Fried is bad for you. That’s why you want more.

ART FRIED® Contemporary culture, served hot. Read in one shot. Digest later. Fried food is bad for you. Everyone knows it. It’s excessive, heavy, probably a terrible basis for a balanced diet — and yet when something arrives hot, crisp and slightly dangerous, nobody is thinking about steamed vegetables. ART FRIED runs on roughly the same logic. This is not where art gets served with tweezers, stripped of fat and accompanied by four thousand words of curatorial restraint. We take something the culture has learned to treat as normal — an absurd price, an exhibition ritual, an aesthetic obsession, a gallery, an artist becoming a brand, the exhausting need to look contemporary — and leave it in the oil long enough to hear what starts crackling. Not to make art simpler, but to make it harder to ignore. Culture can be serious without constantly behaving as if someone has died. There is another problem with fried things: you usually want another one. A perfectly reasonable idea disappears quickly; a slightly indigestible one has a habit of staying with you. That is the point. ART FRIED is not interested in being right all the time, and provocation for its own sake gets boring almost immediately. The aim is to look at art, money, power, taste, fashion, the internet and all the strange little rituals surrounding culture with enough knowledge to earn the right to misbehave. Some of it may be good for you. Some of it definitely won’t be. But if you finish reading and feel absolutely nothing, we got the temperature wrong. The rest of the Editorial can feed you. This should occasionally fry you. Art. Culture. No cold takes.