I was in London this week where I stayed two nights in the St Giles Hotel next to Tottenham Court Road station. It’s a brutalist design. I’ve never gotten anything out of brutalism except a bad mood, fully body graze. This was a concertina of rough concrete that made strips all around the outside in a way that reminded me of the vertical blinds in a therapist’s office. You know how that colour gets heavy once it’s soaked up years of bad memories? This hotel always looks like it’s just been rained on even when the weather’s playing nice.

There was a tourism scheme in the 70s that meant developers received subsidies based on the amount of rooms they could cram into hotel architecture. That’s why the concrete’s folded like it is. It’s also why I couldn’t connect to the Wi-Fi or get any signal on my phone to hotspot. Staff slipped A4 under my door on day two to let me know the water had been turned off. I saw it after I woke to building work in the room next door, or the one above me. The hammering stopped whenever I poked my head out the door to investigate so it all began to feel a bit Shirley Jackson. I left with my raincoat and just tried to avoid the room at all costs.

Those costs, though, got annoying fast. Because I looked in some obvious shops and ate food that tasted far away. I considered seeing art but when I looked at what was on, everything was gegging on the Frieze hangover, and well, Frieze is not for me.

When visual art is passed through commercial mechanisms, it ceases to exist. I can still see it’s there but I can’t feel it anymore, as if the relationship between us has ended. They’ve moved to another city. They’ve got different friends these days. Exchanged at a fair or packaged in the back room of a small gallery in the middle of London, it’s art that becomes decoration instead. That, or a gold bar to trade in the future. And these are impossible and unfair things to feel in a world where the private sale of art is the only viable career ladder for contemporary artists, and yet I still think it is so deeply uncool I like to pretend that business doesn’t go on.

The rain was stop-start all day, and I was walking even though I wanted to walk less. Long Covid told me to go lie down in the haunted hotel, but then I found a real exhibition only a dogleg away.

At the Architectural Association’s gallery, in the front room of a Georgian terraced house in Bloomsbury, I went to see the maps Ursula K Le Guin drew of her many fictional worlds before she got on with the work of writing their stories. A lot of the maps had never been exhibited but by the time I left, I felt like they still hadn’t. I was so turned off by the choice to take the drawings and reprint them on cyanotype flags that were hanging through the space. Each one had the white shadows of ferns across the top so that the work came off like twee bunting. It was more ideas made decoration, when so much of Le Guin’s anarchic writing was about the very opposite.

So I guess I was already losing my mind by the time I reached Outernet. I wasn’t aiming for it, but I had ran out of legs and it’s the only place where you can sit down for free, under shelter, all along that main London vein. If you’re not familiar, at one end of Oxford Street, opposite a pop-up for frozen yoghurt sold out of a double decker bus, you can walk under an open air gallery that’s basically just big screens. It’s a tent of 360° floor-to-ceiling 8K screens stitched together that cycle through different contributions by artists.

Fucking Outernet. Images slide and stretch across the inside like a showreel of IMAX screensavers, but where IMAX can get confrontational and grand, Outernet is a digital aquarium where all the fish are dead.

I walked in on an animation by Jesse Woolston of white polystyrene-looking balls thrown together against a colour-changing background. It took on the vague image of sea foam at one point. It also just looked like anything anyone could run in a particle simulator. You know sometimes when we’re at the famous intersection of art and technology, it’s like viewing software demonstrations and it just so happens an artist is giving the powerpoint? I caught my breath and checked my phone instead.

When I saw the light change, I looked up and there was a shower of emojis shooting out from a heart in the ceiling. There was copy in one corner of the biggest screen letting me know it wasn’t an artwork, it was a celebration for Black History Month. The whole scene was very Apple Store all of a sudden, and when I sent a picture to a friend, she messaged back asking if it was 2008, and like —

I can’t be arsed describing the rest. There was plankton and some mouse-trap chain reaction loops in the style of the Internet’s favourite satisfying videos. All of it bright and giant and I saw it in the daytime and I walked back through at night where tourists flocked like moths. I saw jaws literally drop. I heard the word ‘beautiful’ over and over again in different languages. There was a vendor in one corner selling ice cream and San Pellegrino. I heard a man explain that this was actually only the entrance to a music venue below. I got roped into taking a photo of two women with digital flowers behind them. More beautiful, so beautiful, wow. It wasn’t dead to them at all. So why could I not feel it?

If I looked up from my phone and saw Ursula’s maps four stories high, I still wouldn’t like it. I blame this part of London. The commercial staging. The molten core. The gold cladding around Outernet. The place that’s not about feeling good, it’s only about wringing money out of people in all these different ways.

I can’t take art seriously here because it’s like, why would you put the thing you made in such a terrible place? And I could say the same about the art in commercial galleries and art fairs, may it rest in peace; and I could ask the Circa exhibitors on that wraparound screen in Piccadilly Circus round the corner if they grew up dreaming of making Capital City Art. I think the centre of London is haunted beyond the brutalist walls of my weird hotel.

And I know it’s not a neat complaint. I love public art and the way it inserts itself into landscapes and confronts unsuspecting audiences. But this is a series of screensavers opposite a Uniqlo. I want art that disrupts. The world is so hard. It’s on track to hell and I want art that knocks it off those rails, even if it eventually carries on — even if it’s only to slow things down and make it difficult for the people in power. Yanno? It’s not fair of me to expect that from art on big screens on Oxford Street but it’s why there’s so much distance between us. Because really, I don’t know if I care about beauty right now. I have no need for decoration.

It’s nearly eleven and tourists are still emerging out of the dark. I’m done with screens for the day. I go back to the black hole of the hotel where my phone is a brick, and the next day I feel terrible and cancel plans to get the early train back home.