‘In London, you’re not supposed to write a negative review,’ so critic Sydney Sweeney tells me via email, adding that, too often, ‘The standard review is just a description of the work, another hyperlink in an artist’s CV.’
To the best of my knowledge, the Sweeney who emailed me isn’t the actress who appears in television shows such as Euphoria (2019–ongoing) and The White Lotus (2021–ongoing), but someone using a nom de plume – an editor at Hollywood Superstar Review, a website that hosts anonymous arts writing. It’s one of several platforms proliferating across cyberspace, seemingly in response to a culture in mainstream art criticism that the authors perceive as risk averse. ‘No one was writing truthfully about art – it was just the same four or five legacy art magazines covering the same circuit of shows, the same four small galleries, the same 15 emerging artists,’ notes Sweeney.
The mask of anonymity, then, aspires to cultivate freedom from the expectations of the art world – whether to present more strident criticism or to subvert its perceived hierarchy. This was the genesis of spittle, a London-based, art-world newsletter authored by a chorus of insider voices. ‘When we first started spittle four years ago, we were working in junior roles and some of us felt our colleagues and managers might not like us being vocal. Publishing the newsletter anonymously has allowed us a certain freedom to speak on whatever, and however, we want.’ Of course, anonymity enables writers to evade the accountability that comes with visibility. For spittle, anonymity was central to the construction of their operation: ‘It’s not any one of our individual views but a collective voice of apathy, gossip and hysteria.’
Eileen Slightly, another editor at Hollywood Superstar Review, tells me via email that using a pseudonym allows their art writing to exist outside the social sphere and social capital of the art world – something they explain using Marxist terms: ‘We wanted criticism to have a use-value, not an exchange-value.’ In other words, they hope that the criticism published by the outlet exists as a stand-alone piece of independent writing, rather than as something that functions as social capital – writing that Slightly calls an ‘addendum to press releases, with the hopes that it might pay off careers-wise in a few years’ time’.
Just as anonymity isn’t the same as invisibility, these identities seem to exist both within and outside the wider art world
In a recent review for Texte zur Kunst of Issy Wood’s exhibition ‘Wet Reckless’ at Michael Werner, Beverly Hills, a writer using the pseudonym Diva Corp leveraged their anonymity to offer a unique perspective on the show. Corp wrote about how the artist’s decision to withhold certain pieces from the exhibition – self-portraits that reveal some, though not all, of her face – increases their desirability. At the end of the review, Corp notes: ‘Michael Werner’s going to sell Issy Wood one way or another.’ So, too, do these anonymous critics tout themselves and their work, one way or another – whether on independent websites, through newsletters or via the legacy publications with which they maintain a tense relationship. Perhaps the absence of a legible identity makes their writing more desirable.
The malleable nature of an anonymous platform isn’t just about the possibility for liberation, play or satire; in some places, anonymity – with what seems like grim inevitability – has turned toxic. The now-defunct blog Observations w/ Jerry Magoo (2018) saw the possibilities of anonymous critique devolve into fictitious quotations and grim pastiches of other writers. Spittle stresses a desire to ‘never bitch down’ confessing that ‘it would be easy to slip into a cattiness you wouldn’t ever voice under your own name’. Yet this wave of what we might generously call cattiness has a precedent for seeping through.
The 2000s and 2010s blog Cathedral of Shit, which spittle describes as ‘an iconic time capsule’ while conceding that ‘some of the writing is definitely of its time and wouldn’t fly nowadays’, walked a fine line – one that often veered into bad faith. Its 2009 end-of-year list, for instance, seemed to lose interest in itself before sputtering to a conclusion. And, while taking swipes at established artists such as Antony Gormley and Damien Hirst can hardly be considered ‘bitching down’, it often feels vacuously bitchy nonetheless.
Sweeney, by contrast, insists that ‘[a bad review] shouldn’t be blind or senseless. It should be urgent, like art.’ The same is true for spittle, who say they ‘don’t want to shit on young artists or gallerists taking risks’ but ‘taking aim at a mega-gallery for putting out yet another basic and uninspiring exhibition is par for the course’. While anonymity means being outside the ‘lifestyle industry cycle’ of the art world – and a refusal to play too nice – it still operates within certain boundaries of taste and acceptability. Just as anonymity isn’t the same as invisibility, these identities seem to exist both within and outside the wider art world – never quite able to totally free themselves from it.
Read the Hollywood Superstar Review here. Sign-up to spittle here.
Main image: Dani Marcel Performance, date unknown. Courtesy: spittle
