An anti-ligature room is a room that contains nothing around which a rope or cord can be tied. Designed to house people considered at risk from suicide, it provides the title, and a guiding metaphor for the state of contemporary culture, for a collection of texts by “Contemporary Art Writing Daily.” CAWD, as it styles itself, is an author project and website which, since 2014, has published short anonymous reviews of, mostly, the kind of contemporary art displayed in élite galleries in the Global North. Scrolling through the reviews, like reading this book, is like tuning into the interior monologues of a crowd of MFA graduates as they mill awkwardly in a private viewing. They offer repressed and volatile compounds of high theory and raw emotion—“the cast-off internalizes its social panopticon as an ever-carried guilt”—that suggest something is unstable and off-kilter, at least among the insiders of this particular sphere of the art world. The book consists of seven sections, six of which are numbered rooms, riffing on the title, focusing on themes like “cold” or “content.” As art criticism, the texts work indirectly, circling around common preoccupations of the past decade’s art: animation, CGI, object-oriented-ontology, the digitization of everyday life. …