Things are critical

In a way this writing will be unjust. It’s not doing its job. It’s not fair. The proposition was to write about Nothing Personal, a publication much needed in Glasgow, a space to talk critically about the scene, the work and the contexts that surround us. And maybe it will talk about that a little or maybe this is about me and them saying the same thing, because it’s important, especially now, to keep saying it. Maybe this is less of a deep dive and more of a channeling of their intention.

The capacity to write this has escaped me. It’s late, it’s half formed, it doesn’t do the moment justice. I find being succinct at times like this devoid. I respect other writers for being able to do it better. I’m exhausted and I know everyone else is too. There is a way of writing things which means it could be ever relevant, hopefully this writing is not that. We are in a moment of profound specificity, and I never want to write or make in a moment like this again. A fuckshow to end all fuckshows, the world at large, this city and our art scene are collapsing around us, despite the best efforts of many.

The thing that re-occurs to me, while thinking of this proposition, thinking of Nothing Personal, is, what use is criticality at times like this? Why is it important to push for this at a time when the world explodes in deeply oppressive and unfathomably violent ways every day? Why, at this stage of shared loss, grief, and hopelessness, is criticality still vital?

For me, it’s like asking why it is it vital to tell the person you love that their outfit is bad, even though they are really excited about it, and they got it for a really special evening. The answer to this is simple, because of love. Because you never want to see a person you love go down like that. You want to see them go down at their best, on their own terms.

Then, how at this moment in time can we be critical? How can we do it ethically, in a way that won’t be weaponised by councils and governments, in a way that won’t weaken us by infighting? I don’t know, but we need to work it out. There is solidarity in criticality, so long as it’s not cheap, it’s not lazy and it’s not surface.

I want enough galleries and spaces in this city that I can walk into at least one per week and think the show is utter shite without the fear that if I voice that it means it will shut down tomorrow. I want to go to a show that is so dumb and the friend that I visit with thinks it is so life-changing that when we get into the guts of arguing about it in the pub people around us start to think we will never speak again. I want to drink five red wines while we have that argument. I want to go to a student show where the work feels so on the cusp of something, but isn’t quite ready and everyone feels embarrassed about it, and that’s ok. I want to look at artists from my community, a place of working-class experience, and say I don’t agree and have my arguments for that listened to and considered without it being read as an infighting attack due to the scarcity of opportunity afforded to us. I want this for all the other marginalised practices too. I want to tell an artist-led space they aren’t doing enough and be proved wrong. I want to tell an artist-led space they are doing too much and be proved right. I want to have screaming rows in my kitchen with my friends over whether an artist in our scene is good or not, whether a space in our city is cool or not and for none of us to agree, and for the personal slights we make about each other’s work incidentally throughout the course of the night all to be forgotten in the morning. I want there to be enough trust in our community for criticality to be experienced in good faith – which is a utopian idea I know – and something that really requires a lot of work. I want this to not sound like I’ve ripped off ‘I want a dyke for president’, which is purely accidental. I want to be in an art scene that is not so under the thumb of the council that it is so scared of being political, or big, or sexy or grimy that it just becomes innocuous, ineffective and dull.

To be critical well is more than giving something a real slagging, it’s about feeling so strongly about something you want it to be better, and making a commitment for that to be so. It’s about critiquing from a lateral position, rather than one of hierarchy and privilege – not criticality through domination, academic or otherwise. Being critical through vulnerability, by being able to say, sometimes I don’t get it, not because it’s too difficult but because the work didn’t work hard enough, maybe because it didn’t have the opportunity to do so or it just doesn’t know itself enough yet to allow me in. To have space for artists to show work that does fuck up, does fail, doesn’t work, because we have enough resource to do that, and crucially we all know work needs to fail sometimes without it putting the artist or the institution on a knife edge. Clarity is so essential in criticality. Now more than ever it is so urgent that people say what they mean.

This can all only happen if we live in a city where what we do is valued, given space and trusted without having to continually justify and self-advocate and hit metrics and try to flatten what we do into a rigid report for Glasgow Life, all while scratching around for tiny pockets of funding.

I’m aware this turned into a rant and nothing more. That it’s another example of things being so bad that we can’t focus on the task in hand, or the thing that is supposed to get the attention being pivoted into the broader community tragedy. So, I apologise to Nothing Personal, and take responsibility for that. They really did do something new and much needed and they did it well, and I hope, in time, that we can build a landscape where it can come back and agitate in the way it intended. Like so many other spaces and projects now gone or paused in Glasgow, I miss it.

Lisette May Monroe is a Glasgow-based artist and writer from Kippax, Leeds. She regularly writes art criticism and opinion for Frieze, The Guardian, Elephant and Tank. She is also co-director of Rosie’s Disobedient Press alongside Adrien Howard. Her solo exhibition, Hard Lines, will open in June as part of Glasgow International 2026.

Nothing Personal is a biannual magazine for art, essays and reviews, based in Glasgow.