Mo-Leeza Roberts s novel Head is like an existential Dickens or satirical version of the film Salo, written, directed and starred in by Barbara Gladstone. Roberts, both critical and complicit, describes a desperate future that clusters around the Head Gallery like cockroaches around a pig s head. She remakes the art world into a sci-fi tale populated by curatorial artspeak, artists, collectors, hanger-ons and other artworld actors who explode in ecstasy, pain or self-induced eradication all according to the whims of Head Gallery, an anonymous and inviolate force, overseer of events and selfless accumulator of prestige and wealth. Familiar contemporary artists are reanimated in this imaginative and darkly humorous future, giving the events described an unsettling familiarity. The Head Gallery is based in New York and Shanghai and operates between 2078 and the present.
Grotesque, hallucinogenic, sardonic, extreme; feral, carnal, problematique, stoopid; brain-batteringly absurdist skewering of Western decline and a post-climate collapse euro-delulu-centric art world, baby. RIYL Up Your Ass (?); honestly no idea what to compare this to. See you in the Head Gallery.
If you make it to page 12 you'll already be wondering what kind of LCD/Acid fuelled molestation-flashback the author was experiencing at the time while writing.