Editor’s Picks: Cher’s Low-Budget Elvis Impersonation

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to.

Cher, performance of ‘Walking in Memphis’ at Love Rocks NYC, 2025

She might not attempt the full, crotch-thrusting gyrations of Elvis ‘the pelvis’ Presley, but there’s no mistaking that Cher is impersonating the king of rock and roll in this bizarre, playful rendition of Marc Cohn’s ‘Walking in Memphis’ (1991) – a song she first covered in 1995. There’s an unexpectedly low-budget aesthetic to the whole thing – this is a charity benefit concert, not her usual stadium show – which is clear from the moment the mononymous singer emerges from the side of the stage, appearing to trip on something as she struts under a single spotlight. Then the camera cuts to a close-up, and we get our first clear shot of Cher in drag: popped shirt collar, sleek black pompadour, oversized pinstripe blazer. Ever since this video entered my Instagram feed in March, I’ve rewatched it at least once a week, in awe at this masterfully goofy performance from one of pop music’s enduring icons. Her carefree swagger is the perfect reminder that it’s always worth taking the time to have a little fun.

Coca Dai, Judy Zhu, 2018 

On a trip to Norway last month, I picked up several books at the Bergen Art Book Fair – including this collection of photographs, published by Kinakaal Forlag. Capturing intimate moments between the artist and his partner, Judy, the images in Coca Dai’s photobook have an understated beauty: most of them seem to come from an impulse more personal than artistic, Judy posing as much for her lover as for the camera. One, showing Judy wielding a knife above a messy hump of raw meat, reminds me of a scene from Brandon Taylor’s novel The Late Americans (2023), in which a student working part-time in a meat-processing plant compares the marbling of white fat and red flesh in a cut of beef to the manic-yet-pleasing paint splashes on a work by Jackson Pollock. If I had stumbled upon these photographs in a slightly different mood, I might have dismissed them as trite, too flatly personal, not designed with aesthetic pleasure in mind. But beauty can be unassuming, emerging from the seemingly mundane – provided the viewer is willing to seek it out. 

Abdellah Taïa, Le Bastion des Larmes (The Bastion of Tears), 2024 

Towards the end of this lyrical novel, not yet available in English translation, Abdellah Taïa explains the Bastion of Tears, which gives the book its title. In 1260, the Spanish briefly conquered the Moroccan town of Salé. During their two-week reign, the conquistadores kidnapped some 3,000 of the town’s inhabitants – ‘women, children, some elders’ – and sent them to be sold in Seville. Those remaining would go down to the port every day, looking out from where their loved ones had been taken. ‘After liberating the town’, Taïa writes, ‘the sultan […] ordered fortifications be built around Salé, to protect it from future attacks.’ And so the left-behind, safe within their walls, would go to the bastion like a ritual. Looking at the empty sea, they would pray, plot revenge, fall to their knees and weep. In the present day of Taïa’s novel, this bastion is also where Youssef – an expatriate professor making a rare visit to his hometown – goes to remember the man he fell in love with more than a quarter of a century earlier. This Bastion of Tears is the perfect coda to a novel obsessed with the ways love can endure when distance and time intervene. You can spend the rest of your life, Taïa suggests, in the aftershocks of love. 

^{Main image: Cher performs during the ninth annual LOVE ROCKS NYC benefit concert For God's Love We Deliver at Beacon Theatre on 6 March 2025 in New York City. Photograph: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for LOVE ROCKS NYC/God's Love We Deliver}