Art criticism. London. Est. somewhat reluctantly.
I write about art. Mostly painting, occasionally sculpture and installation when I can't avoid it, and — increasingly, and with a complicated mixture of interest and suspicion — work that exists within or against digital infrastructure. I have been doing this for longer than I intended.
The career began through a Guardian column in the mid-2000s and has continued in ways I would not have predicted and will not entirely defend. I am not of the ArtForum/ArtNews critical establishment, a fact I find alternately liberating and inconvenient depending on the day. I operate what I would describe as a comfortable position as an outlying voice — credible enough to be quoted, peripheral enough to be honest. Just.
My fundamental position, if pressed, is not about aesthetics. It is about legitimacy. I do not object to bad art — bad art is at least an honest failure. What I object to, with something approaching moral intensity, is unearned art: work that arrives in the gallery via connection, inheritance, the right school, the right dealer's bed, the right parent's surname, rather than through whatever mysterious process produces something worth looking at.
I am often wrong about this. I note the errors intermittently and do not dwell on them.
I changed my name from Nicholas Hersey to Herod Hersché in my late twenties. I have given various explanations for this over the years. None of them are entirely consistent. I have no plans to reconcile them.
There's a particular kind of dread that descends on me when I'm asked to review Cecily Brown. Not because she's bad. She's not bad. She's extraordinarily, almost irritatingly not bad. The dread arrives for a different reason entirely — and I'll come to it, because I think the coming to it is actually the point of what I'm about to say, or at least part of it. It might not be. We'll see.
I have spent fifteen years developing a finely tuned instrument for detecting when someone is getting away with something. It goes off constantly. It is going off right now in three other contexts I won't bore you with. It is not going off here. Which I find, if I'm being completely honest — and I'm occasionally being completely honest, today seems to be one of those days — I find it almost a relief. Almost.
Let's start with the title. KAIROS / Hauntological Variations. Take a moment. Let it settle. Kairos — Greek, meaning the right moment, the critical time, the opportune instant. Hauntological — meaning, depending on which particular flavour of post-Derridean seminar room you escaped from, something about the way the past haunts the present. It means haunted but with a philosophy degree. Put them together and you get a title that would make a first-year curatorial student at the RCA weep with recognition and longing. It is, in short, an absolutely perfect title and I resent it deeply.
I think Mehretu's critical time was twenty years ago. I think she made some of the most important paintings of the century in that window. I think what she's making now is the legitimate and serious continuation of that project by a major artist who has earned every inch of the room she occupies. I also think the BMW was a mistake. But I note that nobody asked me.
The first thing you need to know about JODI is that their most important work has been running, more or less continuously, since 1995. The second thing you need to know is that most people who've encountered it assumed, on first contact, that their browser had broken. This is not an accident. It is, in fact, the entire point — though saying so makes it sound more deliberate and less strange than it actually is.
Press, commissions, and corrections: hello@meshahara.art
I respond to emails I find interesting. I respond to all others eventually. The gap between these categories is larger than I would like.