Cracks

They form where we don’t expect,

As we look into them, we fill with fear

But what if they’re the answer to all our problems…

We live in a world that hides the cracks, especially from those powerful enough to create them. That’s the architecture of control. Never let those who command the system see where it’s breaking.

What’s fascinating is how inverted the logic becomes. We don’t show our vulnerabilities to those who could plaster them. We perform strength. We overcompensate. We rehearse perfection.

The Art world is no different. Mini fiefdoms in converted mews. Serene, white-walled cathedrals in a chaotic city. But that’s just the frame. And frames are designed to hide what they exclude.

The cracks aren’t to be seen in the image. You’ll find them in the behavior. In the pause before a reply. In what gets left out of the press release. In what isn’t said when the collector walks in.

Scratch just beneath the surface and the system begins to blur.

The frame is never as strong as it looks.

LAW V: Control the Frame

The frame is the first fiction. Control it, and you control everything that follows.

This law is about perception. Not content. Context. Not truth. Structure. The frame decides what gets seen. What gets silenced.

• In art: the white wall, the caption, the price tag

• In media: the headline, the crop, the algorithm

• In politics: who speaks first. Who defines the language

• In life: the boundaries we accept before the conversation even begins

Every crack is evidence that the frame is warping.

Every subversive act begins by refusing the frame.

This week is about locating those fractures. Not as aesthetic defects, but as entry points. If you see a crack, don’t cover it. Follow it. It will lead you to the architecture beneath.

FRACTURE AS SIGNAL

Cracks don’t start as breaks.

They start as tension.

You feel it slip through your fingers. A kind of psychic draft. A pressure that shouldn’t be there.

And before it snaps, you already know.

Not with your mind, but with your body.

Something is about to give.

That’s the nature of a crack.

It doesn’t explode. It stretches.

It warns.

But we treat tension like threat.

Our instinct is to brace, to fix, to look away.

Because we’ve been taught to fear the fracture.

To see it as failure.

As damage.

As something that reflects poorly on us.

I’ve stopped believing that.

Now, when I crack

Under pressure,

Under weight,

Under expectation.

I don’t see it as the end.

I see it as a signal.

A friend stops replying.

A deal falls through.

I snap at someone I care about.

I burn out halfway through a build.

These are not just failures of execution.

They’re signals that the system I’m in, or the system I’ve built, isn’t working for what I’m trying to do.

And that’s valuable.

Cracks tell us how the structure is really behaving.

Where power is leaning too hard.

Where pressure is backing up with nowhere to go.

They remind me of earthquakes, how fault lines shift invisibly until they don’t.

One of the most absurd things I’ve ever read was about a nuclear power station built in California.

Right on the edge of a known fault.

As if the surface told the whole story.

As if we could just ignore what was happening underneath.

You can’t.

Cracks don’t lie.

They expose where we’ve been pretending.

And I get it, the world teaches us to smooth them over.

To plaster. To polish.

To kintsugi our trauma in gold and call it stronger.

But some cracks don’t want to be repaired.

They want to be seen.

Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth split the floor of the Tate Modern.

A deep, jagged crack down the middle of the Turbine Hall.

People walked around it.

Some tried to jump it.

Some stared into it.

That’s the moment I remember: not the sculpture, but the hesitation.

The way we’re trained not to fall.

Cracks make people nervous.

But for me, they’ve become something else.

An invitation.

To look deeper.

To see what’s underneath.

To stop pretending the world is whole when it isn’t.

Some cracks we recover from.

We patch them. We rebuild.

Other times we don’t.

Because what we found underneath was more honest than what we had before.

And once you’ve seen a crack clearly, you can never go back.

It becomes part of how you see.

How you feel.

How you frame what’s real.

Cracks aren’t flaws.

They’re fault lines.

They don’t show us what’s broken.

They show us what’s true.

THE FRAME IS THE FIRST FICTION

I love the art world. I love galleries. I really do.

But I’ve also learned that they are a system for control. They steady the market. The gallery: a temperature-controlled box. It protects the art. But it also contains the artist.

It’s soft power in action. A place to clean a name, elevate a profile, frame a narrative. And the dirtiest systems often look the cleanest.

In Shapolsky et al., Hans Haacke revealed how New York real estate empires were built and how museums were complicit. He showed who owned the frame.

Mona Hatoum’s installations come to mind too.

fragile containers that hum with the threat of collapse. They remind me that even domesticity can be a prison. Even love can become a trap.

When I look at British art, I think about national-level funding. About institutions we admire. There are certain galleries with such powerful reach that students at the top universities fight for a foot in the door. And yes, they show great artists. Yes, they offer a platform.

But that’s not the point.

The point is what happens when there’s no redundancy. When those are the only places that make a career viable. When every brilliant young artist has to contort themselves to pass through a single kind of gate. That’s where systems start to rot.

If the only way to become a top-tier artist is by following the prescribed route, eventually the route itself will destroy the very thing it claims to produce. Because someone will eventually notice the power held within it. And power, when hoarded, corrupts. Corruption cracks.

Art isn’t born in the system.

It grows through the cracks.

Art finds light in the dark.

And at the national level, I can’t ignore what the Trump administration is doing with art right now. Weaponizing beauty. Deploying culture. Not to uplift, but to erase. To scrub.

But it is a system. One owned and controlled by incumbents.

When a tool cracks, I can replace it.

Maybe even improve it.

That’s what tools are for .

extensions of a practice, not its core.

But when a system cracks, something else happens.

The tool doesn’t break.

The artist does.

Because when the scaffolding collapses,

it’s not the institution that hits the floor first.

It’s the people holding it up.

The artists. The curators. The believers.

We’ve been trained to lean on the system.

To let it shape the market.

To build for its approval.

To trust that exposure = survival.

And when that system cracks

when capital pulls out, or the headlines shift

it’s the most vital, most vulnerable parts that fracture first.

I’ve seen it before.

In music, artists like James Blake had to build new structures from the ground up.

They traded easy wins for long-term control.

They became their own infrastructure.

Harder route. But cleaner architecture.

Because once you control the frame,

you decide the scale of the work.

You decide what’s seen, what’s not.

You decide whether the crack is a flaw

or part of the design.

Do I need a massive stage?

Only if the concept demands it.

Marina Abramović didn’t.

Banksy doesn’t.

The work isn’t made bigger by the venue.

The venue is transformed by the work.

That’s the shift I’m seeing now.

The artist doesn’t need to become the institution.

They need to become the frame.

Because that’s what dictates what lasts.

WHEN THE SYSTEM BREAKS, THE ARTIST BLEEDS

When a tool breaks, I replace it.

Maybe I even improve it.

That’s what tools are for.

They serve me.

But when a system breaks, it’s different.

It’s not the tool that cracks.

It’s me.

It’s the artist.

It’s the assistant.

It’s the intern who believed in the idea.

It’s everyone holding the scaffolding while it collapses.

And the system?

It doesn’t bleed.

It shifts the blame.

It moves on.

It hires someone else.

That’s what happens when you lean on something that was never built for you.

It teaches you to comply, to adapt, to play the part .

and when it fails, it erases you.

Silently.

Efficiently.

Ashley Hunt mapped this dynamic in prisons .

but he was never just talking about jails.

He was talking about systems of surveillance.

Of control.

The gaze that flattens.

The institution that contains.

He showed how space

itself can be used to extract obedience.

How control rewrites geography.

Jenny Saville doesn’t paint bodies.

She paints pressure.

The pull. The distortion.

What happens when a person is looked at for too long.

What happens when the skin becomes the site of negotiation.

Between power and identity.

Between gaze and survival.

Tehching Hsieh once lived inside a cage for an entire year.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

It wasn’t performance. It was ritual.

No talking. No reading. No TV. No distractions.

Just time.

Passing.

Slow.

Immovable.

Measured by the discipline of his own will.

That’s what it feels like when a system breaks and there’s no backup.

You become the cage.

You become the guard.

You become the architect and the prisoner.

So I built something else.

Not to prove a point.

To survive.

I treat my studio like a startup.

I build. I show. I write.

I reach out. I share. I invite.

Every month I email the people who believe in what I’m doing.

Some become patrons.

Some become friends.

Some introduce others.

It’s not radical.

The Medici did it.

Startups have been doing it for years.

I’m doing it now.

My next show will be funded entirely by patrons and collectors.

Because if freedom is real, it needs to be designed.

Not declared.

Curators are equity advisors.

Collectors are early-stage backers.

Artists are not producers of objects.

They are founders of systems.

And I believe more than anything else that if something comes out of my practice, it should be tools for freedom.

We live in a world that knows how to monetise tools.

Startups. Algorithms. Scalability.

That’s all noise.

What matters now is something else.

Because in a world where intelligence is becoming free and where knowledge is no longer scarce

The next currency will be ideas about how to live.

Not what to know.

But how to exist.

And in that landscape, the explorer is not the entrepreneur.

It’s not the coder.

It’s definitely not the politician.

It’s the artist.

The one willing to bear everything.

To risk it all.

To live the idea to see if it works.

I believe in freedom.

And maybe, at the end of this, I’ll be destroyed.

Maybe none of it works.

But if I don’t try —

then no blueprint gets made

for the artists who are actually good

who are still coming

who deserve more.

And if you’re reading this, it’s because

you believe your life should be a little freer than it is.

And that maybe

you deserve a little more too.

CRACKS AS OPENINGS

Cracks are not defects. They are thresholds.

Japanese kintsugi teaches us this .

the repair becomes the value. The break is not hidden. It’s gilded. A record of survival, not shame.

I see it in Louise Bourgeois’s Cells .

small chambers of trauma, precisely arranged. Places where the damage is made visible. Intimate architectures of pain.

Sandra Chevrier paints superhero masks over the faces of women, binding them in graphic armor. But the beauty is in the fracture .

the moment the mask tears and the human slips through.

Lucio Fontana slashed his canvases. Alberto Burri let his surfaces break with time. Wangechi Mutu assembles hybrid women from fragmented materials. Doris Salcedo carved a fault line into the floor of the Tate.

These aren’t acts of destruction. They are gestures of trust.

Because in a world full of polished facades, the crack is the only honest part.

And lately, I’ve been seeing more of them.

A downturned art market.

Artists whose works sold for less than twenty thousand now going to auction for over a million .

with none of the upside returning to them.

Galleries producing what feels like mass-market art, branding the artist more than exhibiting the work. Not a judgment .

just an observation. If I was given that platform, I hope I’d do more with it.

But the bigger crack, the one widening daily, is this:

How do we increase the value of art in society without making it inaccessible?

How do we reach the public without simplifying the work?

My friends don’t go to galleries. Maybe the Tate. But the calendar? The rhythm? The logic of the art world? It doesn’t land unless you’re inside it. Speculator, collector, contributor .

or orbiting one of them.

And when art has to become entertaining to be digestible, we lose mystery. Purpose swallows intuition.

I’ve always learned by watching what works. We’re mimics. Meme machines. We imitate what we admire and call it our own.

So when I think about financing art, the closest working model I see is film.

It’s well capitalised. It understands cash flow. It builds infrastructure. It gets art made .

even if it’s sometimes obvious about how you should feel.

But when I speak to artists .

here, abroad, everywhere .

I hear the same line:

I don’t know how to get a show.

I don’t know how to fund my practice.

We all seem to be solving the same problem in isolation. And yet the solution offered is always the same:

Get picked. Get shown. Get paid.

But by who?

Your average independent gallery owner is significantly richer than your average independent artist. That’s just data. But that cannot be the only system available to us. Because that creates a loop.

I don’t love the word gatekeeper. It sounds like a job title. But if you are the one deciding what gets seen, what gets funded, what survives .

then you are the gate. And artists must bend to fit it.

That’s how you know a system is breaking: when the artist no longer defines it.

There must be a way to grow in unfertile soil.

Like a desert rose.

Without gardeners.

Because the systems we are offered are not built for us. They are built to contain us. And when they crack, they reveal the truth:

That artists have always grown in places they weren’t supposed to.

That beauty doesn’t come from design.

It comes from refusal.

That’s the crack I want to grow in.

That’s the one I trust.

POMPADOUR

One year ago, almost to the day,

I was installing a street intervention on the King’s Road with a wooden board and a bunch of screwdrivers in hand.

No assistants. No budget. No permission. Just an idea I believed in.

That moment was the beginning of my work in London.

Now, twelve months later, I am building something with more gravity.

The show is called Pompadour.

It is not housed in a gallery.

It is not backed by a museum.

It is not supported by institutions with deep pockets and deeper hierarchies.

It is being held in a grocery store. (the best grocery store in London, but nevertheless…)

And that is the point.

This show is funded entirely by patrons, collaborators, and collectors.

People who believed in the work before it was framed or priced.

People who did not need to be told it mattered.

I have no institutional support.

No safety net. My budget is twenty percent of what my last show received.

And I am already over it.

Still, this is the strongest example of the system I’m building.

Because the value of a show is not in its ceiling height.

It is in the soil it grows from.

It is in the people who gather around it.

It is in the energy it unlocks.

Pompadour is a bridgehead.

It is a foothold before the takeover.

I plan to win Chelsea in Bloom.

Not because I want a trophy.

But because I want access.

Access to real estate. Access to space.

So I can build the kind of shows that artists deserve.

I am flying in a florist from Texas whose work moves me.

I have invited poets and singer-songwriters to fill the opening night.

Not just because they are talented,

but because I believe an artist should build a space where others thrive.

It is one thing to succeed.

It is another thing entirely to build a world where your success feeds others.

That is what this show is about.

If you are an artist reading this,

you do not need permission.

You do not need a school.

You do not need a gallery.

You need a vision.

And the courage to walk into the fracture.

Because that crack,

that impossible gap between where you are and where you want to be,

is not proof that you are broken.

It is proof that there is something underneath worth breaking into.

This is the beginning.

One year from now, I will show Circus.

It is the culmination of this arc.

It is the show I have always planned.

Some of my patrons want it sooner.

But they understand what real things take.

In the meantime, Pompadour is the prototype.

The first bloom.

The test of everything I believe.

If you have felt what I am building,

if you see the world forming through Hot Girls Like Art,

come see Pompadour.

Watch it grow.

Details hwr

Poets Corner

Lowry's Burnden Park

Looking close enough;
The beating feet of faceless punters
Going to the match, beating cracks
Into pavements of paint.

Listening closely;
The marching steps
Break the smoothness of silence,
Cracking the canvas like a whip.

- Thomas May

Final words

Be kind, be free.

I love you loads.

Russ

x