[for the Spectator, 30/11/19]

Empires are born to die; that’s one source of their strange allure.

[for the Telegraph, 14/11/19]

There was a time, before Aids, when gay men didn’t routinely die for love.

[for Artforum, 29/10/19]

Aura, too, shall pass, and “Object of Doubt,” a compact group show about monuments and their fragile authority, is toying with its expiration.

[for Frieze, 25/10/19]

Judd’s value to critics is in the economy of his style. He’s elegant, and pleasurable, if slightly risky to read; tranches of Judd may cause the mental equivalent of shortness of breath.

[for the Telegraph, 12/10/19]

Ellmann’s novels are like wannabe archives that she’s forcing to moonlight as tales told.

[for the Telegraph, 6/10/19]

This isn’t anti-establishment at all. Banksy’s art is coercive, and its politics are trash, because its modus operandi is to make you ignore the complexities of things.

[for the Telegraph, 6/9/19]

London has been full of thoughtless new art all year. “Digital” doesn’t entail “smart”; ironic cuteness can fail; work that wants to make “statements” rarely does. Doig has set an example: one of craft, not theory.

[for the Telegraph, 30/8/19]

Norman Rockwell’s dreams belonged to everyone – in wartime that was necessary, and in peacetime it was lucrative – but Lana Del Rey holds something back; an elusive quality that never quite allows your trust.

[for the Telegraph, 19/7/19]

I do not commute by boat. (One of the arts editors does, but I suspect she’s a rarity.) This made me wonder […] for whose eyes, standing where, has this project been designed?

[for the Telegraph, 17/7/19]

What if you found the Moon landings dull?

[for Frieze, 27/6/19]

Thankfully, he never learned to see the world with acceptable taste. More than once, An Oral History throws up his old line: ‘I always wanted my works to look more like what was going on outside the window.’

[for the Telegraph, 14/6/19]

Armfield’s prose has a stupefied ease. It glides along so stylishly, incurious about the blood intermittently spilling across its palms.

[for Mana Contemporary, 20/5/19]

We talk within galleries as we do without: in the language of being touched.

[for the Telegraph, 23/4/19]

Del Amo’s prose is steady and calm; it lets your hopes run ahead; you wish the scene would speed up, but that’s not the way life is.

[for Frieze, 1/4/19]

David Salle is a fool for choice. He lets possibilities open up in his paintings, then leaves them well alone.

[for Frieze, 20/3/19]

When Trinity College Dublin awarded Beckett an honorary degree, he groused to a friend that he had ‘no clothes but an old brown suit’. But unfashionability is itself a pose.

[for Frieze, 4/3/19]

The painting, then, is a picture of nature’s gradual work, itself formed by a gradual natural process. Paint is allowed both to tell and act out.

[for the Telegraph, 27/2/18]

Group exhibitions can be awkward. Those that fulfil a communal objective are rare; most fall back on a nebulous purpose.

[for the TLS, 19/2/19]

If you read enough of Logan’s takedowns, you glimpse an eerie Kennedy sparkle; they’re working so hard to seem off the cuff.

[for the Telegraph, 8/2/19]

For all the drama of Calvi’s style, her technique is masterfully controlled. She can finesse her way up a pealing arpeggio, then crown it with a pure single note that snaps and stings.