Lauren Wetmore interviews Swiss American curator and writer Alexandra Stock about her scathing critique of Christophe Büchel’s 2019 Venice Biennale project Barca Nostra. Published that same year by the independent Egyptian online newspaper Mada Masr, Stock’s “The Privileged, Violent Stunt That is the Venice Biennale Boat Project” decries an “artworld that repels all criticism of it,” and describes the repercussion of being one of the first voices to publicly denouncing this high-profile artwork. Stock is an occasional writer, artist, and consultant based mainly in Cairo since 2007. She graduated from the Zurich University of the Arts with a BFA in Art Theory, participated in De Appel’s ...

For this episode of our “Criticism in Conversation” series, a writer and collaborative performer, Jacob Wren, speaks with artist Dayna Danger, about the line between empowerment and objectification and the meaning of community in both their work. Danger is a 2Spirit/Queer, Metis/Saulteaux/Polish artist whose images highlight and queer power dynamics, kinship, representation, and sexuality. Wren makes collaborative performances, exhibitions and literature, including 2014’s Polyamorous Love Song and this year’s Authenticity is a Feeling, a hybrid of history, performance theory, and memoir. Together they cover a lot of ground, from personal narratives and community relationships to speaking against silence and apathy. We ...

Two art and technology critics, Nora Khan and Mike Pepi, discuss pushing for a rigorous critical discourse in a creative field that can flatten evaluative distinctions in favor of zealotry for invention. “Criticism of a tool that’s presented as neutral when it really is a piece of social engineering is incredibly hard to do, and there really isn’t a model for criticism in this space,” says Khan. In this far-ranging discussion that touches on the critical distance and yet humanism required of writing on the internet, surveillance, and AI, Khan and Pepi assert that tools aren’t divorced from their makers, ...

In the first episode of Momus’s new “Criticism in Conversation” podcast series, an art critic and an art journalist parse the differing responsibilities and approaches of their craft. Catherine G. Wagley (a Momus contributing editor, and a critic for ARTNews and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others) and Julia Halperin (Executive Editor of artnet News, and former Museums Editor for The Art Newspaper) compare notes and find common ground as they consider, in particular, the example of a potent piece of journalism published by Halperin concerning the influence of five commercial galleries on worldwide institutional programming. Wagley wonders if ...

The artist residency has risen to the top of the artworld’s global economy and increasing professionalization, becoming one of the key features of contemporary art practice. Momus publisher and podcast host Sky Goodden leads an overdue critical conversation on this phenomenon and its consequences for art practice in the 21st century. Featuring international voices close to the subject, Goodden – joined by co-host Lauren Wetmore, a Brussels-based curator and writer – discusses the risks and rewards of an actively-commercializing enterprise, and where it came out of. Momus: The Podcast episode 2 features guests Daniel Baumann (director of Kunsthalle Zürich), Kristy Trinier (artist, curator, and former Banff Centre director), Aaron Cezar (founding director ...

“We are post-purity,” observes Arushi Vats, a Delhi-based writer and inaugural fellow of the Momus/Eyebeam Critical Writing Fellowship. Rooted in field research and expanded through poetics, Vat’s text Exit the Rehearsal: A Body in Delhi, published by Runway Journal, is a precise yet capacious meditation on our “epoch of waste”— ecocide, legacy waste, and the Anthropocene in which Vats suggests that what we waste is “highly proximate, right under your skin, in your gut, and there is something radical in accepting that this is a part of your lifecycle.” In this interview with Lauren Wetmore, Vats discusses building a text ...

In the introduction to Ben Davis’s new book, a bracing and perspectival collection of essays titled Art in the After-Culture (Haymarket Books), he reflects that “the only thing that has grown faster than the demands on art has been doubt that art can respond adequately to those demands.” In a generous and thoughtful conversation with Sky Goodden, Davis expands on those cultural tensions that exacerbate an already fraught cultural dialogue, and touches on other central themes to this collection of writing, including the economic structures that inform contemporary art and its technologies, the roots of cultural appropriation, the context collapse ...

For the penultimate episode of Season 5, Sky Goodden interviews Cecilia Alemani, the Artistic Director of the 59th Venice Biennale. After three years of research and commissioning (an extended period of preparation, due to the pandemic) and 7 months of The Milk of Dreams being open to an immense public, Alemani takes a rearview look onto a show that responded to—and endured—several seismic shocks over the course of its run, and was, in so many respects, unprecedented. She touches on “history knocking on the door of the biennial” with regards to both the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, and ...

In this episode of “Criticism in Conversation”, two art critics and historians discuss “conflict of interest” in contemporary art criticism. Tyler Green, the host of the popular Modern Art Notes Podcast  and Catherine G. Wagley, a critic who regularly publishes with artnet News, the LA Review of Books, and Momus, frame the stakes and risks of a critic writing on contemporary – and even historical – figures in art, especially in light of the market’s increasingly firm grip on our discourse. We can hear them debate the most ethical approach to navigating nepotism, allyship, and critical distance in contemporary art writing. ...

In this episode Lauren Wetmore speaks with writer and organizer Dana Kopel about her widely-read article “Against Artspolitation: Unionizing the New Museum,” published in September 2021 by The Baffler. In conversation, Kopel expands on “the personal and messy dimensions” of unionizing work, and reflects on the challenges of calling out the exploitation, abuses, and hypocrisies of an art industry that, at the time, she was actively working in. She doesn’t hold back on the sacrifices made or the consequences suffered as a result of this successful union drive, but she also stresses that there is never a sole author. Kopel ...

In the first episode of Season 5, Lauren Wetmore speaks with Nigerian art writer Emmanuel Iduma, who reads from “Mileage from Here: Nine Narratives.” Known for his travel and photography writing, and for establishing what he calls “a third, or shared, space between images and text,” the selection Iduma reads from (published in an exceptional presentation of Todd Webb’s previously lost photographic work, Todd Webb in Africa, by Thames & Hudson, 2021) sees Iduma choose a selection of photographs and imaginatively write to, as well as of them. Emmanuel Iduma is the author of A Stranger’s Pose, a travel memoir. His essays and art criticism have been published in The New York ...

In this episode, artist Harry Dodge reads from My Meteorite, or Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing (Penguin Press, 2020). Dodge, a sculptor, writes from inside the artist’s life and the sometimes inchoate density of a studio practice. Tracking us through cosmic patterns and material grapplings as they intersect with family, work, and grief, Dodge’s first book gives us a genre-defying memoir that succeeds as art writing. Harry Dodge is an American visual artist and writer. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, and his sculpture, drawing, and video work has been exhibited at many ...