Ever routinely watch cartoons on Saturday mornings (specifically Wile E Coyote vs Road Runner or Tom vs Jerry)? Ever spend a couple of hours in a jail cell minus your skateboard & trouser belt? Ever wallowed in the post-exhibition blues for weeks on end? Well, this trifecta of trauma was resurrected from my X Generation childhood, teenage years & current middle-age after reading Anti-Ligature Rooms by Contemporary Art Writing Daily, the anonymous blog that has been sleigh-riding on the hollow marrowless carcass of art criticism since 2014, when art criticism proper finally died following the extinction burst of panel obituaries on its demise (circa 2009), the same year I adopted the role of art critic with equal amounts of pleasure, pain & ignorance. Published by Plea & Cabinet in 2020, this book's timing couldn't be more perfect. Just take the title, Anti-Ligature Rooms: a room that's been suicide-proofed like the aforementioned jail cell & Wiley E Coyote of my youth — how many times did Wiley E find himself falling from those death valley cliffs to become a puff of smoke to then masochistically rise again to enter the same existential loop alamed by that skeleton jingling "BEEP BEEP." This glossy & lossy (look it up!) pink pill of a book is swallowed at the same time humanity jack's up & a good pharmaceutical empire is created, borne on the wave of a virus that just keeps giving & going & rabbiting on like Duracell Bunny Graham Harmen who told us to bet everything on objects. When this pink pill kicks in Road Runner's BEEP BEEP goes flatline, Barbie develops melanoma, the artworld looks like a dead zoo behind Marcel Broodthaers one-way glass, & the only peep show in town is Marx & Freud making a baby named “Anhedonia” (look it up!).