Zander Leissle

‘Two Horses’: A Poem by Ralf Webb ‘Girls, I thought, understand / The attitudes of animals in motion. / Girls could reveal the nature of happy horses’

A gorgeous new poem by Ralf Webb is out now: ‘Girls, I thought, understand / The attitudes of animals in motion. / Girls could reveal the nature of happy horses’ artreview.com/two-horses-a...

The ‘Fascinating Fascism’ of AI The US government’s anniversary AI project tells us nothing about American history and everything about today’s America

is AI *actually* the aesthetic of fascism? I think a lot of the discourse has gotten it wrong, and I explained why in my latest for @artreview.bsky.social artreview.com/the-fascinat...

The @artreview.bsky.social newsletter, rather like the @africasacountry.bsky.social newsletter, is consistently excellent. Among the handful of emails I always read & feel grateful for. Good writing, great editing. Allelujah!

Notes from New York: Art Critics and Gangster Capitalism The state of art criticism today resembles a crisis of freedom, when one reality has been rejected but another has yet to be conceived

The state of art criticism today resembles a crisis of freedom, where one reality has been rejected but another has yet to be conceived artreview.com/notes-from-n...

What Isn’t at the V&A Storehouse You can’t escape it: this is the same colonial museum we know, in a shiny new suit

"What isn't at the V&A?" — new from me in @artreview.bsky.social on enduring colonialism, art-washing working class heritage, and a museum without labels
artreview.com/what-isnt-at...

Why Do We Have to Be Ourselves Online? Age verification and data collection require there be no slippage between who governments think we are and who we want ourselves to be – which was the whole point of the internet in the first place

the internet is for lying! artreview.com/why-do-we-ha...

‘Unsettled Earth’: The Artists Resisting Palestinian Erasure A new group show and study programme at Berlin’s Spore Initiative reconnects the Palestinian story to the land: how it is experienced, remembered, worked, violated

For @artreview.bsky.social I reviewed 'Unsettled Earth', an exhibition countering the razing of Palestinian land and erasure of its history. It strikes me that art, while incapable of much else here, can re-introduce the full emotionality of a people and their homeland artreview.com/unsettled-ea...

David Cronenberg: Grieving in the Digital Age In his latest film ‘The Shrouds’, characters can livestream their loved ones rotting in the grave. Is this a new monumentalism?

i wrote about john donne, cronenberg's The Shrouds, and the location of love for @artreview.bsky.social artreview.com/david-cronen...

ArtReview Asia Summer 2025 Issue Out Now Featuring Shilpa Gupta, Shimabuku, Bachtiar Siagian; commentary on China’s zombie museums, and legacies of the Black Panther Movement; and much more

ArtReview Asia Summer 2025 is out now – featuring Shilpa Gupta, Shimabuku, Bachtiar Siagian; commentary on China’s zombie museums, and legacies of the Black Panther Movement; and much more artreview.com/artreview-as...

Join Rosanna McLaughlin and Fi Churchman at the ArtReview Bar on 25 June as they discuss McLaughlin’s new book, ‘Against Morality’. ⁠

⁠RSVP essential to rsvp@artreview.com

Good to know that @bsky.app thinks the image is too much...

The Trans Community Refuses to Be Erased Defining ‘woman’ by biological female sex isn’t just about excluding trans people from single-sex spaces. It also highlights how little respect governing bodies have for the trans community as a whole

Defining ‘woman’ by biological female sex isn’t just about excluding trans people from single-sex spaces. It also highlights how little respect governing bodies have for the community as a whole artreview.com/the-trans-co...

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain: Things Falling Apart Across largescale tapestries and adroit conceptual works, the artist examines the destructive forces in the world

My review of Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s work is now up on @artreview.bsky.social. Big, vertiginous tapestries and some conceptual trickery later on. Whether it’s what you want from art or not, I think it works. artreview.com/ailbhe-ni-bh...

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain: Things Falling Apart Across largescale tapestries and adroit conceptual works, the artist examines the destructive forces in the world

Across largescale tapestries and adroit conceptual works, the artist examines the destructive forces in the world artreview.com/ailbhe-ni-bh...

Not a political person

'Kehlmann frequently compares his subject’s compliant life under the Nazi regime to that lived on a film set.'

Alexander Leissle on the compromises and self-justifications of G. W. Pabst

Gertrude Stein’s literary experiments; celebrity mystics; the compromises of G. W. Pabst; a tribute to Mario Vargas Llosa; Toni Morrison’s books – and much more.

www.the-tls.co.uk/issues/cu...

Not a political person An expert film director, frustrated by the creative restriction and cultural shallowness of Hollywood’s so-called golden age, returns with his loyal

I'm in the new @thetls.bsky.social, reviewing Daniel Kehlmann’s latest novel – about G. W. Pabst, art’s relationship to fascism, and the ways in which aesthetic taste and social ethics are interlinked www.the-tls.co.uk/literature/f...

How to See the Puerto Rican Art Scene The island faces a challenge of visibility, with barriers imposed by imperial neglect, poor urban infrastructure and a lack of local arts journalism. But discoverability and visibility can come at a c...

I went long on how policy, colonialism, being neglect, diaspora and the contemporary art market produce layers of visibility and obscurity for Santurce's contemporary art scene for @artreview.bsky.social artreview.com/how-to-see-t...

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I'm convinced that Max Cooper, Max Porter and Charlie Porter are all the same person

National Gallery Rehang: First Pleasure, Then Politics The gallery’s much heralded rehang avoids burdening the art of the past with the politics of today as it reconsiders what the modern visitor really wants

Here’s my review of the new National Gallery entrance and rehang, which opens tomorrow.

artreview.com/national-gal...

The Trap of Catchalls Baggy terms such as ‘Global South’ and ‘Global Majority’ are useless, because you can’t address what you can’t describe

In the May issue of @artreview.bsky.social, I offer a little provocation: lets do away with 'global south' & 'global majority'. There is no shared hemispheric condition between exploiter & exploited, & the geographies of neocolonialism aren't natural or demographic. artreview.com/the-trap-of-...

Don’t Listen to the Art Gurus Celebrity authors are rebranding themselves as philosophers of art; an extraordinary dumbing down of culture has occurred

Celebrity authors are rebranding themselves as philosophers of art; an extraordinary dumbing down of culture has occurred artreview.com/dont-listen-...

‘Do Not Say The “D” Word’: A Poem by Oluwaseun Olayiwola ‘which of us / is in servitude’s work? 0)))0(((0 / which takes the bird’s eye?(*))))’

Each month, we publish an original poem written in response to a work of contemporary art. This month, poet Oluwaseun Olayiwola has chosen a work by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami artreview.com/do-not-say-t...

Bianca Hlywa: In Defence of Disgusting Art At St. Chads, London, the artist has installed a smelly, sticky clump of live yeast culture in the gallery. It’s the beginnings of a lesson about art, life and the creatures we create

Why disgusting things are actually really important, for @artreview.bsky.social artreview.com/bianca-hlywa...

‘Not Only Cringey but Politically Troubling’: Paul Preciado’s Dysphoria Mundi, Reviewed The philosopher’s reflections on his own privileged experience of the COVID-19 pandemic range from the bizarre to the frankly obscene

I read all 500 and something pages of the new Preciado book and wrote this review. I did not enjoy it. Sometimes things are actually not that much like other things.

artreview.com/paul-preciad...

The Institutional Sticky Drawer Syndrome The tenor of current cultural and critical exchanges among South Asian and Gulf countries points to the contortions required of those who would correct art history

The trend, it seems, among curators and institutions globally, is to ‘correct’ art history by reversing the erasure of the Global South from a history written in and by the Global North. But what you can’t do is correct some parts of history and not others artreview.com/the-institut...

As does a typo x

Feels very, you know, ~now~

The Guardian view on Germany’s new coalition: unleashing the radical centre | Editorial Editorial: A groundbreaking vote by outgoing MPs has given the chancellor-elect, Friedrich Merz, the chance to renew mainstream politics

This is liquid Guardian-brain. In fact, I love this entropic idea of radicalism: shaking up the status quo into a a new version of the same thing, like making potatoes out of mashed crisps www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...