assault, a gallery filled with clashing chemical scents, was shown through the reactions of visitors who stumbled out visibly shaken, the refusal of coherence made visceral. Clara Nguyen’s assembly diagrams that result in a chair without a seat were presented as a wry but profound meditation on our endless desire for function and the possibility of its denial.

What distinguished the programme was its insistence that these gestures are not random eccentricities but a considered response to the conditions of the present. In an age dominated by information overload, algorithmic prediction, and the constant demand that meaning be clear, immediate, and digestible, Discombobulationism insists on our right to be confused. It resists clarity not out of laziness but as a form of honesty: our world, fractured and contradictory, is no longer one in which sense can be easily made. The artists do not merely reflect that condition; they force us to inhabit it.

The show drew comparisons, inevitably, with earlier artistic revolutions. Impressionism dismantled the solidity of form in order to capture fleeting light. Cubism fractured perspective to reveal simultaneity. Discombobulationism, we were told, goes further still: it embraces fracture itself, not as a technique but as a reality. To encounter these works is to be reminded that confusion is not a temporary inconvenience but the state in which we increasingly live.

This is not without its dangers. The programme acknowledged critics who fear that disorientation could harden into gimmickry, an easy trick for artists keen to manufacture depth by withholding coherence. There is also the risk of elitism: when art courts bewilderment, it risks alienating those without the patience or inclination to embrace it. Yet the advocates of Discombobulationism argue, persuasively, that bewilderment is the most democratic of experiences: it happens to everyone, everywhere, without warning.

What made the programme so compelling was its willingness to lean into this paradox. It did not pretend that Discombobulationism is entirely graspable; indeed, its refusal to be pinned down seemed part of the allure. The film ended with a montage of exhibitions: maps that lead nowhere, staircases that collapse into themselves, blank books demanding to be read. The effect was disconcerting but oddly exhilarating. One left with the uncanny sense of having brushed against something both absurd and necessary.

It is a rare privilege to live through the birth of an artistic movement. Rarer still to encounter one that seems not only to mirror its age but to offer a vocabulary for it. Discombobulationism may fizzle, or it may define the century. For now, it feels like a name that will not easily be forgotten. And if the programme captured even a fraction of its significance, then it has given us something remarkable: the chance to recognise, in bewilderment itself, the beginnings of a new way of seeing.

The Epistolary Gesture: On the Letters of Simon Hargrove, Artist.

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The Epistolary Gesture: On the Letters of Simon Hargrove, Artist.

By any measure, Simon Hargrove is not an artist easily contained by medium, market, or even myth. His practice exists in the strange overlap between performance and artefact, intimacy and commerce. For the past five years, Hargrove has written letters. Handwritten, ink-stained, occasionally water-damaged, sometimes months late. And yet, these missives, which can take the form of love confessions, furious accusations, inventories of cloud formations observed from his window, or what he once called “portraits in syntax,” have come to command extraordinary prices. The collectors—who are not so much collectors as recipients—pay for the right to receive a letter from this artist. To wait, as one Wolverhampton gallerist put it, “for the postal sublime.”

Hargrove calls this practice Correspondentialism, a term he first used in a 2021 lecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. “The letter,” he declared then, “is the last object that still arrives with breath on it. It is a body folded into paper, a psyche sealed with, excuse the vulgarity, spit.” The audience, fatigued by digital immediacy and the dematerialization of art objects, erupted into something halfway between laughter and reverence.

His story borders on the implausible. Born in Oxford, he allegedly spent his early twenties working in a monastery archive in Avignon, tasked with cataloguing correspondence between medieval abbots and their distant patrons. There are rumours that he once locked himself inside the archive for forty days, reading nothing but farewell letters written by monks on their deathbeds. When asked about this, he only shrugged: “It was not art. It was apprenticeship.”

What makes Hargrove’s project so disarming is its refusal of immediacy. Buyers—who pay anywhere between €4,000 and an eye-watering €120,000 per letter—do not know when their missive will arrive, nor its content. A single collector in Berlin reportedly waited seventeen months for an envelope, only to receive a page describing in exhaustive detail the sound of dripping water in a hotel corridor. Another, in São Paulo, received nothing but a pressed leaf accompanied by an unsigned sentence: “You did not wait for me; you waited with me.”

Another, received by a patron in Vienna after nearly two years of silence, was written in blue ink across both sides of a page torn from a French phone directory:

“I counted the hours until you opened this. That counting is the artwork. You hold only the receipt of my waiting.”

Is this merely fetishism of delay, of scarcity in the Amazon age? Or is Hargrove, with unsettling precision, re-instituting the very conditions of longing that modern communication has annihilated? Critic Marianne Klotz, writing in Texte zur Kunst, has argued that “Hargrove re-sutures art to eros, not by depiction but by anticipation. His correspondences are not artworks; they are absences curated.”

In person, Hargrove is elusive. He does not give interviews, though he is known to walk into openings dressed as a postal clerk, stamping guests’ hands with the word WAIT. The few who know him personally describe him as “archival,” as though he were already a document.

Whether Correspondentialism proves to be a durable form, or merely another flare in the ongoing crisis of art’s ontology, remains unclear. What is certain is that Hargrove has managed something almost impossible in a time of instant delivery: he has turned delay into ecstasy, and waiting into wealth.

As one recipient whispered at a recent salon in Vienna, holding an envelope they hardly dared to open:

“The letter itself is irrelevant. It is the arrival of a presence you paid to anticipate. It is brilliant. He has weaponized longing.”

And in that weaponization, Simon Hargrove has written himself into art history—one envelope at a time.

Kilo Barnes Repaints a Rothko — and the Art World Isn’t Taking It Well

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Kilo Barnes Repaints a Rothko — and the Art World Isn’t Taking It Well

Controversial artist and leading figure in the Repaintage movement, Kilo Barnes, has once again made headlines — this time for repaintaging (the term for his now-notorious method of painting over existing artworks) one of the most beloved and publicly adored Rothkos in private circulation.

The act took place quietly, almost clinically, in a private studio in Antwerp. The Rothko in question — widely believed to be Untitled (Yellow, Red, Green and Blue), although Barnes has not confirmed the original title — was purchased via an anonymous intermediary late last year. What remains now is a large canvas, entirely coated in a soft, matte white. Silent, stark, and totally absent of Rothko’s signature color fields.

“It was my favourite picture,” said a visibly distressed gallery-goer outside the artist’s recent show in London. “I used to have a poster of it in my flat. Now it’s just… a white thing. He’s deleted emotion.”

The Method and the Madness

Barnes, speaking with cool detachment at the opening of his exhibition Whiteout: Acts of Repaintage, at Pimlico Wilde Central explained the decision: “I didn’t erase a Rothko,” he said. “I completed it. It was already grieving. I simply allowed it to rest.”

This is typical Barnes: equal parts provocateur and philosopher. For the uninitiated, Repaintage is the act of painting over existing artworks, often of significant cultural or emotional value, not in an attempt to destroy but to reframe absence as the final form. Practitioners — and Barnes is its high priest — see it as an evolution of the image, not a negation.

But critics are less forgiving.

Rewriting Reverence

Art critic Elisa Drayton called the Rothko repaintage “an act of cold vandalism cloaked in poetic language.” She continued: “It’s one thing to work in white on white. It’s another to do so over a painting that meant something — historically, emotionally, humanly. What next? A Pollock dipped in primer?”

Others, however, see Barnes’ move as a legitimate — if deeply uncomfortable — intervention. “If the sacred can’t be touched, it’s no longer art, it’s religion,” noted curator Mikkel Reingold. “Barnes challenges us to reconsider what we’re really looking at when we look at a Rothko: is it the colour? The mood? Or the story we’ve told ourselves about it for decades?”

An Art of Absence

The newly repaintaged Rothko — now titled simply Untitled (After Silence) — hangs in the centre of the gallery’s main room, lit dramatically, surrounded by muttering, often incredulous visitors. It is difficult to say what’s more powerful: the image, or the memory of the image that used to be there.

Barnes has made no apology. “Art is not a monument,” he told one reporter flatly. “It’s a sentence. And I’ve added a new comma.”

At the time of writing several museums have issued statements reaffirming their preservation policies, while online petitions to “stop Barnes from erasing art history” have gathered tens of thousands of signatures. But Barnes remains unmoved.

“I loved that Rothko too,” he said. “That’s why I set it free.”

Whether one sees him as vandal or visionary, Barnes has once again forced a confrontation with the limits of authorship, legacy, and visual memory. For better or worse, the Rothko is gone — or perhaps, for Barnes and his followers, is more present than ever.

The rest of us are left staring at a white canvas, wondering what we remember, and what we’ve lost.

On Flatness and the New Aristocracy

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by Helmut de Rococo

(Originally published in the pdf-only catalogue for Ptolemy Bognor-Regis III: Works from the Blur Period, Pimlico Wilde West, 2025)

“When the canvas no longer holds paint but protocol, the brush becomes a cursor—and the artist a landlord of pixels.”

— Elana Kvant, “Surface Tensions: Digital Nobility and the Aesthetic of Owning,” 2019

It is no longer meaningful—perhaps no longer even possible—to speak of painting in its historical sense. Surface, once the locus of tension between intention and accident, pigment and gesture, now lies flat and backlit. This flatness, long prophesied by Greenberg, no longer signals aesthetic purity. In the hands of a new breed of aristocratic image-makers, it marks dominion.

No artist exemplifies this better than Ptolemy Bognor-Regis III.

To understand Bognor-Regis III’s practice, one must almost discard the vocabulary of composition and colour theory and instead take up the lexicon of fealty, estate, and simulation. For what we encounter in his work is not painting in any conventional sense, but rather a highly stylised expression of what I have elsewhere termed digital feudalism—a new socio-aesthetic order in which image production mimics the hierarchies of dynastic wealth, platform control, and data possession.

The Aesthetic of Inherited Authority

Bognor-Regis III does not seek the viewer’s comprehension; he assumes it as a birthright, only to withhold it. His works—aggressively flat, sometimes violently empty—offer neither perspective nor entry. Instead, they announce their presence like heraldic banners in a castle courtyard. One does not read or interpret them; one beholds them, as one might behold the seal of a duchy one cannot enter.

This is no accident. The artist, descended from Ptolemy Bognor-Regis II, a man whose influence spans football, philanthropy, and forthcoming yacht-based reality television, operates within what we might call the Aesthetic Sovereignty of Legacy. His gap-year abstractions, allegedly inspired by Colombian road signage, are not so much about travel or encounter as they are about the performance of cultural inheritance—flattened, dislocated, and repackaged as NFT-friendly mystique.

Surface as Domain

Consider his series “Signs Before Breakfast.” At first glance, they appear to be abstract compositions of digital brushwork—semiotic storms rendered in retinal-dulling palettes. But a closer (or rather, more cynical) inspection reveals something more architectural: the paintings are meticulously gridded, rigid in aspect ratio, and carefully optimised for screen, print, and projection. These are not expressions; they are zoning maps—flat territories over which the artist asserts symbolic control.

Just as feudal lords claimed fiefdoms with banners and crests, so Bognor-Regis III lays claim to cultural real estate through aesthetic domain-staking. In doing so, he joins a new class of what I term Creative Lords—those who do not directly generate content for publics, but rather lease their presence through limited-access viewings, QR-gated editions, and catalogue essays published exclusively in proprietary file formats.

The Myth of Depth, The Theatre of Flatness

Art history has always flirted with flatness, but never has it embraced it so fetishistically. In the 20th century, flatness was political: a renunciation of illusionism, a strike against the bourgeois cult of verisimilitude. In the 21st century, under the reign of the New Aristocracy, flatness is no longer revolutionary—it is performative silence, an aspirational opacity.

This is where Bognor-Regis III excels: in crafting surfaces so flattened in depth that they transcend it. His refusal to offer interpretation is not coyness; it is class performance. The artist’s statement—“My work is so deep and meaningful that it can only be expressed in abstract paintings”—isn’t naïve; it is a heraldic riddle, a dare issued from the castle’s turret.

Conclusion: From Patronage to Platform

We must be clear-eyed: Ptolemy Bognor-Regis III does not paint, rather he manages aesthetic capital. His works function not as objects of aesthetic contemplation, but as tokens of presence in a closed system of symbolic exchange. They are no more paintings than a blockchain ledger is a poem.

In this sense, he is not a charlatan but a mirror. His oeuvre reflects the rise of a new aesthetic aristocracy—one that inherits bandwidth, leases meaning, and builds castles made of code.

If painting once aimed to democratise vision, the work of Bognor-Regis III reasserts the primacy of possession over perception. And perhaps that is his most radical gesture.

Helmut de Rococo is an independent theorist of surface ideologies, aristocratic visualities, and hyper-mediated art practices. He divides his time between Vienna, Bogotá, and a small server farm outside Dubrovnik.

‘My Child could have done That’: Against the Barbarous Philistine

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‘My Child could have done That’: Against the Barbarous Philistine

A Disquisition on the Infantilisation of Art Or why your child couldn’t have done that…

It has become, in our debased epoch of instantaneity and aesthetic illiteracy, a weary commonplace to hear the ignoble ejaculation, usually proffered between sips of tepid Chardonnay, “My child could have done that—and he is three, and cannot even feed himself.” To this pronouncement—at once smug, banal, and profoundly jejune—I can only reply with the most strenuous execration.

The phrase itself is the reductio ad absurdum of what the ancients termed homo incultus—the unlettered man, devoid of paideia, bereft of the capacity to discern between the puerile scrawl of a toddler and the deliberate, tectonic gesture of the artist whose hand participates in a tradition stretching back to Apelles and Giotto, to Caravaggio and Kandinsky.¹ That one should mistake apparens facilitas—the appearance of simplicity—for genuine simplicity is symptomatic of a civilisation in thrall to surface phenomena, blind to the depths of intentionality, and unwilling to acknowledge that behind every authentic work of modernist or postmodernist experimentation lies a palimpsest of discipline, negation, and historical dialogue.

To declare that “a child could do it” is, in fact, to unwittingly confess one’s own artistic nescience. A child cannot do it. A child cannot inscribe a line freighted with pathos and irony, with historical resonance and ontological inquiry. The child’s mark, however charming, is a-logical—a mere effusion of motor impulses.² The artist’s mark, by contrast, is logos incarnate: at once apophatic and kataphatic,³ speaking through silence as much as through form, a gesture simultaneously toward Being and beyond Being.

Nor is it accidental that the critic of the “my kid” variety nearly always couches his disdain in terms of alimentary incompetence—“he cannot feed himself.” What curious projection! As though the capacity to wield a spoon were somehow homologous with the capacity to negotiate the abyssal dialectics of colour, space, and negation. It is an argumentum ad culinarium, and thus doubly risible.

The barbarians at the gate imagine themselves defenders of common sense; in truth, they are the very enemies of sense itself. They resemble those Athenians whom Socrates rebuked for their incapacity to distinguish sophistry from wisdom. *Ignorantia artis non est argumentum contra artem.*⁴ To disparage what one does not understand is the oldest, cheapest, and most ignominious form of pseudo-criticism.

One ought rather to approach even the most seemingly infantile abstraction with reverence, or at least humility, recalling Aristotle’s admonition that wonder (thaumazein) is the beginning of philosophy.⁵ The great canvases of modernity are not playground scribbles, but metaphysical laboratories; they are sites wherein Being itself is interrogated with a force unavailable to the literal-minded bourgeois and his anecdotal offspring.

So let us consign this wretched cliché—“My child could have done that”—to the dung-heap of philistine platitudes, along with “It doesn’t even look like anything” and “I could have made that.” For in truth, you could not. And your child, tender though he might be, cannot. The work of art remains what it always has been: an impenetrable mystery, an object of numinous dread, a manifestation of the human spirit struggling against the inertia of the merely given.

Notes

1. Cf. Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), wherein even “natural facility” presupposes years of training.

2. See Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality (1971), for the crucial distinction between spontaneous gesture and artistic symbolisation.

3. On the apophatic/kataphatic dialectic, cf. Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology (c. 5th century).

4. Loosely adapted from Cicero’s dictum: Ignorantia iuris non excusat—ignorance of the law excuses not.

5. Aristotle, Metaphysics I.982b: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophise.”

About the Author

Dr. Severinus Archimandrite, D.Phil. (Leintwardine Polytechnic)

Adjunct Professor of Aesthetico-Metaphysical Hermeneutics,

Institute for Obscure and Rebarbative Studies, Luxembourg.

When Retail Triumphs Over Art: Galleries Where the Gift Shop Is Better Than the Gallery

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When Retail Triumphs Over Art: Galleries Where the Gift Shop Is Better Than the Gallery

In the quiet corners of the art world there’s a rising phenomenon that curators dare not speak aloud: the gift shop is winning.

Across Europe and North America, a curious pattern has emerged—one that art critics, sociologists, and retail anthropologists are only beginning to scrutinize. In certain galleries, it’s not the permanent collections, traveling retrospectives, or even the edgy sound installations that visitors remember most—it’s the exquisite, wildly inventive, and sometimes subversively curated gift shops. The gallery may house a middling exhibit of regional abstractionists, but its shop is a curated cultural ecosystem, bursting with bold design, rare books, and bespoke soaps named after obscure Russian avant-garde artists.

The Rise of the Cult Gift Shop

Take the Haus für Nuancen in Basel, Switzerland. While its exhibits are primarily grayscale meditations on “material fatigue in post-industrial ceramics,” its gift shop—Boutik für Gedanken—has become a pilgrimage site for the international design cognoscenti. Stocking limited-run Risograph prints, anti-capitalist card decks, and matcha-infused stationery crafted by Slovenian monks, it has drawn more press than the gallery’s actual programming.

What explains this inversion? Dr. Camille Thistlewaite, author of The Commodification of Aesthetic Experience, suggests that “the gift shop satisfies the modern appetite for participatory aesthetics. You cannot take home a Rothko. But you can buy a Rothko-inspired knitwear line made in collaboration with Icelandic shepherds.”

Indeed, for a generation raised on experiential consumption and social media storytelling, the gallery gift shop offers tactile, photographable proof of cultural engagement. A tote bag featuring a dadaist pun is not mere kitsch—it’s semiotic flair.

The London Anomaly: The Kettlehouse

Consider the Kettlehouse Contemporary in East London. Housed in a converted water filtration plant, the gallery debuted in 2020 to little fanfare. Its exhibitions—mostly curated by post-graduate students from the Slade School—tend toward the aggressively inscrutable. But its gift shop, Filtr, has eclipsed it entirely. Designed by famed scenographer Lotte Greschler, Filtr is a labyrinth of illuminated niches, offering everything from edible perfumes to speculative fiction zines printed on bark.

In a bizarre twist, several of the artists featured in the gallery now request to have their works sold only through the shop, circumventing the gallery walls entirely. “It’s where people actually look,” said one anonymous installation artist whose bio notes include “makes his own cardboard.”

Paris: Where It All May Have Started

The Musée du Contrepoint in Paris is widely credited with pioneering the curatorial inversion, as it’s come to be known. The museum itself focuses on meta-critique of artistic categorization, frequently exhibiting blank canvases titled with paragraphs of footnotes. But its gift shop, Objet d’Objet, is a masterclass in conceptual retail. Every item is wrapped in layers of allusive packaging. You don’t know if you’ve purchased a candle, a commentary on Western consumerism, or both—until you get home.

Rumours persist that a portion of the gift shop is actually a permanent installation, never for sale. A rack of “Socks for the Post-Truth Era” (each sock is a subtly different hue, all suggestive of different emotions) has reportedly been on display for three years, untouched but fiercely debated.

The Implications

This shift has triggered not only commercial implications but philosophical ones. If a gallery’s cultural impact is measured more by its retail than its retrospectives, what does that mean for the future of institutional art?

“There’s something profoundly democratic about it,” argues Dr. Mouna Fekri, a semiotician at the University of Amsterdam. “The traditional gallery is exclusionary. The gift shop offers a filtered, digestible piece of the sublime—priced accordingly, of course.”

Not all agree. Critics warn of the dangers of “curated consumerism,” where aesthetic value is conflated with market viability. “It’s like mistaking the foyer for the opera,” scoffed Lars Feldmann, a staunch defender of Brutalist purism.

Toward a Hybrid Future?

Some institutions are embracing the change. The upcoming Museum of Distinguished Images (MoDI) in Chicago will reportedly have no permanent collection—just an evolving, immersive gift shop curated by guest artists. Entry will be free, but patrons must enter – and exit – through the gift shop, which doubles as the installation itself.

It’s unclear whether this trend signals the collapse of traditional gallery culture or its metamorphosis into something hybrid, transactional, and thoroughly modern. What is certain is that in a time of sensory overload and algorithmic recommendation, the curated object still holds power—especially if it fits in a backpack and comes with a story.

As Thistlewaite quips in her latest lecture series, Buying Art History: “In the age of the simulacrum, the receipt is the artifact.”

Related Articles:

• Edible Catalogues: The Rise of Gastronomic Publishing in Art Retail

• From Murakami to Merino: Why Artist-Branded Socks Are the New Posters

• Instagrammable Irony: How Museum Stores Became the New Third Place

Abstract Sandcastles: Fine Art from the Beach

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Abstract Sandcastles: Fine Art from the Beach

The beach has long held an important place in art history. Turner’s vaporous seas, Courbet’s muscular waves, Whistler’s tonalist horizons, and the Impressionists’ promenades (Boudin at Trouville, Monet at Sainte-Adresse) made the littoral not merely a theme but a laboratory for modern vision. Today the shoreline is no longer only depicted; it is mobilized as studio, site, and substance. Out of this shift has emerged a new tendency—call it Abstract Sandcastling—in which artists work directly with tidal time, granular matter, and architectural logic to produce sculptures that are at once diagram, monument, and performance.

From motif to medium

If nineteenth-century beach painting transformed light into subject, late twentieth-century practices refigured site itself as medium. Robert Smithson’s entropic aesthetics and “non-sites,” Arte Povera’s embrace of humble materials, and the dematerialization of the art object traced by Lucy Lippard prepared the ground for works that could be both present and inherently provisional. Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” provided a theoretical armature for such practices, situating sculpture amid the coordinates of landscape and architecture rather than as a lone object on a plinth. The seashore—a threshold of land and water, law and leisure, geology and weather—now reads like the expanded field’s most literal grid.

Sand, once the pictorial ground beneath sunbathers in Boudin, becomes the sculptural ground and the sculpting grain. This move is not only genealogically plausible; it is materially cogent. Sand’s angle of repose, capillary moisture, and thixotropic quirks impose a grammar of stacking, undercutting, and slicing—constraints that are less a limitation than a syntax for form.

A movement coalesces

The term Abstract Sandcastling names a set of converging practices rather than an official manifesto. On one flank are architectural sand works: compositions of planes, voids, cantilevers, and stepped masses that cite Brutalism and Metabolism while exploiting sand’s uncanny ability to hold a sharp edge for a brief, ecstatic interval. Artists such as Calvin Seibert have become touchstones here, translating the rhetoric of béton brut into littoral ephemera. On another flank are non-figurative and geometric constructions—macro-minimalist stacks, lattices, torqued prisms, and eroded grids—kin to the logic of Sol LeWitt’s sentences and the seriality of Eva Hesse, yet resolutely site-driven. Parallel lineages include the large-scale raked geometries of Jim Denevan and Andres Amador, which treat the foreshore as a drawing surface whose erasure is part of the work’s completion.

What binds these approaches is not a shared iconography but a common ontology: works conceived to be undone. The tide is not enemy but collaborator, an agent of editing and return. Here the Tibetan sand mandala is a crucial precedent—an image made for dispersal—though the Abstract Sandcastling intensifies the interplay between designed form and ambient force.

Theory at the waterline

Three theoretical lenses clarify the stakes.

1. The expanded field and the “littoral”

In Krauss’s terms, the beach is simultaneously landscape (horizontal extension) and architecture (constructed verticals), a zone where sculpture becomes relational to ground conditions rather than autonomous. Miwon Kwon’s account of site-specificity helps too: the site is not a neutral container but a constellation of social and environmental relations. The public beach—commons, tourist stage, climate front—renders those relations explicit.

2. Phenomenology and making

Merleau-Ponty’s embodied perception and Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space meet Tim Ingold’s notion of making as correspondence with materials. Sandcastle artists “think with the hands,” discovering forms in dialogue with moisture, grain size, wind. The result is a choreography of gestures: compact, slice, bevel, score. The work is as much action as object—a happening that leaves a temporary monument.

3. Entropy and the aesthetics of the Anthropocene

Smithson’s entropy is not mere decay but a principle of meaning. On a warming planet, the tide’s erasure reads newly: not tragic, not simply cyclical, but diagnostic. Abstract Sandcastling stages an aesthetics of accountability—beauty inseparable from loss, form inseparable from unforming. Wabi-sabi’s embrace of impermanence resonates here, reframed as coastal ethics rather than interior decor.

Architecture without concrete

One of the movement’s most generative tensions is its architectural imaginary without the material legacy of architecture’s carbon debt. Sand is geology at hand; water is the only binder. Forms recall the concision of Tadao Ando or the aggregates of Le Corbusier not to quote them but to test architecture’s grammar under radically temporary conditions. Voids are tuned like wind instruments; stairs become rhythms rather than circulation; towers are propositions, not shelters. The beach is a sandbox for urbanism’s dreams, allowed to fail safely and beautifully before the sea.

This also clarifies why the abstract is so potent here. Figuration promises narrative; abstraction promises systems—modular units, ratios, tessellations—which can be recombined or dissolved. The tide edits the system, offering a critique more honest than any jury.

Time, documentation, and the problem of collection

As with performance and land art, documentation is not an afterthought. Photographs, time-lapse films, drone topographies, and process scores operate as “afterlives,” sometimes as co-equal works. The precedent ranges from Smithson’s essay-films to Tino Sehgal’s paradox of non-documentation; Abstract Sandcastle artists sit between these poles, often issuing scores (“construct stepped volumes to the height of the breaker line; bevel until shadow merges with texture”) that invite re-performance elsewhere. Collections acquire the score, the right to execute, and a corpus of images, while institutions negotiate conservation through reiteration rather than preservation—closer to music than to masonry.

Public, playful, critical

Because the beach is a commons, the movement is necessarily porous. Children’s castles and expert works share the same horizon; beachgoers drift through the studio; critique arrives as an incoming swell. This porosity is not a dilution of art-world seriousness but a recalibration of publics in Jacques Rancière’s sense of the “distribution of the sensible.” The passerby becomes witness and sometimes collaborator; the demarcation between artwork and leisure narrows, echoing Fluxus and Kaprow’s Happenings while avoiding their interiority.

The best works exploit this condition by using legibility and illegibility in tandem: a fortress-plan that reads from the promenade dissolves up close into subtle chamfers; a pure abstract stack becomes, at child’s-eye level, a city of thresholds. The work must carry at three scales: from the pier (image), at the perimeter (architecture), in the hand (craft).

Toward a vocabulary

A succinct lexicon has emerged:

• Bevel: the elemental gesture; makes shadow a material.

• Stack: unitized massing that tests the angle of repose.

• Void: aperture cut to align with wind or horizon; architecture without interior.

• Score: procedural text enabling re-performance.

• Ebb-proofing: designing for dignified collapse; chamfers that soften failure.

Such terms matter because they allow criticism to speak materially, not metaphorically, about works that are both fragile and exacting.

Why now?

Abstract Sandcastles synthesize several urgencies:

• Ecological: they model low-carbon monumentality and honour nonhuman agency.

• Economic: they resist the saturation of object-commodities without renouncing craft or form.

• Technological: drones, phones, and social media give ephemeral works durable publics without requiring durable objects.

• Pedagogical: they teach composition, structure, and time—architecture and sculpture at one-to-one scale with nearly zero waste.

If Impressionism made the beach modern by turning it into a theatre of seeing, Abstract Sandcastling makes it contemporary by turning it into a theatre of making and unmaking.

Conclusion: the museum of the littoral

To encounter an Abstract Sandcastle at low tide is to stand before a proposal: that art might be rigorous without being permanent, architectural without building, public without enclosure. The next tide is the closing date; the horizon is the frame. When the water lifts away the last bevel, the work’s claim is not diminished but sealed. The beach, once merely pictured, now pictures itself—through the hands of artists who let form breathe with the sea.

Selected references

• Eugène Boudin’s beach scenes at Trouville; Claude Monet, La plage à Trouville (1870).

• J.M.W. Turner’s seascapes; James McNeill Whistler’s coastal nocturnes; Gustave Courbet’s La Vague.

• Rosalind E. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979).

• Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object… (1973).

• Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments” (1966); Spiral Jetty (1970).

• Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958).

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945).

• Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (2002).

• Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (2013).

• Wabi-sabi and Tibetan sand mandala practices as precedents in intentional ephemerality.

• Contemporary beach practitioners and influences: Calvin Seibert (architectonic sand forms), Jim Denevan and Andres Amador (large-scale sand drawings).