"What Makes Great Art?" with Jarrett Earnest

<p>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 <em>Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light</em> (Abrams, 2019), which highlights Schjeldahl’s more risk-taking and experimental art writing from venues like <em>The Village Voice</em>, in addition to his most enduring criticism from <em>The New Yorker</em>. In 2018, Earnest published <em>What it Means to Write About Art</em> (David Zwirner Books), a master compendium of fresh, vulnerable, and reflective interviews with the legends of American art criticism. In the spring of 2019, he curated <em>Young and Evil</em> at David Zwirner, which re-centered the gay artists who pivoted away from “the prevailing trend toward abstraction in the early 20th-century.” His conversation with Goodden encircles his approach to reading and writing, the significance of storytelling, and the heightened relevance of the question, “What is art?”</p>