Art | Culture | Ideas

Portfolio

Here is a selection of my work.

Get in touch if you like what you see
 

Irresistible Digital Gloop – Charlie Stein: Virtually Yours

Review for FAD Magazine, 2023


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Careless Words are So Lightly Thrown

Essay, 2023


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So Here is the Sea, but Where are the Sharks?

Review for FAD Magazine, 2023


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Gavin Turk’s Reimagining of Richter

Interview for Trebuchet, 2022


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Fantasies of Eternity

Essay for Trebuchet, 2022


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The Time I Was Famous

Column for Winq, 2016


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ART

Critical Theory

CULTURE

Cultural Memoir

IDEAS

Philosopical Analysis

From the blog

manuscript of the novel Dive Boy by Daniel Barnes

An extract from my first novel

Luke drops out of uni, befriends his cocaine dealer, and gets a boyfriend. Everything’s going so, at least until well until it starts going wrong.

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3, January 2024 0

In the Midst of Life, Morrissey is in Debt, etcetera

As a lifelong Morrissey fan, it has become difficult in recent years to defend him and even more difficult to like him. Now it seems like as if there is no going back because the music that he constantly plays says nothing to me about my life.

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28, August 2023 0
front cover for sounds like fun by bryan morarity published by hodder queer books

Bryan Moriarty, Sounds Like Fun – review

A funny, heart-warming story about what happens when a pair of twentysomethings embark on an open relationship.

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30, March 2023 0

Work in progress

Forgotten Promises: Encounters with Damien Hirst

In this work of narrative nonfiction, I use a mixture of critical theory and cultural memoir to construct a defence of Damien Hirst. I chronicle my obsession with Hirst and explore how his work has shaped my aesthetic and intellectual development. 


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manuscript of the novel Dive Boy by Daniel Barnes

Dive Boy: a novel

My first, and perhaps only, novel tell the story of Luke, who drops out of a philosophy degree, befriends his cocaine dealer and gets a new boyfriend all in the same week. Everything is going so well until Luke gives in to temptation and then does the worst of all possible things to cover it up. His boyfriend is oblivious and has his own secret to keep.


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a man looks at an abstract painting in a gallery

Here We Are Now: Essays on Culture, Music and Memory

Essays about the link between pop music and autobiography.


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Book

The Value Industry

find out morebuy it from amazon

My personal library

Check it out

Talks, tours and lectures

Find out about my artist talks, gallery tours and public lectures on art and philosophy.

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Latest events

Q&A with Daniel James, author of ‘The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas’

 Gallery 46, London, 11 June 2022.

Gallery Tour and Artist Talk with Celina Teague & Richard Stone

Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, 14 May 2022.

 

Curating

Strange Love

Bankley Gallery, Manchester, 2018

Here Comes the Flood

Euroart, London, 2016

Benedict Redgrove: Everything & Nothing

Display Gallery, London, 2015

Richard Stone: the end of england

Galleries Goldstein, London, 2012

Contact me about curating opportunities
installation view of richard stone the end of england at galleries goldstein
 
About me

Daniel Barnes

philosopher, writer, teacher

I was born on the Isle of Wight in the year that both Jean Baudrillard’s ​​​’Simulacra and Simulation’ and Arthur Danto’s ‘The Transfiguration of the Commonplace’ were published.

After an unremarkable childhood spent reading, listening to music and dreaming of stardom, I trained as a philosopher at Cardiff and Nottingham. My PhD defended an unfashionably strict form of aesthetic realism and offered a resolution to the Heidegger/Schapiro debate over the meaning of van Gogh’s ‘A Pair of Shoes’.  Although I have long since departed academia, I consider philosophy to be the primary occupation in my writingfor I am less concerned with reporting, describing or informing than I am with the interrogation of ideas and furthering a critical understanding of why we produce and enagage with art and culture.

The restless life of the mind, eternally searching for intellectual challenge in the grip of capitalism, has led me along varied paths. I have worked as a curator, gallery invigilator, bookshop assistant, freelance art critic and proofreader, but teaching and writing have been my staples. I have written for FAD Magazine and Trebuchet, Aesthetica, this is tomorrow, Spoonfed, ArtSlant, Tirade, Platea and Winq. My book, The Value Industry, is available from amazon.

My work is a fusion of contemporary art, popular culture and philosophy, resulting in a unique form of cultural memoir and criticism. For the last decade or so I have been working on a book that chronicles my encounters with Damien Hirst and explores how his work has shaped my aesthetic and philosophical outlook. I am also working on a collection of essays about about the link between pop music and memory.

Art | Culture | Ideas

 

Contact me

 Ask me anything, offer me work, tell me something interesting