Come Thursday

+ I had to go there...

Thursday I’m moderating a conversation with artists Isaiah Davis and Alix Vernet at Anton Kern Gallery: 6pm at 16 East 55th Street. The talk is tied to this group show the artists are in, and also names like Eric N. Mack and Kayode Ojo, up until February 21.

Last Thursday I went by Dean Majd’s opening on Ludlow, not expecting the buzzy moment I stumbled into. Big local boy makes good energy but carrying larger political import. There was a line down the block for the double solo show also headlined by Zainab Aliyu. Kareem from Subway Takes was there, and most notably, New York’s first lady Rama: Dean photographed Zohran for Vogue last year after his win. A Palestinian New Yorker who grew up in Astoria, Dean was also tapped to shoot Mahmoud Kahlil with his wife and their baby for that Dazed cover you surely saw. These historic portrait commissions are distinct from but still connected to Dean’s personal photographic practice focused around masculinity. His show is on view through April 2.

With Wuthering Heights opening this week, I have been thinking back to the essay on the Brontë sisters that Amber Later wrote for issue 004 of The Whitney Review (Fall/Winter 2024/25). I’ve thought often since about this passage of Amber’s, illustrating the bleak Victorian reality that birthed the sisters’ Gothic vibe.

One year after the publication of Wuthering Heights, Emily died at the age of 30, shortly followed by the deaths of Anne and Branwell (the only Brontë son) at 29 and 31, respectively. Their father subsequently used profits from Anne and Emily’s novels to launch an investigation into environmental and infrastructural hazards in the town impacting the health of its residents, like runoff from an overcrowded graveyard contaminating the water supply.

Let that sink in. The genius behind the ultimate ghostly tale of doomed love died young, possibly because an excess of corpses was poisoning her water.

Most people who read this newsletter aren’t on substack and I think you’re probably fortunate to miss a lot of the discourse that goes on “in app.” But I’m going to update you anyways!! Substack had crazy growth last year and the culture that’s emerging on the platform will probably have more consequence even if it’s mind-bogglingly naive.

It feels naive but not guileless. Any algorithm in the attention economy incentivizes performances to win eyeballs. Success here is often finding an audience and flattering the particularities of their worldview. You have writers with a competent command of rhetoric without any incentive or oversight to not manipulate facts in favor of their narrative. Rage-bait is also effective.

This week, we’ve moved on from Big Lit’s shadowy payola conspiracy to arrive at a lot of priggishness about botox.

Something has been building up for a while. People my age, we grew up with choice feminism. It was really out of vogue to criticize anyone’s preference for body modification. But the current cosmetic protocol regime is twisting people up: Are they just getting older or is it fascism? Ayesha A. Siddiqi wrote 12,000 words on how this anti-aging panic is rooted in a larger decline of Western empire and the devaluation of life. Grace Byron recently got under the hood of the morality panic writing for The Nation. A lot of other intelligent people are processing this moment less intelligently. You can never totally check out of being perceived. If you think you are “rejecting” vanity, you should reflect on what threshold of value you meet even with limited cosmetic interventions. If you haven’t thought about this, it shows. Your life may all of a sudden feel devalued, but it’s worth considering who never benefited from that presumption of value you’re now grieving. Unless you just want to flatter a silo of readers who’d rather not think critically about their own grief, which is probably better advice if you want to rise on the substack rankings board.