‘The Art of Fame’: From Oscar Wilde to Lady Gaga

‘Fame’ as an artwork. Is this even a thing? Well, no. Not technically. In the canonical framework of 20th century art-history, it’s never really been raised as a legitimate artistic strategy, though it’s definitely alluded to in a lot of the…

Daylight Savings is Great — If You’re a Communist

As I lay awake on Sunday morning, I pondered deep, existential questions. The most pressing of these being……..‘why am I awake?’ After scanning my place of slumber — registering the sour gummies wrappers, orphan socks and various other debris —…

From Doggerland to Dunwich, Suspended by the Sea

Earth, and man, and all their gods wax humble/Here, when Time brings pasture to the sea.

‘By the North Sea,’ A.C. Swinburne

On Spiritual Calories, and Feeling the Burn

You’ve probably never heard the name ‘Gurdjieff.’ And even if you have, I bet you know little beyond the fact that he was some sort of guru. Then I tell you that Gurdjieff was indeed a guru who, during the 1920s, proclaimed himself to be the authentic…

Don’t Copy Me I’m An Architect

On 15th November 2011, the United States Patent Office granted Apple a permanent patent for the design of their new store on the Upper West-side of New York. If anybody now mimics the structure, layout or material palette of that building they will be liable for prosecution…

Aesthetic Intoxication

“A contrary pancake surely, a fingerish atrocity but not without a queer charm all its own.”

The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien

Killing time in a bookshop a few weeks back, I found a copy of Walter Benjamin’s On Hashish. The book is an…

Materialising Ghosts: Leckey’s Archival Dreamwork

‘FIORUCCI MADE ME HARDCORE.’ (1999)

“An experienced event is finite — at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before and…

Paris Re-Remembered: On Writing Memory

My head’s been pinging back and forth, lately, between the same few things. In all of it, really, I’ve been thinking about memory: how it relates to the act of recording in written language, what the effects of that recording might be, and what this all means…