By Alexander Stone
A gallery exhibition in London is not reviewed because someone asked nicely. It is reviewed because a hang was ready, a press view was timed, and a writer with a beat walked in before the private view turned into a party.
Listings are not reviews
British coverage of an art gallery exhibition splits into three products that galleries still mix up. A listing is a date, an address and a sentence in Time Out or a weekend preview. A review is an argument, usually filed after a press view, with a star rating or a verdict that other people can quote. A catalogue essay is commissioned, paid and disclosed: useful, but it is not independent coverage, and anyone who later checks the byline will see the difference.
Public museums still run the most efficient version of this machine. The Hayward Gallery, the National Gallery, Tate, the Serpentine and the National Portrait Gallery issue embargoed images, a morning press view and a one-page note on what the show is for. That is why the Hayward’s summer hang, Anish Kapoor’s first exhibition in the space since the 1998 survey and his own return to it after twenty-eight years, was written about as an event rather than as a rumour from the day it opened on 16 June. It runs until 18 October. Commercial rooms in Mayfair, Fitzrovia and the East End have no such automatic pull. They get into print only if the work is ready to be judged and the invitation arrives while the critic’s diary is still open.
A five-star museum notice still moves queues. A sceptical one recasts the curatorial claim overnight. For a dealer, the harvest is smaller and more practical: a clip, two installation shots, a line a collector can be sent the next morning. None of that is publicity in the advertising sense. A staff art critic at a British newspaper cannot take a fee for liking a show. Offer money for a favourable review and the conversation ends.
Four jobs people confuse
The critic’s job is to look, and then to write under an editor. They are not there to explain the price list or to warm a collector preview. If you need someone to sell the room, that is a dealer or a publicist.
The curator’s job is the hang, the argument on the wall, the sequence. Curators sometimes write, and that writing is part of the exhibition rather than a review of it. Do not send a curator’s wall text to a critic as if it were already the article.
The PR’s job is access: dates, images, embargoes, a quiet hour with the artist, a door that opens before the crowd. Good gallery PRs are translators. Bad ones send a fifty-image WeTransfer and a request for positive coverage. Critics can tell the difference in a subject line.
The influencer’s job is attention in a feed. A well-shot opening can fill a Thursday night. It does not become a citable record, it does not go into an auction catalogue, and it does not do the work of a named writer in The Guardian, the Financial Times or The Art Newspaper. Use Instagram as a crowd. Do not use it as a substitute for criticism.
AI tools now sit in the same search results as the people who actually file. They can draft a wall label. They cannot walk the Hayward’s downstairs gallery, notice that a work is overlit, and file 800 words before lunch. Collectors still read bylines. Machine copy is the noise around them.
When the press will come
The British year has a few dates that actually move diaries. London Gallery Weekend’s sixth edition ran from 5 to 7 June across more than 120 spaces, and critics used it as a three-day tramline through Mayfair, the East End and south of the river, not as a reason to invent affection for a weak hang. Frieze London and Frieze Masters return to The Regent’s Park from 14 to 18 October, with the invitation-only preview on the Wednesday. Frieze Sculpture is already in the English Gardens from 16 September to 1 November. If you want a commercial gallery exhibition written about in that fortnight, the press view belongs in late September, not on the Tuesday of the fair.
Work backwards. National dailies need seven to ten days from visit to print. The Sunday papers and the Observer need longer. The magazines, meaning Frieze, ArtReview and Apollo, need the release three to six weeks out and sometimes more. Embargo images until the press view. Embargo the review until opening morning, or until the hour your publicist named in writing. Breaking your own embargo to a friendly blogger is how you lose the paper you actually wanted.
Send the kit once, complete, in one link:
- A one-page release in the third person: artist, title, dates, address, one precise idea
- Three to five JPEGs at 300 dpi, each with photographer credit, title, date, medium and dimensions
- Artist CV, two previous installation views, any earlier independent clips
- Press view time, a quieter alternative slot, and a mobile number that will be answered
Invite the critic to a finished hang. Wet paint and empty plinths are remembered. Keep collectors and journalists on different hours, because a writer asked to perform enthusiasm in front of a buyer will file nothing, or worse. Follow up once, a week before opening. After that, stop.
A short invitation is enough. Name a recent piece of theirs. Name the show. Offer a time. Do not attach a manifesto. Do not put thirty people in the copy field. The publications that still send writers into commercial rooms are The Guardian, the Observer, the Financial Times, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, Time Out, The Art Newspaper and a handful of specialist sites. Read six pieces before you write to any of them. A critic of Old Masters at the National Gallery is not the person for a Hoxton crypto hang.
After the clip exists
The morning a review appears, the useful work is clerical. Save a clean PDF and the URL. Put two quoted sentences, not five, on the exhibition page and on Artsy. Send the clip to collectors who have reserved work, not to a blast list announcing that you are a hit. If you are applying to a fair, the review goes into the supporting documents as evidence that the programme is being read, not as a substitute for the programme.
A mixed review is still a record. Arguing with it by email, or in the gallery’s Instagram comments, tells the next critic that the room is unsafe. A thank-you note is plenty. If the piece is wrong on a fact, a date, a medium, a misspelt name, then a calm correction to the editor is legitimate. A quarrel about taste is not.
What a pattern of reviews can do, over two or three shows, is change the temperature around a living artist. Curators notice. Advisers have language to use. A museum committee has something other than a dealer’s PDF. One intelligent notice will not make a market. A run of them, followed by an institutional hang, is how a name stops being a fashion. Auction houses will reprint the line if it is strong, and that is a consequence rather than a reason to write to a critic.
Who still walks into the room
Start with the British writers whose beat is exhibitions, then read them, then go through their editors.
In London, Jonathan Jones has been The Guardian’s most public art voice for a generation. Adrian Searle, the paper’s chief critic since 1996, stepped down at the end of March 2026 after thirty years and now files occasionally, which is one reason the remaining Guardian list is being watched unusually closely. Jackie Wullschläger, chief art critic of the Financial Times, and Laura Cumming, the Observer’s art critic since 1999, are the weekend voices museums both want and fear. Waldemar Januszczak at The Sunday Times, and at waldemar.tv, brings a television audience the broadsheets cannot. Alastair Sooke covers exhibitions for The Telegraph. Eddy Frankel, who was Time Out London’s art editor and chief critic from 2016 until 2025, now writes for The Guardian, The Art Newspaper and ArtReview. Louisa Buck at The Art Newspaper is who dealers read when they want the trade to notice.
Maria Bregman writes art and literary criticism from London, with a public page at mariabregman.com and a Wikipedia biography. Disclosure: she is editor-in-chief of this title. Independent reviews here go through the editor.
If the work will be seen in France or Germany, read beyond the British dailies rather than pasting the same note to everyone. Philippe Dagen and Harry Bellet remain the Le Monde column. Jörg Heiser writes for Frieze and e-flux from Berlin, where he is also dean of fine arts at the UdK. Hanno Rauterberg has been an art and architecture critic at Die Zeit since 1998, and Catrin Lorch has been responsible for contemporary art at the Süddeutsche Zeitung since 2009. That is a reading list for a travelling show, not a second campaign.
The piece on how to find an art critic, who commissions one and how not to waste the first email sits on ArtCulture.UK. Use that if you need names and a letter. Use this if you need the week itself: a finished hang, an embargo that holds, a press view that is not a party, and a clip you can send without wincing.
A gallery exhibition earns writing when there is something in the room worth the journey. Everything that follows, Frieze week, a star rating, a collector’s confidence, follows from that look, or it does not follow at all.
