This year’s BSC includes a ‘consultation lounge’ with a working plastic surgeon, a wellness studio running a full timetable of Pilates and boxing classes and a spray-tan area that does walk-ins until eight. At one of the accompanying normal bars, I overheard a circular conversation between two German women about whether this was ironic or not. In any case, it’s all the same spectacle of art fair wealth that is rather boring to read about unless you are there. At a time when being an artist is more financially difficult than ever before, paying money to be part of a large, potentially ‘ironic’ project like this is almost a bit perverse.

So is there any fringe to Basel? The official map to the unofficial is ε SUMME, which has been presenting a city’s worth of ‘off-spaces’ since it was launched by Basel-native artist-curator-collective Dr. Kuckucks Labrador in 2015. But this year, there was plenty to see off grid too.

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Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven at Cavalli Basel, Greifengasse 3

Cavalli Basel was founded in 2024 – the current iteration is in a fourth-floor apartment with a view of the Rhine. Musical performance is a theme in Cavalli’s programming: over the last year they have arranged performances from LA Timpa and Rita P, and this preview week they invited London-based band Mitsubishi Suicide to play in the Liste foyer performance space, in what might have been the post-post hardcore band’s highest-median-age crowd yet.

In the apartment, Comfortt turlurons Nostalgie comprises collages by Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (AKA. AMVK). The artist was born in Antwerp, Belgium, and worked with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Brussels, the first lab for the study of artificial intelligence in Europe. Twenty-Twenty One Spiritual (2026) is a wall-dominating cut-up UV print on Skai, a woman in three different poses, layered with cut outs: black-bars of newsprint trad-censorship and beautiful computer gradients of crimson. The coy expression of the subject and her ink-black hair are framed by a digital reverb that resembles the editing process of Photoshop.

Chapitrie (2014) uses butterfly-shaped cut-outs of nailed-on thin plastic sheets, to direct the gaze not to the fishnet-clad buttocks of the bent-over fashion model it depicts but the confluence of her knees, wrists and the unidentifiable piece of plastic she clutches. The theme is not of music per-se, but of the feminist act of nightclub and gig-going: the networked, penetrated and cut up urban body.

Hollywood Superstar Review and Galerie Tenko at Daisy Chain Space, Messe Basel Car Park, Floor 5

Hollywood Superstar Review and Galerie Tenko presented works by Magnus Peterson Horner and clothes by LA Apparel at ‘You Wouldn’t Steal A Car’, listed under Daisy Chain Space (a Basel-based project space run by Gina Folly and Sven Gex) on the ε SUMME map. On floor 5 of the Messe Basel Car Park, it was a halfway escape from the nearby fairs, and just so happened to both conceptually and physically interrupt their flow of moneyed visitors: every five minutes someone quite chic was nearly hit by a car.

Parked on the other side of the curb to the entrance of the paintings space was a grey VW Passat Estate from which Hollywood Superstar Review (HSR), the London-based pseudonymous art magazine, flogged LA Apparel slogan t-shirts and booty shorts with the *real* phone numbers of curators and editors on the backside. At $40 each, the merchandise flew away, which could be accused of being a lipstick theory recession indicator, but I’d say was mostly because the clothes looked really good – better than the Ottolinger x Kunsthalle Basel collab that was less successfully being sold in the museum’s lobby.

Peterson Horner’s work was shown previously by Tenko in a one-night-only exhibition in an NYC hotel room last month. Boy (2026), got a lot of attention for its menacing Walter Sickert-ness and its horrid materials: oil and paint on McDonald’s cheese, framed. If we are talking off-piste shows: Tenko’s curation is where it is at. The anonymous editors of HSR had hired a beautiful model to approach people with a clipboard and do something I did not see done elsewhere: demand an immediate reaction to the work on show. She held up a pink piece of paper with a questionnaire, designed after John Waters’ 2006 work Art Market Research (Tenko had displayed Waters’ work Paris last October). What words would you use to describe this to a collector? read the form. How much money do you have? (CHECK ONE: loads, a bit, fuck all).

Chess Club and CHB Fine Arts, drawing show, Davidsbodenstrasse 58

A 30 minute journey on public transport from Basel’s centre was Hamburg-based project space Chess Club. Inside was a small table of cool and small drawings, like Karolin Braegger’s pencil sketches of anxious girls, alternately leading and being led by simple primary shapes.

In a small cubicle backroom was a presentation by CHB Fine Arts, a mysterious and excellent Berlin-based curatorial practice formed in 2024. The space was made for two bodies, or even just two cats. Animals and avatars anchored CHB: Elisa Barrera’s blue cat diptych Gattino I grounded the space, connecting to the softest representation of a robot I have ever seen: Simon Glaser’s Ohne Titel (2026).

In all these places, comfort came easier: everybody had gravel on their butt from sitting on the ground or wet feet from a paddling pool. And there were no requirements for body alterations as some comment on commercial longevity/sociality. As for the question: why Basel? The question remains. Maybe the Reena Spaulings no-show is a canary in the coalmine; I did overhear that it’s all about Paris now.

Emily Morley is a writer and editor. She has written for Ocula and once submitted to Hollywood Superstar Review but never heard anything back.

Side Eye explores the alt scenes shaping the artworld, surfacing the weirdly specific but widely consequential dynamics that quietly determine what art is worth, and why.

The Art Journal is a new, independent art market publication published by Meta Media Group.

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‘Way of the Future’ is perhaps the apotheosis of techno-faith – the sanctification of technology as quasi-religion – but it is far from the only example. For The MIT Press Reader, Greg Epstein spoke to a Mormon Transhumanist with a health supplement business. Earlier this year, autonomous AI agents on the Moltbook network (‘Reddit for AI’) spontaneously developed their own pseudo-religion: a lobster-themed faith named ‘Crustafarianism’. Roko’s Basilisk, the infamous thought experiment, warned of a future AI superintelligence that would retroactively punish early skeptics of the technology. The topic was eventually banned on internet forums for causing ‘real psychological damage’. The list could go on.

The establishment of Zero 10, a new platform for ‘art of the digital era’ at Art Basel, formally recognises practices that deal with the cyborgification of the present. A concurrent series of institutional exhibitions also marks global interest in the intersection of technology and faith. In May, an expansive show titled Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age opened at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. At Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Pixel Pioneers includes an internet-era tarot deck (Suzanne Treister’s HEXEN 2.0, 2009-2011). At the Haus der Elektronischen Künste in Basel, coinciding with the city’s annual art fair, an exhibition named New Rituals [for the End of the World] looks at the intersection of technology and spirituality through the concept of ‘ritual’.

The worship of Artificial Intelligence might ostensibly seem outlandish, but upon closer inspection it can be understood as a natural (albeit bleak) step in a species unequipped to cope with fragmentation, fatalism and impending catastrophe without some external divinity to provide existential comfort. Epstein writes: ‘Our computing culture has become so ubiquitous and insular, so devoted and devotional, that it repeatedly recycles the tropes of traditional religions.’

In 2023, I encountered the artist Nina Davies’s video work, Stepping Into Machine (2022), as part of the annual New Contemporaries show at Camden Art Centre. The film tracked a dystopian theocracy dictated by the doctrines of techno-faith, exalted through a fragmented take on TikTok choreography – ‘the bionic step’ – a futurist vision of the 16^th century European dancing plague, or the Pied Piper.

‘Your kids, in the events they go to, may not identify with techno-faith communities,’ the voiceover says. ‘But the dance is sort of an ode, if you will, to the moment where people were trying to find an explanation for society’s hardships and suffering… We’re still experiencing mass unemployment due to cognitive service automation, and in most cities it’s unclear where those needed jobs will be coming from.’

Davies’s work appears in Phantasmagoria alongside a cast of (similarly young) artists. The exhibition, like that of HEK, sits at the intersection of ancient narrative and modern technology, tracking myth through machinery. In Basel, Zach Blas asks visitors to donate virtual tears to an AI-deity (in 576 Tears, 2022); a disturbing echo of Silicon Valley’s exaltation of the technology. Teresa Fernández-Pello presents a neo-altarpiece based on the floorplan of a cathedral (The Heart of the Hurt, 2023), built from dismantled iPhone screens displaying personal data in an ode to the digitally constructed self.

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These exhibitions generally posit faith as a generative framework through which to navigate internet black holes and the impenetrability of code for the layperson. In 2024, KW in Berlin staged a show titled Poetics of Encryption (Art and Artificial Intelligence), curated by Nadim Samman. The name was taken from Samman’s book, described as ‘toggling between enlightened concern and occult dreaming’ in its explorations of the hidden dimensions of technology. Samman sees the artist as a translator of superabundant digital information, and the artwork a medium for a centring of the human in technology.

This entanglement has not been without its blind spots. The most glaring omission in Poetics of Encryption – a show based on the opacities of the present – was that of Morehshin Allahyari and American Artist, who had withdrawn due to the exhibition’s state funding from the German government, complicit in the genocide in Gaza. While artists like Martine Syms and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley counteract the still-prevalent influence of bad boy cyberpunk, techno-faith is haunted by a brand of Thiel-esque technolibertarianism. And though Zero10 marks digital art’s shifts from the margins of the art market, it also raises questions regarding the extent to which assimilation strips work of its critical edge.

The solution, then, might be to ground the intangible concerns of technology in human issues, such as labour, exploitation, representation and ecology. Art can be useful in decoupling technology from abstract psychosocial anxieties and false notions of progress. In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud writes: ‘Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.’ Art is sitting with the trouble. It is important that, in the artworld’s increasing acceptance of digital spirituality, it does not detach itself from the very real issues underlying it.

ella slater is the Assistant Editor of The Art Journal.

Side Eye explores the alt scenes shaping the artworld, surfacing the weirdly specific but widely consequential dynamics that quietly determine what art is worth, and why.

The Art Journal is a new, independent art market publication published by Meta Media Group.

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A new interdisciplinary exhibition at non-profit art foundation The Warehouse in Dallas, titled Chase a Crooked Shadow: Film Noir as Contemporary Mirror and curated by Alexandra Terry, delves into this idea of film noir as an enduring worldview; speaking as much to our contemporary paranoia as the post-war disillusionment of its origins. I visited during the week of the Dallas Art Fair and The Dallas Invitational, where recent economic anxieties seem not to have reached attendees, tsk-tsking recent political headlines before moving on to more comfortable conversation.

Historically, film noir is known for its combination of realism, gritty cynicism and the influence of German expressionism and, more latterly, French new wave cinema, avant-garde movements which – though developed the Atlantic Ocean apart – were also seeped in the raw energy of urban alienation and sociopolitical upheaval. Film noir’s visual aesthetic, however, is singularly recognisable. When it first emerged in the 1940s and 50s through films such as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946), it perfectly epitomised the atmosphere of a country reeling from the Great Depression.

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Chase a Crooked Shadow: Film Noir as Contemporary Mirror feels itself like a film set: The Warehouse is a sprawling space that constantly refers back to its own existence. Walls don’t go all the way to the ceiling, where skylights and industrial beams are on full display. In one room, a dummy partition makes way for the fake closet of Diamond Stingily (Orgasms Happened Here [Chicago]), filled with an ominous collection of baseball bats. Right away, the space indicates that violence might be lurking around the corner, or at the least, in a wardrobe.

The show is an interdisciplinary meeting of art and film, and is organised into thematic groupings that navigate the underpinnings, feelings, and metaphors of film noir. They are filmic tropes: the detective and antihero; the often fatal shifting of power dynamics; crimes and crime scenes; the femme fatale; violence and the abject body; and psychological states shaped by duplicity, ambiguity, obsession and entrapment. Giuseppe Boccassini’s ragtag (2022), for example, is composed of constantly shifting and morphing archival clips from film noirs, shifting back and forth between longing and anxiety. In an unsettling prescient whisper of the TikTok reel, strobing images from film noirs shift and morph, leading to a visceral sense of anxiety. The medium is the film noir message: creating a somatic experience that mimics the film’s formal devices.

In Paul Schrader’s seminal 1972 text Notes on Film Noir, he resists calling it a genre. Instead, film noir is a combination of qualities and moods. “What is perhaps the over-riding noir theme: a passion for the past and present, but also a fear of the future. The noir hero dreads to look ahead, but instead tries to survive by the day, and if unsuccessful at that, he retreats to the past,” he writes. “Thus, film noir’s techniques emphasise loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurity; then submerge these self-doubts in mannerism and style.” This refusal to look towards the future creates a dynamic where the audience is kept in perpetual suspense, as in Christian Marclay’s Telephones (1995), a movie montage of subjects picking up the phone in a collage of emotion: from anxiety and anger to desire and trepidation.

The show’s didactic text ends on a few questions: “Across these galleries, contemporary artworks echo film noir’s concerns-not by imitation, but by reactivating its questions. How do we navigate systems we cannot control? Where do ethics fracture under pressure? And what does it mean to live with clarity when the world itself is fundamentally unstable?”

Here are my answers:

How do we navigate systems we cannot control? Mostly, passively. Just as I was shepherded from room to room in the gallery like cattle, the structures of systems move us where we want to go. The docent told me very kindly to step away from the Marlene Dumas painting, and I did. Film noir offers a novel suggestion: push back.

Where do ethics fracture under pressure? Very easily! Upon my return to Canada, I was met with constant accusations on why I would travel to, not only the US, but the Republican state of Texas! To this, I had no answer except a weak proclamation that I love Texas. (It’s complicated. I keep wanting to ask in reply: have you ever been?)

And what does it mean to live with clarity when the world itself is fundamentally unstable? Just as film noir teaches us, we must live with our eyes open. Look out your window, be a bit suspicious of authority, take a second and third glance. Good art teaches us something similar.

Back to Dallas, where the grungy essence of film noir is in spades, just better lit – by the proceeds of the booming oil business, propped up by war in Iran. I meet countless Texan women who remind me of the femme fatale: assertive and beautiful, saying exactly what they meant and not a word more. For most of my time in Texas, I float comfortably in the echo chamber of the art world. Yet the shadowy concerns of film noir – as they have always done – lurk beneath the bright facade of fair booths and champagne toasts.

is a Toronto-based writer and founder of Art Forecast. Art Forecast is a weekly newsletter and PR agency that situates artists and galleries in a global conversation.

Side Eye explores the alt scenes shaping the artworld, surfacing the weirdly specific but widely consequential dynamics that quietly determine what art is worth, and why.

The Art Journal is a new, independent art market publication published by Meta Media Group.

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A series of recent exhibitions point to a time where astrology was an established tool for the structuring of society, used for navigation or to track agricultural cycles. Reading the Sky: Beneath the Stars of the Mediterranean closed at Marseille’s MUCEM in January. The exhibition explored historical traditions of surveying the sky as a means to organise life on earth. Shortly afterwards, Destiny in the Stars: The Beginnings of the Zodiac opened in March at the Neues Museum in Berlin, tracing the history and significance of the zodiac from Babylonia to Egypt and the Greco-Roman world. Last year, on the summer solstice, the Hamburg planetarium launched From the Cosmos to the Commons, displaying art historian Aby Warburg’s long lost Image Collection on the History of Astrology and Astronomy alongside contemporary artworks reflecting on the intersection of planetary and social orders. Earlier, Rising Signs: The Medieval Practice of Astrology wrapped up at the Getty Museum in LA. The shows’ widely historical approaches draw a parallel with current interests in astrology, making the case that – though now relegated to the realm of woo-woo and esoterica – the practice remains appealing to modern crowds.

That astrology has reemerged as a contemporary trend is old news. Co-Star, the social horoscope app, launched in 2017 and boasted 30 million registered users in 2023 (of which a reported 800,000 were active monthly). The app is one of many products to form the still-growing multibillion dollar astrology industry that also offers the likes of astrologically-personalised meditation or dating services. ‘For today’s young astrologists, there’s no contradiction between using astrology and participating in late capitalism’ says a smiling saleswoman for a fictional astrologically-minded property rental app imagined by the artist Alice Bucknell in her 2020 video essay Align Properties. The marketable version of astrology (and associated occult practices) has less to do with socio-environmental cohesion, it seems, than with the individualistic trappings of wellness culture.

Astrology has been harnessed by the artworld in various ways over the last decade. Alice Sparkly Kat’s Postcolonial Astrology (North Atlantic Books, 2021) considers astrology as a lens through which to view neoliberal and neocolonial powers, Stephen Ellcock’s Cosmic Dance (Thames & Hudson, 2022) presents a collection of works throughout history dealing with earthly embodiments of the cosmos and Gaëlle Choisne’s 2024 symbolism-filled Prix Marcel Duchamp exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris was titled The Age of Aquarius. I was offered more than one unprompted Tarot read at artworld events last year, and have even heard stories of a commercial gallery asking applicants their star sign at job interviews.

As these things go, contemporary interest also serves as a new prism for the ‘rediscovery’ of historical artists who haven’t yet been given their proper due. Perhaps most prominent among them, the surrealist Leonora Carrington and the spiritualist Hilma af Klint – both of whose works are teeming with references to cosmic energies – received various major exhibitions and saw their market value significantly increase in recent years. While Carrington multiplied her previous auction record by more than eight in 2024, coinciding with the centenary of Surrealism and earning her the mouthful of a title of ‘most financially valuable British-born woman artist’, Klint’s pieces have become equally desirable despite being rarely up for sale: the Hilma af Klint Foundation, managed by the late artist’s family, has been publicly feuding with David Zwirner gallery over the commercialisation of Klint’s legacy. The Foundation seeks to preserve her works for authentic ‘spiritual seekers’.

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The tension between the highly personal nature of spirituality and the impersonality of the value-driven commercial art market make for unlikely partners. I speak about this with Catherine Wilding, founder of the London-based arts consultancy Colbert & Company and of the astrology advisory firm & Astrology. The two businesses are completely separate, she tells me on the phone, but the fields naturally overlap: it’s about sensing energies, frequencies and resonance – and about good relationship skills. Though she doesn’t use astrology for straightforward financial forecasting, she says she can predict periods of change or high volatility, and would give advice in consequence (we’re in one of those periods of high fluctuation right now, so advice to readers: hold off on big decisions for a bit). Despite astrology’s popularity and the existing field of financial astrology (that bases market forecasts on planetary cycles), finding art consultants who advertise themselves as astrologers, financial or otherwise, is uncommon. Catherine doesn’t generally tell her art network that she’s also an astrologer, but when she does, they tend to be receptive.

Explanations for the return of astrology into the mainstream from the mid 2010s onwards broadly point to a combined loss of faith in traditional religious beliefs and political systems. In search of meaning, people turn to other existing organisational systems, and astrology, which has been around for thousands of years, is plug and play. Amid exceptional violence, abuses of power and erosion of truth, there is something calming in the idea that your so-called individuality is cosmically determined rather than algorithmically engineered. This isn’t the first instance of astrology cropping up during troubled times. In 1947, in his ‘Theses Against Occultism’, Theodor Adorno had some more choice words on the matter. Comparing occultism to fascism, the Frankfurt school philosopher saw the ‘woeful idiocy’ of astrology as a displacement, and therefore abstraction, of real fears and a blind submission to irrational systems.

Yet in contrast with the blind individualism of pop astrology, many artists see the practice as a proactive method to work against hegemonic systems. In 1974, forefather of social sculpture Joseph Beuys created the diagrammatic blackboard drawing Untitled (Sun State) that mapped out his ideal society as a metaphorical astrological chart. Half a century later, Ei Arakawa-Nash, the current Venice Biennale Japanese pavilion artist, turned to a professional astrologer to develop a work connecting individual acts of care to broader social forces (Grass Babies, Moon Babies, 2026). Earlier in the current hype cycle, in 2017, the artist David Hammons curated a small show at MoMA based on the artistic and astrological connections between his former mentor, the Black activist artist Charles White, and the canonical Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci (both Aries). On view in the exhibition alongside the artists’ works were each of their birth charts, commissioned by Hammons from the Vedic astrologer Chakrapani Ullal. In the audioguide, Ullal explained that according to the charts, White ‘made friends very easily’ and da Vinci ‘had many friends’ too, using astrology as a vector for identity to help bypass traditional discriminatory art historical hierarchies.

Speaking to astrologist Monisha Holmes in 2020 about their work imagining new constellations around the iconography of Black liberation (Black Liberation Zodiac [2017–]), Nolan Oswald Dennis stated that they weren’t ‘interested in giving people a specific message, but in exploring what happens when you try to read familiar symbols in a different context.’ Now, Oswald Dennis will have the chance to do just that, as one of four artist-researchers behind the Van Abbemuseum’s Collection as Cosmos opening next week: a reorganisation of some 250 works from the museum’s collection that ‘embraces non-linear temporalities, favouring constellations of meaning over chronology’. If in this case it revolves around astrology, the language sounds familiar – that of the deconstructive frameworks applied to exhibitions since the 1980s. In current manifestations, astrology is offered up as one of the alternative worldviews to help knock down perceptually monolithic systems. Also available are the cosmologies of various indigenous communities or quantum physics. That all these complex concepts get distilled into the same flattened out phrases is suspicious, but that is the double edged nature of the art world: both offering subversive ideas and packaging them for consumption. Thinking that I’m on to something, I ask Catherine Wilding if it’s fair to say that the art world is a Gemini. “It’s quite Neptunian”, she says. “More Pisces”.

Mia Stern is editorial assistant at ArtReview. Her writing has also appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and Right Click Save.

Side Eye explores the alt scenes shaping the artworld, surfacing the weirdly specific but widely consequential dynamics that quietly determine what art is worth, and why.

The Art Journal is a new, independent art market publication published by Meta Media Group.

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Satiation of desire is a service that the art world, like the television industry, has always catered to – today, this is provided through the return of 20th-century fetish illustration to the contemporary market. What was once the underground existence of fetish art has transformed into a contemporary aesthetic category, and in recent years, a spring of commercial exhibitions, fair booths and museum shows has signalled the re-emergence, or re-appraisal, of 20th-century fetish art as a unique market genre.

Examples include Sabina Van Der Liden’s erotic sketches at Josey Gallery, Sadie Coles’s Hardcore exhibition, and Cosey Fanni Tutti at Maxwell Graham Gallery. Institutionally, Christina Ramberg recently had a retrospective at the Hammer Museum, and last year the Kunstverein in Hamburg hosted a show called Origins of the 21st Century or the Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography.

Earlier this year David Zwirner hosted a retrospective of Robert Crumb. “I want everybody to love me, especially the women,” he had previously reflected to ARTNews. “Instead, I have alienated most of them with my vulgar, gross drawings.” Crumb’s subject matter has been the perpetual subject of criticism as sexist, racist, or anti-Semitic (the list goes on), yet this recent show saw a packed opening.

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Both Crumb and the Japanese master Namio Harakawa (1947–2020) contributed to the solidification of fetish throughout the 20th century through their explorations of Macrophilia. While Crumb was not simply a fetishist, his love for Amazonian women preoccupied him heavily. Namio was solely dedicated to facesitting, or “Queening” – as seen in Work No. 278 (date unknown). He is described in a recent episode of the Marxist hot esoteric reading group podcast Purity & Danger as one of face-sitting’s key champions, with a borderline quixotic fixation on being dominated. A fetish, which can be hard or practically difficult to realise in reality, can be better articulated by hand. Both Crumb and Harakawa use a crosshatching method, pioneered by Hogarth and Rembrandt, to convey the scale of their desire and the buxomness of its object.

Each artist worked throughout the post-war ‘golden age’ of fetish art, realised in underground pulpy magazines like the underground ‘Comix’ scene in San Francisco, Kitan Club in Japan and Fads & Fancies in the UK. In New York, fetish was led by Irving Klaw and Leonard Burtman, who championed dominant women through their print magazine, Exotique. John Willie, another iconic fetish artist, published Bizarre magazine alongside his masterpiece character, Sweet Gwendoline. These would be the foundations that lead to the postmodern fetish art of G.B. Jones, Seiji Inagaki, Peter Sato and the indomitable H.R. Giger, alongside his pupil, Sybille Ruppert.

In 2025, Reena Spaulings gallery hosted a ‘closet’ booth at Art Basel curated by nomadic gallerist Tenko Nakajima Glenewinkel. Inside a tiny closet — subtly capturing the covert feeling of a peep-show booth in some red-light district — there were a dozen delicately hand-drawn illustrations by Seiji Inagaki. Born in 1942, Inagaki was the chief illustrator behind Barazoku, Japan’s first gay men’s magazine. Inagaki’s works, which feature ephebes entangled within each other’s bodies, are the sensitive Henry Darger-esque homosexual alternative to Tom of Finland’s masculine vision. In a fantasy within which one of Inagaki’s boys encounters Finland’s leatherheads, one imagines it would play out much like the plot of the recent film Pillion (2025), in which a timid gay man played by Dudley from Harry Potter starts a BDSM relationship with Alexander Skarsgård.

Inagaki’s presence at Basel would not be the first, or the last, iteration of erotic illustration sold upfront as an artwork rather than, say, an ‘outsider’ work of art or specialist collectors’ items in recent years. With the Tom of Finland foundation now recognised within the market, a selection of sketches can sell for a pretty price. In 2021, Phillips sold eleven graphite drawings for $189,000.

Re-addressing dead artists is also a trend in and of itself, and this is no different in the fetish world. Following the death of seminal Japanese illustrator Namio Harukawa in 2020, the text Facesittings are Forever became prolific in cult bookshops across London and New York City. Like Inagaki, Harukawa was a regular contributor to the aforementioned pulp mag Kitan Club.

A selection of Harukawa’s drawings and bondage photography appeared in a show at LSS NYC titled Weight of Desire, which closed earlier this month. A late work also appeared in Emalin’s 2025 dual show, Content Fatique I and II. Harukawa is contained between butt cheeks. Known for a subsection of macrophilia where large women sit on men, desire becomes a mode of transgression in the Bataillean sense: the self dissolves into sex. As Harukuwa’s small Japanese businessmen are suffocated, they occupy a different space of desire than Inagaki’s ephebes. They are not the object of desire, but rather the conduit for the spectator, who sees himself implanted firmly between two buttocks as shiny, engorged, cylindrical and mechanical as a futurist sculpture by Umberto Boccioni. The work’s inclusion in the group show reflects a wider trend for the genre’s growing acceptance.

In the 1940s and 50s, voluptuous figures became the fantastical saviour of the American people, just as women were encouraged to step into male roles left behind by the Second World War. Now, we return to the fascistic (defined by the categories of Umberto Eco’s ‘Ur-Fascism’ as a call to order and a rejection of modernity). The full-sized domination and engorgement of the 21st century woman carries a different cadence today: whether through Maja Malou Lyse’s gargantuan porn stars at the Denmark Pavilion within the 61st Venice Biennale, or through Sydney Sweeney’s ‘50 foot woman’. An appeal to macrophilia no longer feels genuine, but like an empty shadow of the desire it once incurred.

The art market’s acceptance of once outsider fetish artists, therefore, can be seen less for its aesthetic than for its nostalgia – nay, desire – for a time when the illustrated fetish was subaltern, pulpy and kitsch. Today’s ‘functional’ version of illustrated pornography emerges through artificially generated porn sites, rendering the passage of patron, to artist, to collector redundant. You want a woman being milked like a cow? A woman with the glazed look of soullessness jiggling her tits? Here it is, on Fiddl.art or Leonardo.ai. Gone is draughtsmanship; sexual fantasies for both men and women are at our fingertips. Instead of commissioning new fetish work, collectors capitalise on the medium as art object, turning it into different sort of pleasuring device.

Lydia Eliza Traill is a writer based in London.

Side Eye explores the alt scenes shaping the artworld, surfacing the weirdly specific but widely consequential dynamics that quietly determine what art is worth, and why.

The Art Journal is a new, independent art market publication published by Meta Media Group.

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The dichotomy leaves one with a particularly sour taste in the mouth. Art is simultaneously a tool for critical expression and a kind of insatiable theatre.

Against this backdrop, Genuine Fake Premium Economy, a sharply cynical exhibition at the ICA which takes aim at the hypocrisies of post-2008 economics, is particularly arresting. Each of the artists presenting work here – including Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison and Jasmine Gregory – came of age during the economic fallout of the financial crisis, which brought neoliberal capitalism to its knees just to perpetuate its shortcomings. They are all American, and, though Britain has traditionally held a particular disdain for the dramatics of US politics, the fiction of the American Dream seems increasingly relevant to our own exponentially polarised political climate and crumbling façade of meritocracy.

The artists are also all millennials, though they embody a disillusionment which spans generations. This extends to the art world: the show’s curator, Nicola Leong, tells me that “from a curatorial perspective, money is all that we keep obsessing over”. It was a coincidence that Josh Kline’s semi-viral essay on New York real estate and the artworld was published shortly before the opening. While criticism hinged on the unoriginality of Kline’s throughline from rent unaffordability to structural issues of contemporary art (as Matthew Donovan points out, “Patti Smith said this in 2010, David Byrne in 2013”), its resonance reveals an anxiety about the future economic – and therefore creative – survival of an artist class.

The best work at the ICA is Jenna Bliss’s True Entertainment (2023), a faux-reality television caricature of the artworld set at a Swiss fair circa 2007 (Bliss previously worked as an editor for the Real Housewives franchise). The movie’s cast of contemporary art tropes – an unstable it-girl artist, a shallow gallerist, a spoilt intern – are uncomfortably contrived. It possesses a humour which doesn’t quite hit; an intentional discomfort made even more cutting by the knowledge that – for those onscreen – the 2008 crash is impending. Yes, it’s insider-y, yes, it’s cringe-inducing, but for those in the know, it brings into sharp focus the parallels between the performativity of reality TV and cultural capital.

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Leong tells me that, when she first came across Bliss’s practice, she was considering staging a show about reality TV and art. Both are interesting lenses through which to look at the artifice of representation, particularly with regards to its economic value. The television genre also speaks to the underlying foundation of the exhibition: the zeitgeist theorisation of Mark Fisher. Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009) gave terminological form to the ideological constriction of imagination under its namesake political economic system. Through this lens, the postmodernism of the early noughties was simply a hauntological, shadow version of counterculture past: Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) was – as Matt Colquhoun writes in the introduction to Postcapitalist Desire – the “rotten husk” of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Bed-Ins for Peace (1969).

The show is appropriately bitter. It doesn’t present any solutions. When I ask Leong what she wants audiences to take away from the work, she says: “I don’t think the aim of the exhibition is to, like, suddenly transform the entire economic system. I think critique can be important without needing to live up to some sort of strange standard that it needs to enact change right now”. Instead, the work acknowledges its own participation in the very systems that subjugate its creators.

Buck Ellison, for example, has created an entire oeuvre of work which satirises the social class to which he belongs. He is known for photographing artificial scenes of the American WASP elite, bourgeois-bohemianism and the cultural signifiers of privilege. At the ICA, he has conceived of a fictional wealth advisory and multinational bank called Orlo & Co. There are lightbox advertisements depicting reproductions of Bronzino and Manet paintings overlaid with slogans like ‘In the hands of the few, for the good of the many’, and a still-life vitrine set-up of employee belongings. Here, an Oura ring, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, ADHD medication and a Simpsons questionnaire calendar paint a scarily vivid portrait of some anonymous thirty-something finance bro.

Jasmine Gregory paints warped visions of Patek Phillipe advertisements, with the slogan ‘You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation’. She transforms visions of interpersonal relationships – father and son, husband and wife – into bleak monetary arrangements. It is hard not to see the works’ endemic humour as a coping mechanism, and perhaps this is because it is ubiquitous: the capitalist grind-set is ostensibly so inescapable that laughing might be the most we can do to survive.

“The first step towards a cure is admitting you have a problem,” Kline writes in New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art. He posits a move beyond institutional critique to a kind of industry-wide one, which necessarily involves that of socioeconomic systems and of politics. A glimmer of this is exemplified by the striking cultural workers of the Art Not Genocide Alliance at the Biennale preview last week, or the resignation of the jury the week before. In the face of these actions, the ICA show – with its The Hills-ification of the white cube and Lehman Brothers-branded Babygro merch – does feel slightly shallow.

Still, the questions invoked by Genuine Fake Premium Economy are real and urgent. They are the same ones articulated by Kline: how can culture mobilise a form beyond neoliberal failure? Will alternatives inevitably become the very systems that they were trying to escape from? It is refreshing to see them posed within an art institution, and they offer a point of connection in a society formulated to cultivate a hyper-individualist opposite.

Genuine Fake Premium Economy is on view at the ICA, London until 05 July 2026.

ella slater is the Assistant Editor of The Art Journal.

Side Eye explores the alt scenes shaping the artworld, surfacing the weirdly specific but widely consequential dynamics that quietly determine what art is worth, and why.

The Art Journal is a new, independent art market publication published by Meta Media Group.

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In the music industry at least, the halcyon days of poptimism are over. Of this, we were reminded in the less than sparkling response to Maggie Nelson’s The Slicks. The book, published last November, attempted to yoke the incommensurate lives of Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath (seriously), arguing that both have been subject to a patriarchal tendency to dismiss ambitious, deeply personal work by women. “A cynical scripture from the Church of Taylor Swift,” one reviewer brilliantly remarked.

But for art, it feels like a similar instinct may be taking hold.

The notion arrives as last month, TikTok announced its latest land-grab in the luxury market with the introduction of a new Fine Art category in its shop. By folding art into its algorithm-driven, trend-chasing ecosystem, the platform seems to be pushing against the artworld’s lofty gatekeeping to advance a strain of popular optimism that treats mass appeal and visibility as important measures of worth.

Proceedings kicked off with a QVC-style live art sale of twenty oil paintings by content creator and visual artist Sophie Tea. The collection, a series of kitsch, lone-object still lives titled Bric-a-Brac, is inspired by her viral Charity Shop Friday series, where she purchases an item – vase, piano, perfectly lovely antique writing desk – adds a few abstract floral flourishes and returns it to the shop, encouraging her million-strong following to visit and purchase the piece.

Tea operates beyond the smoke and mirrors of so-called ‘serious’ collecting. In the caption of an announcement video for the live sale she writes:

“For the most part, my market sits OUTSIDE the pre-existing art world. I operate in a space where I am trying to expand what it means to be a collector, supporter and patron of the arts. Many believe that the arts are a luxury. I think this is wrong. The arts are for EVERYONE and have the power to change lives.”

At £2,800 a piece, there are, clearly, still practical limitations to her benevolent aspirations but as someone who has always felt a niggle of imposter syndrome in the gallerina circuit, I’m inclined to look fondly on the ‘art for all and all for art’ levity that props up Tea’s practice. Life is serious enough!

For a large majority of the general population, dropping a photo frame, corner first, on your foot (my feed is full of harmonica challenge videos) is a more appealing prospect than stepping into a gallery, pointing at a work of art and saying ‘I’ll have that one please’. Tea’s model makes a case for meeting people where they’re at: on their screens.

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The algorithmic logic of TikTok and Instagram has been erecting the scaffolding for luxury discovery commerce for some time now, so the endorsement of a new Fine Art category on TikTok Shop isn’t all that surprising. But the choice of Tea to launch it is telling.

Her buyers, predominantly women aged between 25 and 55, would not necessarily call themselves ‘art people’. It’s not a term I’d vie to claim either, mind you, but the point is one of mediation. With reports that Gen Z and Millennials are projected to control 75% of luxury spending by 2026, the move from TikTok feels strategic, not just because of Tea’s audience, but because of what she represents. With no formal art education, coming up through the increasingly common influencer-to-artist pipeline, she’s an example of how commercial success in the art world is becoming less reliant on gallery endorsement.

Many artists were quick to keyboard combat, pointing out that they had been listing their work on TikTok Shop since its 2023 launch, albeit under the Home Decor category. However, the formal recognition of Fine Art on the platform signals a new online engagement with the question of what counts as ‘serious’ art, driven (in poptimist fashion) as much by visibility and virality as by institutional kudos.

The precarity of the gallery lifespan, of which we’ve been soberly reminded in several closures – Venus Over Manhattan in New York, High Art in Paris and more recently Stephen Friedman in London – suggests that may not be such a bad thing. Surely commercial clout, however procured, should be taken as at least one of the markers of an artwork’s quality?

When Walter Benjamin wrote The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in 1935, he was more concerned with the effects of photography and talking pictures on the art market than the prelapsarian dawn of TikTok. Despite this, he anticipated an important pillar of contemporary cultural discourse: the most important consequence of technology’s ability to infinitely reproduce and distribute art is the “democratisation of art’s availability, allowing the general population to experience artwork that they would otherwise be unable to access.”

However, in a desperate, perpetual bid to democratise accessibility in the arts, have we incentivised an injudiciously toothless, poptimist market?

This year’s Art Basel Report suggests that Tea isn’t the first to exalt the perks of cutting out the middle-man. Artists are increasingly bypassing gallery frameworks to make sales directly to collectors, leveraging social media and digital channels like Artfinder and Saatchi Art to connect with buyers and get more bang for their buck. This trend towards disintermediation has been brought about by a number of factors, from democratisation and accessibility efforts to the acceleration of e-commerce and digital technologies. The conditions of the creator economy have also reified new-model art fame – awarding rapid digital visibility rather than honed artistic skill – prompting an increasing number of collectors to look to influencers rather than more traditional sales advisors.

Because Tea’s paintings largely bypass the traditional gallery circuit, they are seldom meaningfully engaged with in cultural publications. In fact, I couldn’t find a single review of a painting she’s produced since starting her career in 2019. I did, however, find a Hello!Fashion profile headline from 2021: ‘Meet the artist who’s changing the London art scene one pink paint stroke at a time’.

Instead, the conversation around Tea’s work takes place almost entirely online, where the lexicon of appraisal collapses into a stream of uncritical fawning.

NEED. Rainbow goddess. [fire emoji x3].

In this kind of atmosphere, the question we’re left with is not just whether her work is good or bad but whether she has, in effect, become exempt from critical judgment altogether, her reception governed by the cozy logic of poptimist consensus. What emerges from the conditions of this censorious digital age is, predictably and to put it nicely, vacuous viral art: feeds pedalling, for the most part, entirely forgettable, onanistic abstract ‘compositions’ or else unremarkable but perfectly legible, feel-good figuration.

I am reminded of the ludicrous reaction to Ben Davis’s review of an exhibition by influencer-artist Devon Rodriguez in 2023. In response to a, by all accounts, pretty fair-minded evaluation, Rodriguez, known for his photorealist subway portraits (who has a 34 milli-strong TikTok following) encouraged his acolytes to assail Davis with hordes of hateful comments.

In the poptimist art market, high sales volume and virality are the new indicators of artistic merit and the ‘tastemakers’ are anyone with a blue tick or the nimble fingers conducive to liking, commenting and sharing. The bright-eyed promise to give popular culture a fair shakedown has been kicked to the curb (aka. Reddit) and the line stands: “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it all.”

I don’t think we need to worry about the aesthetic symptoms of poptimism catching on, but Tea’s TikTok takeover may be indicative of where we’re headed temperamentally. TikTok’s 2026 trend report makes something of users beginning to consider the emotional ROI of their purchases in an attempt to wrestle back some shred of dignity from the algorithm. A version of that logic is creeping into the art market too. Phin Jennings recently suggested a kind of feels-forward approach to collecting (buying art you can bear to look at for longer than a scroll second) as a potential buffer to a gallery ecosystem that’s eating itself.

At some point we must all submit to the base delight of visuality and yet, I’ve read enough pre-Venice press puff to know that that’s not what’s propping up traditional programming.

So, how far can this kind of market-friendly poptimism really travel?

I dislike the term ‘intellectual influencer’ intensely but, in an embrace of neo-oral culture and a renewed appetite for people with distinctive, arguable taste, we may see a return to poptimism in its more nascent form. Not just celebrating popular art, but holding it up against the light. Of course, it’s great that more people are encountering and collecting art via Tea’s profile and TikTok Shop. And no one is saying you can’t like it (even if they think your money is better spent elsewhere), but liking it should be an exercise in active judgement at the very least.

I’ll finish on a simple notion put forth by art advisor Greg Rooks in his Substack, . Good art – the stuff that’s worth buying – is the art that’s worth seeing. “Not for investment. Not for Instagram,” he writes, “But because it lingers, provokes, endures.”

is an art and culture writer, book publicist and author of the Substack newsletter Pending Attachments. She has written for Artsy, AnOther, The Art Newspaper, British Journal of Photography, Dazed, Elephant, Wallpaper* and World of Interiors amongst others. When she’s not writing she can be found heading up publicity and marketing at indie music book publisher Omnibus Press.

Side Eye explores the alt scenes shaping the artworld, surfacing the weirdly specific but widely consequential dynamics that quietly determine what art is worth, and why.

The Art Journal is a new, independent art market publication published by Meta Media Group.

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‘I, I, I, I am…’, an SS26 Prada campaign reworked by US artist Jordan Wolfson, is one example. It includes a a computerised Where The Wild Things Are-like vision of bizarrely glossy birds standing aside the likes of Nicholas Hoult, Hunter Schafer and Carey Mulligan. Another is fashion designer Demna Gvasalia’s debut FW26 Gucci collection, ‘Gucci Primavera’. In this case, the clothing itself fused the sex-charged vulgarity of the brand’s Tom Ford-era with a numbed-out internet age edge, à la Fakemink in low-hanging pants. In each, the evocation is equal parts repulsive and entrancing, tapping into the coarseness of late capitalist desire. Through this lens, spending £500 on a logo-font t-shirt is the inevitable byproduct of belonging in this strange new world.

Not long ago, the deformed spawn of cannibalistic AI chatbots and pixelated monsters would have seemed starkly out of place within the gilded walls of fashion. As Nancy J. Troy details in her book, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (2003), the virtuosity of fine art has long been present in fashion’s economic model in order to continue the illusion of privileged access to an increasingly abundant field. Troy argues that Paul Poiret, the early-twentieth century magnifique of couture, self-styled as an artist to position himself as a ‘transgressive modernist’ even as he ‘appealed to audiences who customarily disdained the avant-garde’.

In more recent years, cross-industry collaborations have become ubiquitous, from Chanel’s soft power arts patronage to the starchitect-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton. The mutual benefits of partnerships and patronage are well established. Luxury fashion’s experimentation with digital hybrids does not signal a shift away from art as a marketable commodity rather than a shift in what is understood as a valuable image itself.

Of course, fashion is predicated on public appeal and is therefore inherently doomed to foster self-reflexive adoption and pastiche. It is a contradiction that the avant garde has historically resisted, eschewing commerciality in favour of unimpeded innovation. But we are long past the glory days of modernism. It is metamodernism, oscillating between postmodern irony and an earnest search for meaning, that increasingly defines the cultural landscape. We have entered the age of absurdity.

Prada’s recruitment of Wolfson to intervene on images previously taken by Oliver Hadlee Pearch fuses the blatant commercialism of celebrity marketing with something more ambiguous and uncanny. However, despite Wolfson’s adversarial reputation (a 2019 Frieze article about the artist is titled ‘Who Likes Jordan Wolfson?’), dismissing the campaign as rage-bait reduces one of the more significant current trends to the egotism of one man.

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Prior to the Demna Gvasalia’s Gucci show, the brand released a series of AI-generated images on its Instagram. Interspersed with a photograph of Sophia Loren shopping in Rome and a 16th century Florentine portrait is a double-G emblazoned satellite in outer space and a recreation of Grand Theft Auto VI’s pink-hued, palm-tree shaded couple straddling the hood of a muscle car. This culture mash speaks the language of the monogrammed fanny packs and bootleg logo tees which appeared in the resultant runway show. Taste has been flattened: the campaign is both provocative and tapping into the democratising effects of the internet.

Of course, the images were divisive. “You did not need to use AI for this, so tacky” one comment beneath the (generated) image of a fur-coated Milanese sciura reads. “Gucci is the new Shein” says another. While Gvasalia might consider himself an artist rather than a businessman, the backlash seems to hinge on the apparent laziness of generative technology, as if its adoption could be nothing more than a cost-cutting measure rather than an intellectual exercise. This is where art comes in, with its shining cape of cultural kudos. The difference between a marketing team prompting ChatGPT and an artist doing the same may ostensibly be nominal, but to a public fluent in advertising imagery, it is crucial. Fashion/digital art partnerships allow luxury brands to tap into art’s intellectualised distance from its technofuturist subjects, while speaking to a deranged but ubiquitous ‘aesthetic of the present’ (see Dean Kissick’s essay ‘The Vulgar Image’).

They also allow a veneer of self-awareness, or cynical sense of humour. In 2025, Valentino enlisted the artist Christopher Royal King (AKA Total Emotional Awareness) to develop an AI-generated campaign for its DeVain bag. The result was a video of the bag transposed with a memetic, distorted montage of images taken over two decades as a touring musician. There is no posing as realism here; King’s practice relies on the glitches and failures of computer imagery to highlight its artificiality. It is a statement on absurdity.

A few critical comments will not be enough to halt the colossal rise of digitised imagery in luxury fashion. When styled as an art image, computerisation is no longer incompatible with ostensibly antithetical marketing initiatives, like emphases on craftsmanship and IRL events. Digital art partnerships both partake in technocapitalism and observe it detachedly. Digital imagery may perform as the opposite of luxury, but its strategic adoption as an art image is a commercial move of ingenious modernity. After all, what else is so democratic – so universally meaningless and simultaneously meaningful – as internet slop.

is the Assistant Editor of The Art Journal.

Side Eye explores the alt scenes shaping the artworld, surfacing the weirdly specific but widely consequential dynamics that quietly determine what art is worth, and why.

The Art Journal is a new, independent art market publication published by Meta Media Group.

theartjournal.com

Side Eye explores the alt scenes shaping the artworld, surfacing the weirdly specific but widely consequential dynamics that quietly determine what art is worth, and why.

You can expect: internet subcultures, art market micro-trends, esoteric event reporting, art true crime and more.

Side Eye is a space for a new generation of art market reporters who are navigating cyberspace alongside an impenetrable art ecosystem. If you have a story, we want to hear from you. To pitch, email ella@theartjournal.com

Side Eye is edited by , The Art Journal’s Assistant Editor.

About The Art Journal

The Art Journal is a new, independent art market publication published by Meta Media Group.

Whether you’re a dealer, collector, artist, student or policymaker – or simply curious – we are here to help you understand how art actually works.

The art market is, by design, opaque and largely unregulated. The Art Journal wants to explore how value is created, understood and exchanged. To lift the paving stone and reveal the beach. You can find us on Instagram, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads and Youtube.

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