Floating Opera Press

Thank you to Susanne Christensen () for featuring “Against Morality” in your contribution to Vagant ()’s 2025 roundup. We’re grateful for the inclusion – scroll below to read the English translation.

This year’s longing for new horizons

Most of us will probably emerge from 2025 quite anxious and exhausted by war and misfortune in the world. In the art world, waves of emotion are building up that lead to a kind of institutional self-sabotage. Here, rigid concepts arise from a notion that art is first and foremost a political tool with the primary mission of creating justice in the world. Worse, political activism seems to be accompanied by a certain drought of ideas.

The American art critic Dean Kissick, who in 2024 published the Harper’s essay “The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art,” said in June 2025 in an interview with Kunstkritikk’s Louise Steiwer: “I’m not saying that art shouldn’t be political. I’m talking about a certain type of very hollow and performative, actually fake, political art that has become enormously dominant. I don’t think it’s a conservative or reactionary position to criticize these.”

Not long after the publication of Kissick’s essay, the London-based art critic Rosanna McLaughlin published a pamphlet entitled Against Morality on the small Berlin-based publishing house Floating Opera Press. In this contribution to the publisher’s Critic’s Essay Series, she calls for art that “transcends simple moralizing in order to speak to the complex and messy reality of what it is to be alive” – and that call is not hard to subscribe to, is it? We put on our sunglasses with anticipation and look towards 2026: Will some new ideas and possibilities emerge?

What a thrill to see not one, but two of our titles appear in the latest issue of The Whitney Review of New Writing . Huge thanks to Kevin Champoux and Oscar Yi Hou for their pieces on “A Q***r Theory of the State” and “Against Morality.” We’re always happy to see our books finding new readers.

📚 NEW SERIES: On the Curatorial

More than ten years ago, the idea of “the curatorial” emerged from an intense debate about what it means to curate exhibitions. The On the Curatorial series revisits the consequences of that discussion today – asking whether we need new curatorial tools to engage with deepening social, political, and ecological crises.

Edited by Carolina Rito, professor of creative practice research at Coventry University and executive editor of Contemporary Journal, the series brings together voices from different generations of curators: those reflecting on how their practices have evolved, and those shaping new conceptual approaches to curation today.

The first title, On Discourse and the Curatorial by Mick Wilson, explores how the impulse to transform exhibition experience into words – rooted in the salon culture of three centuries ago – remains central to contemporary curatorial practice.

Available now!

A little star power for “Against Morality” ✨ Rosanna McLaughlin’s book appears in Travis Diehl’s new Libra Season piece. Snippet below – full read in bio.

Should art be governed by political ideals?

Join us on July 23 at ICA London for the UK launch of Against Morality by East Sussex-based writer Rosanna McLaughlin: an incisive critique of the ways a homogenous set of liberal political values came to dominate contemporary art over the past decade.

Drawing on recent exhibitions, artworks and films – as well as responses to them – McLaughlin explores the flattening effect this moral turn has had on cultural output, and the limitations it has placed on the way art is produced, presented and discussed.

In arguing against the dominance of morality in art, she opens the door to a more expansive understanding of difference, and the value of creativity, in 21st-century art making.

McLaughlin will be in conversation with cultural critics Dean Kissick and Rebecca Liu . Reserve your tickets now via the link in bio.