From the October 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Dear London Art October,
I need some time apart.
It’s been intense (how can I forget your immaculately groomed openings? your shapely sales figures? your unhinged deadlines?). Still, I’ve started to wonder whether the buzz I feel when you come near me is excitement or churning panic.
For years I’ve barely questioned what our relationship was doing to my other months. Already, in August, I’d be thinking about you: my body in one month, but my head in another. August is when the art magazines and highbrow glossies get in touch asking me to write about you. Naturally, whatever I write will be little more than guesswork. How can I really know how you’ll have changed from one year to the next? Whether you’ll surprise me? What we’ll talk about once you arrive? What this year’s obsession will be? Whether others will bitch about you? (Of course they will.) Which celebrities you will attract? What people should buy? I’d write previews of exhibitions by artists I’d barely heard of and proffer ‘insights’ into art I’d only seen in an email attachment. You were still months in my future, but every August I’d exploit you. Why not? It’s been a lucrative affair.
For years, too, I’ve been cheating on September with you. As you come closer, the days are filled with intense soothsaying and obsessive prediction. Weeks ahead of time, I’d write guides to special sections at the art fairs and identify the most exciting booths (as best I could from an inbox full of press releases. Which is to say, not in any meaningful way at all). I’d compile round-ups of what I imagined to be the top shows around town. I’d interview the artist awarded that year’s Tate Modern Turbine Hall commission. All details would be embargoed ahead of the opening, so the artist would speak only in the vaguest generalisations and the interview would become redundant as soon as the work is revealed. But who cares? So it goes with previews.
I don’t flatter myself that it’s just me. Most of London’s art world spends August and September obsessing about you, desperate for the inside track. Art advisers study advance details of galleries’ Frieze London and Frieze Masters displays, avid as schoolboys memorising Kendrick Lamar lyrics. Long before the fairs open they have charted the thrill-packed routes along which they will walk their attention-deficit/high-net-worth clients. The gallerists, in turn, strive to secure buyers weeks before the preview day (how else can they be sure of covering their fees, shipping, travel and insurance?)
After months of overthinking our relationship, as soon as you arrived I’d be overwhelmed. Everything about you still seemed to take place in the future, but now I’d be thinking minutes, hours, days ahead rather than weeks and months. How to focus on an exhibition if all I could picture was the next deadline or the next unmissable event? The art world around me would be filtered through the anxiety of how it might translate into copy, anecdotes or social media takes. Opinions must be had. Pronouncements made. Judgement passed. (Despite the fact that, afforded marginal attention, most art only ever seems… fine, OK, good, unexciting.)
Your inner sanctum is Frieze London. I’d enter the fair early on the preview day in the hope of scoping out booths before they were veiled by a curtain of air-kissing. The fair would be throbbing with human distractions. Even in a less charged setting there’s only so much art I can take in before I lose the ability to process it. Within a few hours, the engaged act of seeing would be replaced by blank-eyed perambulation. Thus, even while I was in the fair, I worried that I was missing out on it. I’d panic that I had not seen the right things, that I had failed to cover the essentials, that I had not received the piece of gossip that would direct me to the one unmissable thing that would compensate for my failure to look correctly. By the close of preview day, I’d have been brainwashed by white LEDs and overpriced poke bowls, unable to recall anything from my eight hours at the fair. The next morning’s deadline would shimmer horrifyingly close and, with it, the demand for opinions and analysis. Thank god for Instagram. Late into the night I’d relive the fair through other people’s feeds.
London Art October, ‘Art’ may be your middle name, but I no longer seem to see it. Under your influence, art becomes something to be experienced in the future, or too quickly to take in, or through somebody else’s eyes. It becomes ungraspable, impossible to engage with. I’d say we should stop seeing one another, but in truth, I think it’s been years since I saw you in any meaningful way at all. I’m taking a break. This year I have done right by my August. I shall float across the surface of September idly trailing a toe along the bottom of my overdraft. Come October, I will be ready to see art – to really see art. But this year, I’m seeing it in other cities.
Until next year. Maybe.
Hettie
From the October 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.