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 ...

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 Momus: The Podcast’s 7th episode, we have brought together a group of artists, curators, and scholars to update the conversation around Artist-Run Culture in Canada. It’s a well-known history, one approaching legend, in this country: the emergence of artist-run centers seeking to address a lack of options for artist representation while forming a network across a vast geography; and then their professionalization, one approaching an institutionalization that mirrors the very thing they were made to contravene. Now, in a moment of large shifts across the arts sector, with a recent change to our country’s funding models, and a refocusing of ...

Welcome to the pilot episode of Momus: The Podcast. For our first broadcast, we focus on the historic Venice Biennale as the 57th edition opens to the public. We air a conversation on its history, institution, relevance, and potential, with insight arriving from a group of critics, curators, artists, and gallerists speaking to us from around the world. In this vibrant and myriad discussion, we question this event’s potential for political comment; its profile amid a “festivalist” biennial culture; its emphasis on nationalism; and the latest edition’s success.

In our 10th episode, we continue our season-long exploration of the question, “What makes great art,” speaking to essential voices of our time about their experiences of seeking it. What follows is an interview between Momus Publisher Sky Goodden and Dushko Petrovich. Born in Ecuador and based in Chicago, Dushko is the chair of the New Arts Journalism program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. and works in several critical and creative capacities, including as publisher and artist. He is the co-founder of the beloved Paper Monument, among others, and by all indications, the heart of his publishing activity ...

For this month’s episode, still circling the question “what makes great art?”, Lauren Wetmore enters into a searching conversation with Irish curator and writer Francis McKee. McKee is the Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, teaches at the Glasgow School of Art, writes books, and curates in other capacities, as well. He speaks with Wetmore about maintaining a relationship to the real world, and to the peripheries, in art.

For this month’s episode circling the question “What makes great art?”, Lauren Wetmore spoke with Berlin-based artist Isabel Lewis. Lewis was trained in classical ballet and carries its impression through a practice that marries philosophy, choreography, storytelling, and sensory aesthetics. She insists, “There is nothing neutral about the body.”

For this month’s episode, towards our season’s question, “What makes great art?”, Sky Goodden spoke with artist, curator, and writer Jarrett Earnest. Earnest is the editor behind the recent compilation of New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl’s writing, titled Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light (Abrams, 2019), which highlights Schjeldahl’s more risk-taking and experimental art writing from venues like The Village Voice, in addition to his most enduring criticism from The New Yorker. In 2018, Earnest published What it Means to Write About Art (David Zwirner Books), a master compendium of fresh, vulnerable, and reflective interviews with the legends of American art criticism. ...

What makes “great art”? How do we account for what Gertrude Stein called the “itness” of art, and what are we seeking – and so often missing – in our experience of art? In brief, bright 30-minute episodes, Momus: The Podcast’s second season will follow co-hosts Lauren Wetmore and Sky Goodden as they speak with writers, curators, filmmakers, novelists, and artists about this searching. They ask, “What are their experiences with the ‘itness’, and with tracing it or trying to replicate it in their own work and in their lives?” In the first episode of the season, Goodden and Wetmore ...