Obiter Dicta: An accidental conversation between visitors at Frieze London 2025 by Alexa Wright

This isn’t going to be a long one (I’ve got ten minutes before I need to be out the door and I’ve gotta work on my typing speed and I don’t want to have to come back to this next week uh oh) but this isn’t about a long publication.

Piece of Paper Press is a playful and now 22-year-old micro-press run by the acclaimed novelist Tony White. The premise is simple and the premise is great: writers and artists have the opportunity to create and release absolutely anything with the press they want, provided it can all fit onto a single piece of A4 paper that can then be cut up and stapled into a 16 page tiny booklet. Some of the pieces are micro-essays (see my thoughts on Susana Medina’s publication about the late David Bowie here), some are short artist books containing images from a deliberate project (see my thoughts on Sheena Rose’s HOME IS ON MY MIND… here, though do avoid the footnotes as I (scott manley hadley) was in a VERY BAD PLACE when I read that one), some contain poems, some short stories, anything really, that can be put onto a page and printed.

And what that means is that Tony White has created and curated this fascinating set of thoughts and ideas across decades, alongside his writing career and practice. Some of these pamphlets are writers or artists doing something new, sometimes doing something very different from their usual practice, and sometimes testing their own limits as a creative. It’s great and inspiring and exciting, and I’ve had a thoroughly good time with all of the ones I’ve been lucky enough to read!¹

Obiter Dicta: An accidental conversation between visitors at Frieze London 2025 is an artist’s book, and is keenly and engagingly designed. It combines snatches of text – all overheard moments of conversation from the Frieze art fair, with some depersonalised photographs (or crops from photographs?) of people in attendance.

The visual elements we get show hands and shoes and the creases of fabric when a person sits down on a bench… We see clothing and jewellery and the outfits people wear, the outfits people choose to wear, as they browse this art fair both famous and infamous.²

The snatches of language are both familiar and cheeky… bouncing from what could be considered pretentious or achingly middle class, through to the blunt and the direct and the unappreciated… The commerce of the art industry is laid bare, the way in which art and culture is commodified and fetishised as both an investment in financial and cultural capital terms is emphasised…

It’s funny and knowing without being aggressive or mean; it’s teasing without being bullying, yet it’s also not really pandering or offering any kind of glamorisation of the art market any more than the art market does itself.

In personal (and occasionally professional (not as an artist)) capacities, I’ve spent a lot of time in art galleries and at art fairs and these are all things I’ve heard and maybe – when the free champagne (I mean it’s usually only prossecco at the openings I get invited to) has been distributed a little too efficiently – it’s even full of things that I’ve said.

It’s a fun publication to read as someone who’s been within and around the art world, and I imagine must have been a fun project to collate for the artist/writer.

It’s playful, it’s cheeky and it’s an enjoyable cultural product. A perfect match for the Piece of Paper Press format, which really does do a lot of interesting and – they key point – enjoyable things.

I hope Tony White continues putting these publications out for another couple of decades at least – it’s great to see a micro-press that hasn’t lost sight of its mission, its format and where and how it wants to sit in the socio-cultural world.

A great addition to the series, a series of publications I love.

More details here – I’d recommend you join the mailing list, like I have, so you can maybe try to beat me to a copy of the next one!

I’ve definitely got a couple more I haven’t blogged about somewhere, too… ↩︎
In my professional capacity as a high-end events manager, I’ve worked at Frieze-affiliated events, so I do know this milieu and their outfits. Tbf they’re usually all very polite. But isn’t everybody, right? Isn’t everybody polite unless or until they choose not to be? ↩︎

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scott manley hadley aka SOLID BALD live

Here’s a video of me recently performing at the prestigious (it has a Wikipedia page) comedy night, Quantum Leopard. Listen to how much fun the crowd is having. You could have that much fun, too!