NFTs, Basquiats and a depressed Eeyore

Dear Londoners — welcome to your first ever culture edition of The Londoner. One of the best things about the capital is how there are always a billion things to see, read or gossip about. So, let our editor, Hannah, serve as the Virgil to your Dante, and lead you on an all-access Londoner tour of some of London’s most esteemed cultural institutions (and their toilets). We’re exploring whether the future of London’s gallery scene is an NFT-laden corporate events space, plus giving a rundown of the best shows, books and exhibitions; cherry-picking the juciest cultural headlines; and discussing that gossip about The Years. Oh, and about those toilets…

Culture diary

🖼️ During the building of Bloomberg’s European headquarters near Bank, the organisation uncovered the temple of Mithras, available to visit in a slick smoke-and-lights show under the offices. But they also discovered a staggering 14,000 Roman artefacts, which the company’s now gifted to the London Museum to display in their shiny new Smithfield site from autumn onwards, along with an endowment of £20m.

🦪 Six days after Bethnal Green’s beloved Vagina Museum warned that it may have to close, the institution has orchestrated a stay of execution, thanks to £70,400 raised via a GoFundMe campaign. Launched in 2019, the museum aims to create a feminist, LGBTQ+ friendly space to explore gynecological anatomy — but it’s already faced the threat of closure on multiple occasions. 

📖 London-based publishing platform Unbound has entered administration, leaving authors unsure of whether their books will be ever make it to print or when they’ll receive payments — one, Tom Cox, believes he’s owed “a five-figure sum”. The company has now been ‘bought’ by the newly-formed Boundless Publishing Group, which has pretty much the same people in charge as Unbound (and who, ironically, crowdfunded to form Boundless in the first place). 

Hot tips

THE SHOW
Manhunt, Dir: Robert Icke
Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, 28 March — 3 May 2025

Let’s just call it now: there is no way that Manhunt won’t be the most discussed play of the year. Firstly, it dramatises the search for fugitive murderer Raoul Moat, an event that in its violence, tragedy and sheer absurdity still seems to apotheosise British culture (no word on whether Gazza will make an appearance — after all, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction); secondly, it’s directed and written by Robert Icke, the darling of British theatre whose last play, Oedipus, was one the hottest tickets of 2024; and thirdly, because backing from Sonia Friedman Productions means it has some serious clout — not to mention cash — behind it. 

THE EXHIBITION
Peter Hujar, Eyes Open in the Dark
Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, 30 January — 6 April 2025

Tate, National Gallery, NPG: so far this year, none of the capital’s galleristic big dogs have topped the exhibition of American photographer Peter Hujar at the comparatively diminutive Raven Row — and I’m beginning to doubt any of them will. You can always tell which exhibitions have been anointed with the title of ‘must-see’ — breathless write-ups in pretty much every national, trade and freelancer Substack; fresh waves of Instagram pics every weekend; and, the real golden ticket, people urging you to go in real life — but the Hujar is more than just hype. It’s a sublime, devastating exploration of beauty, sex and gay identity in AIDS-era America. Go before it finishes in a couple of weeks. 

THE BOOK
Róisín Lanigan, I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There
Fig Tree, 20 March 2025

Proofs of this have been bandied around London literary events recently, swapped and exchanged and loaned like a kind of cultural currency. Usually, this means one of two things:  the book is very good and people are jealous and want to see for themselves; or the book is very bad and people are gloating and want to see for themselves. Luckily, Lanigan’s is the former; a haunted house story set in the contemporary London rental market, a demonic enough experience even without any supernatural interference. After moving in with boyfriend Elliot, protagonist Áine finds herself trapped — legally, financially, emotionally — in a flat that feels increasingly off. Expect to see this in the hands of every tote-bag-and-baseball-cap-wearing millennial you see on the tube. 

NFTS, Basquiats and a depressed Eeyore: Is Moco the future of London's galleries?

I reach the NFT room a little over halfway through my trip around Moco Museum, by which I mean after Daniel Arsham’s Lunar Garden, a brittle, baby-pink take on a Japanese garden whose plastic flowers and harsh lighting supposedly represent “the cosmic balance between the temporary and the eternal”, and before the Endless Realities room, a sort of cod-Kusama mirrored light show that asks us to “visual the unseen dimensions of existence”. Six LED screens illuminate the room. On one, co-made by socialite Paris Hilton, a love-bed twinkles in a miasma of fuchsia clouds; on another, clumsily rendered likenesses of US celebrities and political figures are pasted onto twitching AI-generated robot bodies. On the wall, an explanation of NFTs morphs into a mission statement: “it’s the future of digital art!” The cumulative effect of these works is anaesthetising, a post-E133 stupor, an aspartame crash.  

It’s easy to be snide about this kind of work, this kind of gallery. But I’m here to understand why it is that these kinds of experiential, immersive galleries have become ever-more popular just as publicly funded art institutions are fighting for their existence after over a decade of funding cuts, with redundancies looming at both Tate and the Royal Academy. Put simply: is Moco the future of the capital’s gallery scene?