“Like writing, fisting is both a replicable skill and a rarefied art form.” This brachioproctic line begins writer Tausif Noor’s “Hand In Glove” (Artforum, 12 April 2019), a joyfully loaded review of William E. Jones’s novel I’m Open to Anything, released in 2019 by Los Angeles independent publisher We Heard You Like Books. In this searching conversation, Lauren and Tausif discuss Jones’s oeuvre, the importance of independent publishing, and celebrate sexual transgression while lamenting that writing can often feel, like Jones’s description of fisting, “a cork popping in reverse.” Tausif Noor is a critic and contributing editor of Momus, currently based in Philadelphia while beginning a ...

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.

Season 4 of Momus: The Podcast invites art critics and journalists to talk about an important piece of their writing – texts that carry stories, that ran in prestigious publications to great acclaim, or that were killed under tense circumstances. Every two weeks, co-hosts Sky Goodden and Lauren Wetmore will ask a different writer to read their text to us, and then discuss how it came into being – its inspiration, construction, and impact. To launch the season, Goodden interviews her co-host Wetmore about a piece that was published in Momus and was shortlisted for a 2016 International Award for Art Criticism, a ...

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 ...

As we continue our season-long exploration of “What makes great art?”, Sky Goodden sat down with Jinn Bronwen Lee, an artist based in Chicago. They discuss old master painting, the effect of our viewing environments on art, and the power of long looking. Lee is a painter currently thinking through the idea of “funk,” after Dr. Cornel West, and Samuel Beckett’s “Mess” as a way of life and practice. She is currently an artist in residence at Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation (2018-19).

Continuing with our pursuit of the question “What makes great art?”, Lauren Wetmore sits down with Greek art historian, curator, and writer Katerina Gregos, in Brussels. Their conversation builds on a quote from Gregos’s recent exhibition The Anatomy of Political Melancholy, hosted by the Schwartz Foundation at the Athens Conservatory: “We are increasingly witnesses to the debasement of political language, the infantilization and polarization of political debate; the growth of a simplified discourse that panders to collective fears rather than addressing the real, pressing questions; the lack of accountability from politicians, and of course, ‘fake truth’ and ‘alternative facts’. Clearly there ...

As we continue to circle the question “What makes great art?”, Sky Goodden spoke with Margaux Williamson, a slow painter who gives the greatest primacy to the work of her work, and to the thinking-through that the work requires. Based in Toronto, and known for both her intense focus in the studio and her community-building in Toronto’s art scene, Williamson speaks with humor and heart about where her friends show up in her art, and the soft focus that painting requires. “People can be easily impressed by skill, and I know that’s not what art is.”

In continuing our season-long exploration of the question “What makes great art?” co-hosts Lauren Wetmore and Sky Goodden speak to essential voices about what are we seeking – and so often missing – in our experience of art. What follows is an interview with the British-Ghanaian curator, critic, and art historian Osei Bonsu. Based in Paris and London, Bonsu focuses on transnational histories of art. In conversation with Lauren Wetmore, he contemplates how we have exchanged a generosity of thought for a culture of transaction, and how the experience of meeting great art can be ahistorical – out of place ...