People Person, guest publication - Sam Cottington and JOAN Publishing

Description

If you were to overhear us, you might have thought that we hated art.
We rarely had anything nice to say about it, and many of us even appeared to delight in the failures of artists. A wide sneering smile glimmered over Olivia’s shoulder as she looked back at Lee from across the room, filled up with gloat, mousy roots poking through her halo of blonde, eyes made dark with bruisey eye shadow. She laughed at the art show, dismissing it with forced irreverent giggles, returning to the memory throughout the night even whilst everyone else had moved on. ‘My god it was shite!’ To her it was plain to see what a joke this whole situation was, an explanation wasn’t necessary (not that she could desperately muster one). We did like art.
We didn’t masochistically force ourselves to keep up to date with something that we hated. We just didn’t like the way art made us feel, and so we brushed the feelings of incredulity off our bodies.


‘Sam Cottington’s prose is keen and conspiratorial, ‘the metropolitan equivalent of curtain twitching’, and his cast of characters elbow each other under it like flies banging on glass. ‘In the opening between lives and personalities there are no words’ he writes. Only there are words: they are in this savage, shimmering book, and its pages flare with how skilfully Cottington has caught them. Scintillatingly quick. I loved it.’

– Hannah Regel


‘A delirious story of listless anxiety, lost nights and half-remembered fucks, when art school isn't enough but life seems all too much.’

– Huw Lemmy