Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World

(The National Portrait Gallery, 21 December 2025)

Beaton's failing as a fashion photographer lies in succeeding as a fashion photographer. People like to connect with other people, and fashion can serve as a catalyst. The subject of the photograph is always the connection, never the fashion itself. There is precious little of human connection in Beaton's photography. Beaton was an aesthete, not a humanist.

Fashion photography as a genre is generally rather good not (only) because its subject matter is beautiful but also because it is answerable to the objective metric of market success.

Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary

(The Photographers’ Gallery, 20 December 2025)

One becomes a photographer because one does not find what one is looking for in others’ photography. For this to be true, one’s tastes must be rather niche. With niche tastes, one is unlikely to create that which many others would find pleasing. As a result, most photography is bad. 

“No politics, no whining” is not an uncommon refrain on bulletin boards. The photographs from Mikhailov's exhibition would not have belonged on this board.

Edvard Munch Portraits

(The National Portrait Gallery, 15 March 2025)

Pre-1908 Munch saw himself in the men and the women he painted. Post-1908 Munch saw the men and the women he painted in the men and the women he painted.

The Face Magazine: Culture Shift

 (The National Portrait Gallery, 15 March 2025)

Little is known about what happened in the 1980s, except that it was necessary in order to enable the 1990s. The 1990s were when modern fashion photography was born, in The Face magazine. With the ascent of Anna Wintour at Vogue and the retention of Peter Lindbergh, the establishment's takeover of the revolutionary had been complete. The raison d'être for The Face vanished.

Zona Maco 2025

 (Centro Citibanamex, 8 February 2025)

It is truly inspirational how much atrocious art there is---this year especially. Whatever one does, one is bound to be in the top ten per cent---at least as long as one brands oneself an artist rather than an artisan.

A commodity is something that each of a hundred people are willing to pay ten dollars for. A piece of art is something that one in a hundred is willing to pay a thousand dollars for. To succeed, an artist must invest in searching for that one dream customer. This investment subtracts time and resources from the artistic endeavour and breeds charlatan mediators.

The winner of this fine-art fair is AI. Guided by Antonio Uvalle, AI seems to remember better than humans do what it is that humans crave: humanity. Well, maybe next year.

Then Chuchito Valdés walked in, sat at the piano, and showed that humans still do humans better than AI does.

World Press Photo 2024

(Museo Franz Mayer, 10 August 2024)

A good photographer seeks beauty. A war photographer is no exception. That is why many a war photographer (e.g., the Turnley twins) has settled in Paris to photograph beautiful people and things (see also Greg Williams).

The war photographs at the World Press Photo exhibition are ugly and staged. When everyone has a camera and an X account, most photojournalists are redundant. They are rarely in the right place at the right time. The smartphone-brandishing crowd always is. Or that is the impression the exhibition conveys.

To make a living, a photojournalist must differentiate his product from that of the crowd and must search for a paying audience beyond X. Exhibition juries are one such audience, hungry for photographs that would indulge their political agenda du jour. The same goes for journalism. It is harder to make a living as a competent reporter than a partisan columnist. Or that is the impression the press conveys.

Damien Hirst Vivir Para Siempre Por Un Momento

(Museo Jumex, 18 August 2024)

Damien Hirst's is a study of beauty. Beauty is that which facilitates survival. Is a medicine cabinet beautiful because it helps one survive? Is a shark ugly because it is a threat to life? What if it is sliced into two parts? Is beauty skin-deep? Is tobacco ugly because it kills? Do butterflies remain beautiful once dead?

Hirst's work is appreciated. People come see it. They find it beautiful. Beauty must be deeper than skin-deep.

Whitney Biennial 2024

(Whitney Museum of American Art, 3 May 2024)

This exhibition is the best argument against socialism---or at least the version of socialism in which merit is apportioned by a committee of opportunists rather than by markets.

A generous interpretation of curators' intentions is to engage in small acts of insider trading: pluck an unremarkable artist out of obscurity, buy some of his work, exhibit the rest, and watch the artist's oeuvre appreciate. There is no law against that.

The best thing about the exhibition is the view from a window, any window, especially if not obstructed by "art."

A less generous interpretation of curators' intentions is that, having lost the public, they are scared and groom politicians for attention. Museums are no longer gatekeepers or trend-setters. Museums are largely irrelevant. Art is everywhere. One can go to galleries, one can go online, one can walk the streets, and one can stop by a Tesla showroom. It appears that, in order to spite the social media, which traffics in beauty so well, Whitney has turned to ugliness, which, presumably, sells to politicians, who have been preferring their messaging dark, as of late. Pandering to politicians is a dangerous game in a democracy, where prevailing politics are liable to change. Whitney's confidence in doubling down on the ugly may be a bad omen.

Will the cult of ugliness persist? Ugliness lacks universality. It excludes by design. In a society that is free, it will not survive.

Another ungenerous interpretation of curators' intentions is that they sought their offerings to be "diverse" as in "preserving irrelevant path dependence." By definition, irrelevant past is preserved when skill is lacking. The mathematics of a skilful mathematician does not sport the Southern drawl or clipped vowels. It is just mathematics. To seek out the scars of the past is to reward mediocrity. To sprinkle them with salt and serve them to the know-all elites is cruel to the mediocre.

David Lynch Lithography

(Cut Art Gallery, 15 July 2023)

Pundits and essayists profess to be threatened by AI's superior intelligence. What is really threatening, though, is rationality: intelligence consistently applied in pursuit of a well-defined goal. Cities and polities are more complex than people, and yet many people are brave enough to belong to a polity and live in a city. This is because cities and polities are not rational. They are kludgy and inconsistent. They are slow to adapt and slow to exploit and, therefore, are less threatening. People are quick enough to run away from a rotting city or a corrupt political regime. Not so with the the imminent AI overlords. And hence, "I find it very difficult to understand what is going on these days" (a title of a lithograph from the exhibition).

Suicidal fantasies is the coping mechanisms of choice for some of those who are faced with the anxiety owing to the impending singularity. Perhaps, there is comfort in imagining the worst case and in doing the imagining in company. There is the illusion of control in planning to bring this worst case upon oneself instead of just sitting there and waiting for something to happen, even if that something would not be quite as bad. "Alice thinks about suicide." The masses dream of degrowth.

Those who don't, seek comfort in the deliberate sensation of staying alive, in spite of the odds. They insist on existing, on constantly pushing through the resistive medium, with one's body ("Man in the rain," "Woman rising"), with one's mind ("Woman obscured by cloud," "Woman w/ abstraction"). They create.

To be creative is to have an interesting conversation among multiple people inside one's head. One may be quite disturbed by the cacophony of the voices inside one's head and seek to silence all but at most one of them. "I fix my head." One should resist this temptation. One does not want to kill the conversation.

Creative work can be fully understood only in relation to the bodies of other people. "Two figures dance by a tree with a ladder."

EXPO Chicago

 (15 April 2023, The Navy Pier)

Like so very much does in this urban agglomeration, this exhibition, too, had the air of a money-laundering operation. One usually comes to an art fair to see, be seen, and to transcend the quotidian through communion with beauty. EXPO Chicago had the ambience of a car show, but without the cars. Some pretty pictures showed. But who was listening?

Surrealism Beyond Borders

(Tate Modern, 25 April 2022)

Surrealism is the (mostly) visual expression of freedom of thought. Surrealism as a political movement asserts that everyone is entitled to this freedom. There is no requirement to be good at being free in order to have the right to be free.

War is inimical to freedom. It is therefore natural that surrealism would flourish at the run-up to, during, and in the aftermath of wars.

A society comprised of rational individuals—those who know what they want, want consistently, and choose accordingly—has little use for freedom. Such a society would be quite happy with a totalitarian system in which the government would give everyone what he would have chosen for himself anyway. Because a totalitarian regime cannot predict how an irrational person would choose, however, the totalitarian regime would necessarily constrain the irrational. The commitment to accommodate the irrational is what gives surrealism its distinctive look.

ZONAMACO

 (Centro Citibanamex, 12 February 2022)

This annual celebration of pretty things is, once again, a success, thanks, once again, to the absence of a curator with an agenda other than to sell tickets and to sell art. 

Big city north of the border galleries stand out as being out of touch, perhaps for two reasons. The first might be that the denizens of these cities do not get around much any more, with New Yorkers at best peddling works in what outsiders would recognise---a New Yorker artist might hope---as the coveted "New York genre." London appears to have been spared this fate of irrelevance.

The second reason for the failure of big northern cities might be their past success. Young people want to create art. But you can't create competitive art while the old people are so objectively good. You can starve and learn until you are 40 and objectively good, or you can bend the reality, and declare bad art good. It seems like the northern cities are in the stage of flirting with the idea that bad art is good. It won't work.

Beautiful things attract beautiful people. Beautiful things make beautiful people. ZONAMACO's attraction is watching people as much as watching art. ZONAMACO is a microcosm of what makes a city tick.

Kumu Art Museum

(23 July 2019)

Perestroika art is a revolt against political establishment, not art establishment. Revolts against art establishment strive to seduce the audience away from the canon. Revolts against the system strive to offend the elites and are often ugly; the audience is the collateral damage.

Rick Owens’s dresses, without imitating Alexander McQueen, borrow his ideal: freedom as the ultimate value. The freedom to entertain and express an idea is also the freedom from being identified with this idea. A dress is a vehicle for an idea.

To a greater extent without than within the museum, Tallinn is strangely subservient to its Soviet past. Are the displays of souvenir busts of former leaders of a purportedly oppressive regime the best way the town can appeal to tourists? Has not the town built a new identity? (The country has, so why not the town?) Perhaps, Tallinn attracts the Northerners who seek the thrill of the past that they themselves have narrowly escaped, instead of attracting those who would value the town for its defiance towards that past. The new identity is also probably slow to percolate into the Old Town due to its peripheral location.

Le Modèle Noir de Géricault à Matisse

(Musee d’Orsay, 12 July 2019)

Focus on the future. Do not waste the time rewriting the past (and, perhaps, the future generations will be less ruthless in overwriting you).

The blacks used to be exotic to the Western eye. Soon it will be Europeans' turn to look quaint and exotic in the eyes of the newly rising civilisations. Perhaps, they already do, at Lapin Agile; not yet in London.

Catastrophes, such as wars, take people outside their comfort zone, shake up social hierarchies, spur creativity, bolster solidarity, which helps cooperate. A kinder, more humane catastrophe is capitalism with a healthy measure of democratic folly every now and then.

"Autofagia" by Arturo Rivera

(El Claustro de Sor Juana, 17 November 2018)

Rivera cures pain by conjuring up beauty, which he distills from pain itself and from freedom.

ZONAMACO

(Hipódromo de las Américas, 10 February 2018)

The exhibition is a city. No individual exhibitor excels. Yet, taken together, the galleries, their visitors, and keepers comprise a metropolis that is greater than the sum of its parts. The galleries are not captive to any single curator’s madness. Instead, it is Starbucks coffee and the customer plastic that run through the galleries’ veins and force them to remain relevant.

Art is a job done well.

The Philadelphia Academy of Arts

(5 January 2018)

Loneliness wakens existence. To survive, one must learn to manufacture one’s own oxygen, in order to justify existence, each time from the first principles.

The Philadelphia downtown is nobly dead. It is a city in exile. The people in the streets do not seem to want to be there, at least not in that frigid weather, a reminder that nature wants you dead, or at least is indifferent about your existence.

A city in exile gives you the gift of time. One may find its indifference excruciating. Or one may reflect and create. Time does not ask to conform or compete. It encourages discovery and experimentation.

BP Portrait Award 2017

(The National Portrait Gallery, 2 and 3 July 2017)

Some are thrust into reality. Few are comfortable in it. The substitute is nigh. In the meantime, the exhibition honours those who bother with the expensive business of traditional existence by painting them and welcoming them in the heart of London, still a centre of modern civilisation. Not all succeed at existing, for not all succeed at connecting. "Carmel," "Carmen," "The Levinsons," and "Society" do. Some connect to seek in-group approval, out-group approval, the viewer approval, or self-approval. Each crafts his own narrative and style in order to be unique and, thus, not directly comparable to anyone else. Some incite the viewer to assert a narrative, as "Carmel" does.

There is something to be said for a random allotment of awards, which lately seems to have been the case with BP portrait awards. If one accepts progressive taxation, why not "tax" a better painter more by refusing him recognition? However, while progressive taxation does not flip the after-tax income ranking, BP awards may flip the post-award recognition. Two considerations may make such flipping palatable. First, before the award has been made, a better candidate may face a slightly higher probability of winning, so expected recognition will be aligned with merit. Second, even after the prize has been awarded to an arbitrary candidate, the authors of better work will gain greater recognition from the public, journalists, and gallery owners. The committee's choice of winners is a better indicator of the prevailing politics than of artistic merit.

As population grows mobile, and alternative forms of existence flourish, Living in London, NYC, Paris, San Francisco, and Los Angeles proper will become a form of traditional existence that only the best of the best will be able to afford and for ever shorter amounts of time.

Andy Warhol. Dark Star

(Museo Jumex, 10 June 2017)

The comfort of the abundance of commodities is the service that well-functioning economies provide. This service is not limited to the provision of physical goods. The public utilities in charge of news and entertainment, too, deal in commodities. One can pick a celebrity, pick an angle from which one would like to see this celebrity presented, and then consume the desired product in an unlimited quantity. This consumption nourishes but does not graduate to a relationship.

One may additionally seek relationships in order to become a part of a narrative and to learn to turn from a consumer into a producer, thereby opening oneself to new sources of joy.

BP Portrait Award 2016

(The National Portrait Gallery, 25 June 2016)

People prefer to see the world in terms of the units they have evolved to understand best: other people. Thus, the primitive people identified the forces of nature with the wills of anthropomorphic gods. Later, somewhat less primitive people conferred human characteristics on ethnicities and nation states and then dedicated their lives to serving the super-human narrative. Today, methodological individualism---the belief that the best way to understand how individuals act as a group is to understand how individuals act individually---is the methodology of choice in the (better) social sciences. (The rather compelling selfish-gene alternative is acknowledged.)

The captivation with the individual is the theme of the Exhibition. The most interesting subject is the one caught in the mid-narrative of his own life or about to disrupt the viewer's life (typical for a portrait), preferably a future life (e.g., Joshua LaRock's Laura In Black or Fiona Graham-Mackay's Sir Andrew Motion) but possibly a past one (Martin Yeoman's Laurie Weedon's D-Day Glider Pilot or Laura Guoke's Petras), or in the mid of a social narrative (typical for candid photography). Intelligence (conveyed by the tentative, sceptical look) and beauty (in the gene of the beholder and conveyed by the countenance of one's beautiful wife, ugly wife, a child, or oneself) evoke the presumption of a narrative.

The London art scene is a single conversation whose goal is to understand the world a little better and nudge it a little forward.