Despite the quintessential plucky gallerist represented in many a media about ”life in the big city,” literature depicting the commercial art world, and doing it well, is far and few between.  Enter James Cahill, an academic, art critic, and one-time gallerina (a decidedly gender neutral term). The British writer, who currently lives stateside in Los Angeles, made a name for himself as a novelist in 2022 with his debut Tiepolo Blue, exploring the psychological tailspin of a Cambridge art historian preoccupied by Rococo frescoes, as the Young British Art movement of the 1990s begins to encroach on his aesthetic worldview. His sophomore outing, first published in 2025 and released in North America earlier this spring, plays out against the contemporary art scene thirty years on, going one rung down the rainbow with the T.S. Eliot-inspired title The Violet Hour. 

Three years after its Golden Lion win at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Sun & Sea arrived in London. The Lithuanian performance on climate change was brought to the British capital as a collaboration between We Are Lewisham Borough of Culture 2022, London’s International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) 2022, and the Serpentine Gallery’s Back to Earth programme on the climate emergency.  This multitude of producers from all corners of the London cultural sphere begged the question: “what exactly is it?”, as many people enquired when I mentioned my summer evening outing. In each context, it became a different art form. Was it a public community event for Lewisham council, a theatrical production for LIFT, or performance art for the Serpentine’s contemporary art audience? Perhaps the most successful description is an opera, the ‘total’ or ‘ultimate’ art form—a beach opera to be exact.