Momus: The Podcast (Momus)

On the occasion of her first book of collected art writings, Malleable Forms (ARP Books), Meeka Walsh, editor of Border Crossings magazine, speaks to guest-host Jarrett Earnest about geographic isolation, the eroticism of art writing, her connection with an emerging spiritual lineage, and about a set of relationships driving her engagement with art. In this far-ranging and generous conversation around publishing, editing, looking, and listening, Walsh reflects, "I'm happiest when I'm writing."

Meeka Walsh is a writer, art critic, editor and curator who has had a major influence on the arts in Canada. She is the editor of Border Crossings, an internationally renowned and award-winning quarterly magazine that investigates contemporary culture.

Jarrett Earnest is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (David Zwirner Books, 2018); editor of Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988-2017 by Peter Schjeldahl (Abrams, 2019), The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930-1955 (David Zwirner 2020), and Devotion: today's future becomes tomorrow archive (PUBLIC books, 2022), among others. His criticism and long-form interviews have appeared in New York Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Vulture, The Village Voice, ​Los Angeles Review of Books, Art in America, New York Magazine, and many exhibition catalogues and other publications. In 2021 Earnest was awarded a Dorothea and Leo Rabkin prize for visual arts journalism.

Our thanks to Jacob Irish (Editor) and Chris Andrews (Assistant Producer), and thanks especially to Jarrett Earnest and Meeka Walsh for their contribution to our fifth season.

Many thanks to SFU Galleries for their support; you can listen to their ten-part radio program Listening to Pictures: Artists on the Art Collection, featuring artist voices with lived experience on the West Coast.

Please consider donating through our Patreon campaign.

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.

Our pilot contributors include Morgan Quaintance, Andrew Berardini, Kimberlee Córdova, Saelan Twerdy, Sandra Paikowsky, Catherine G. Wagley, Alison Hugill, Mitch Speed, and your host, Sky Goodden.

We’d like to thank the Ontario Arts Council for its support in making this podcast’s first episode possible. Momus: The Podcast is co-produced by Angela Shackel and Sky Goodden; and edited by Angela Shackel. We would like to thank our assistant producer, Mitra Shreeram; and our music composer, Kyle McCrea.

We are thrilled to announce that NTS radio hosts Momus: The Podcast.

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 of Delfina Foundation), Michelle Grabner (artist, educator, and artistic director of Front International), and the co-directors of Beirut residency marra.tein, Jared McCormick and George Awde.

We’d like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts’s New Chapter grant for its support in making this podcast’s first season possible. Momus: The Podcast is co-produced by Angela Shackel and Sky Goodden; and edited by Angela Shackel, with assistance from Braden Labonte. We would like to thank our assistant producer, Mitra Shreeram; our composer and music editor Kyle McCrea; and this episode’s co-host, Lauren Wetmore.

Momus is also thrilled to thank NTS radio for syndicating and hosting Momus: The Podcast.

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, and artwork is never post-human - nor post-critique.

“Criticism in Conversation” is a series by Momus: The Podcast, and is co-produced and co-hosted by Lauren Wetmore and Sky Goodden. This episode of Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, features original music by Kyle McCrea, and production assistance by Mitra Shreeram. It’s brought to you with the help of the Canada Council for the Arts “New Chapter” grant, and is syndicated by NTS Radio.

You can stream the episode above, or download it on Google Play or iTunes.

Momus is also thrilled to thank NTS radio for syndicating and hosting Momus: The Podcast.

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 and out of time.

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, features original music by Kyle McCrea, and assistant production from Mitra Shreeram. We would like to thank Esker Foundation for their support. And, of course, our many thanks to Osei Bonsu for his deeply meaningful contribution to this episode.

If you would like to inquire about advertising opportunities or other forms of support, please contact Sky Goodden at skygoodden@momus.ca.

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 sharp and farcical review of Manifesta 11: What Artist and Curators Do for Money, which demonstrates a rare example of curatorial criticism. Their conversation ranges from sharpening the perfect retort to writing in bed, with Wetmore reflecting on the driving impulse to write this, her only published review to date: "Like, who's making this? How much are they getting paid? What process are they using to get this done? How are you, the curator, and your artist, and your intellectual conceit, tied to the making of this work? Because isn't that the essentially interesting part of the commissioning process? We're there to be able to touch in some oblique way how this came to be. And if we want to pretend that it came to be out of thin air - as I find a lot of curators want to pretend - then I'm simply not interested. Because it's not true."

"Let’s stop talking about Philip Guston and start talking about structural racism."

This has been critic Nikki Columbus's refrain through the past season, issuing what many considered the final word of a furious debate surrounding the postponement of a Guston retrospective. Titled "Guston Can Wait" and published October 27, 2020 in N+1, the text (which Columbus reads for the podcast) deftly summarizes the controversy's main thrust - the vehemently-shared opinion that postponing the exhibition was a move based in institutional cowardice - before zooming out for the larger context in which museums are actively undermining and purging their own labor forces; that the Guston furor is distracting from these more pressing issues. "I did have fun writing this," she admits, before stressing, "We have to let go of this myth that we’re more progressive than any other sector or business."

In the penultimate episode of Season 4 – across which Momus: The Podcast has been engaging writers on the genesis and reception of a particular piece of criticism – Sky Goodden speaks with Kristian Vistrup Madsen about writing Artforum Diary through the pandemic, and bringing the historic column to a more isolated, romantic, existential, and sometimes fictional space. The conversation also touches on Madsen's first book, Doing Time: Essays on Using People (Floating Opera Press), which has just been released and features a series of "reflections about the politics of solidarity and appropriation, but also about writing itself and what happens when life is turned into art." Madsen says, "There’s such an overemphasis on representation as though representation is the sphere in which the violence takes place and not the sphere in which the violence is portrayed."

"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 from both a bodily and civic curiosity, and why sometimes, when writing about culture, it is important to leave the artworks out.

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 of our critical reception, and the ambient shifts in contemporary art's 'connoisseurship'.

Of course, this is also a conversation about writing. In discussing a book that has taken the better part of a decade to come out, and has required significant rewriting as Davis responded to a shape-shifting present, he reflects, “It’s a process that resembles depression in the psychoanalytic sense. You feel, for a long period of time, that you have this giant object, a presence in your life that can’t be expressed, that hangs over you like a dark cloud. I don't have a life hack around that except to say that I think it really helps to believe in what you're doing.”

Ben Davis is the National Art Critic at artnet News, where he’s also a senior editor. His first book, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, came out in 2013 (Haymarket Books) and, as one artist put it, delivered "a truth-bomb of a book.”

Please consider donating through our Patreon campaign.

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 the ways in which she embedded history in the exhibition, in turn. She also speaks to the impact of art writing, both its influence on a longer-researched edition of the biennial—one "curated from a desk"—but also in terms of the reviews, too, some of which underscored the need for more female-driven programming. Perhaps most poignantly, Alemani remembers the slow time of this show's creation, and her drawing on sensorial and somatic influences, however unconsciously, as she worked at a remove from artists' studios. "I think [the biennial] was a reaction to what I missed the most."

Our thanks to Jacob Irish (Editor) and Chris Andrews (Assistant Producer), and thanks especially to Cecilia Alemani for her contribution to our fifth season.

This conversation is presented in collaboration with Art Toronto; our deepest thanks to them for in part making this possible.

Many thanks to Gallery 44 for their support.

Please consider donating through our Patreon campaign.

To inquire about advertising opportunities or other forms of support, please contact: skygoodden@momus.ca.

The season finale for Momus: The Podcast’s fifth season features a conversation between writer, art critic, and co-founder of ARTS.BLACK, Jessica Lynne, and Dr. Kemi Adeyemi, an “art-adjacent academic” and Director of The Black Embodiment Studio at the University of Washington. Adeyemi talks about her new book, Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago (Duke University Press, 2022), an ethnography of how Black queer women in Chicago use dance to assert their physical and affective rights to the city. Her conversation with Lynne looks at the pleasures (and challenges) of working between the classroom and the dance floor in an effort to pay a different kind of attention to Black queer women’s lives. “What pleasures are sweeter than talking with your friends about the brilliant things they write, create, and offer to us?” asks Lynne. 

Our thanks to Jacob Irish (Editor) and Chris Andrews (Assistant Producer), and thanks especially to Jessica Lynne and Dr. Kemi Adeyemi for their contribution to our fifth season finale.

Many thanks, as well, to Cui Jinzhe for her support.

Look for us on Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Please consider donating through our Patreon campaign.

To inquire about advertising opportunities or other forms of support, please contact: skygoodden@momus.ca.

Throughout the season, Lauren Wetmore and Sky Goodden will speak with participants of the Momus residency, “Estuaries: An International Indigenous Art Criticism Residency,” created with Forge Project and led by Dr. Léuli Eshrāghi (Sāmoa) and Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish).

To launch this series, Wetmore speaks with writer and curator Megan Tamati-Quennell, who is of Te Āti Awa, Ngāi Tahu, KātiMāmoe, and Waitaha Māori descent and is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Māori and Indigenous Art at Museum of New Zealand | Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, New Zealand. Wetmore and Tamati-Quennell discuss a 2006 text on artist Michael Riley by Australian historian Nikos Papastergiadis, as well as Tamati-Quennell’s own writing and research, where she makes use of "Whakapapa," a knowledge system that binds all Māori people.

"The joy is being able to put something into the world, and honor some people, and maybe shift some ground,” says Tamati-Quennell about her ongoing work.

Our deepest appreciation to this episode's advertiser, SFU Galleries, whose special project, Witnessing Tsēmā Igharas: Hughadēsłēł — give it all away, is available for listening now.

This episode has been generously supported by the Mellon Foundation.

This episode features an interview with Sháńdíín Brown (Diné), continuing our series talking to participants in the Momus residency "Estuaries: An International Indigenous Art Criticism Residency" co-hosted with Forge Project. Lauren Wetmore talks to Sháńdíín Brown, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and the first Henry Luce Curatorial Fellow for Native American Art at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, about two very different texts written almost a century apart: Laura Tohe's "There is No Word for Feminism in My Language" (2000) and Uriah S. Hollister's "The Navajo and His Blanket" (1903). Brown speaks about these two texts in the context of the exhibition she has curated Diné Textiles: Nizhónígo Hadadít’eh (They Are Beautifully Dressed), which opens in early September at the RISD Museum. In highlighting the important role of women in Navajo culture, and Brown's own work as a facilitator of that culture, she speaks against racist writing about Indigenous art: "When someone so boldly says 'the Navajos are going to go extinct,'" Brown says of Hollister's text, "you're like, me being here, having Native people in museums, having Native people invited to be collaborators, and working in art history is a big deal."

Diné Textiles: Nizhónígo Hadadít’eh (They Are Beautifully Dressed) curated by Sháńdíín Brown, will be on view from September 2nd, 2023 to September 29th, 2024.

Thanks to our Editor, Jacob Irish; Assistant Producer, Chris Andrews; and many thanks to Gulf Coast Magazine's Toni Beauchamp Critical Art Writing Prize for their support.

This episode has been generously supported by the Mellon Foundation.

Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick (Kanaka ‘Ōiwi) joins Lauren Wetmore in conversation about Māhealani Dudoit’s fundamental text, “Carving a Hawaiian Aesthetic,” published in the first issue of ‘Ōiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal – He ‘oia mau nō kākou’, which Dudoit co-founded in 1998. Broderick, an artist, curator, and educator from Mōkapu, Oʻahu, champions the text, saying “Kānaka ‘Ōiwi don’t have a lot of writing about our recent stories of art, so the few texts that do exist become more significant with time because they function as rare points of reference that we can all share when we’re reconstructing our own histories.” Broderick discusses challenges faced by Native Hawaiians around stories of their art within institutional settings and the role of writing in his own practice: “I’m an artist, but I have to write now because the work that I make, no matter how understood it is by the communities that I’m a part of, if it’s not written about it doesn’t really exist for a certain audience … Writing for me is a way to no longer have to waste time explaining what I already know.”

On the occasion of this episode and especially following the fires in Hawaiʻi, we encourage listeners to visit the Puʻuhonua Society and consider making a donation.

This episode has been generously supported by the Mellon Foundation.

This episode features Kate Wolf, one of the founding editors of the Los Angeles Review of Books and a critic whose work has appeared in publications including The Nation, n+1, Art in America, and Frieze. Wolf is currently an Editor at Large of the LARB and a co-host and producer of its weekly radio show and podcast, The LARB Radio Hour. In conversation with Sky Goodden, Wolf discusses Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) and what she took from it for her own writing practice: “There are many pleasures, as there are pains, but I think the pleasure of writing is unwinding an opinion, a point of view that’s latent inside of you and can become fully expressed. Especially in criticism,” Wolf adds, “the kind of closing mechanism that your brain sometimes furnishes for you where something becomes a story, both by grammar and by very minute plotting … this turn of the key in the door is immensely satisfying.”

Thank you to Jacob Irish, our editor, and to Chris Andrews for assistant production.

Many thanks to the National Gallery of Canada and the Sobey Art Foundation for their support.

In this episode, Jessica Lynne speaks with Catherine G. Wagley about their shared love for Barbara Christian’s iconically confrontational essay, “The Race for Theory” (1987, Cultural Critique). Christian, a ground-laying literary academic who introduced writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker to the academe, goes toe to toe with her peers in this essay, rebuking the constraints and monolith of French theory and championing the approach of learning from the language of creative writers "as a way to discover what language I might use." In it, Christian both names and demonstrates the power of critique from within the institution, and its effective complement to calls for empowerment. And as Lynne and Wagley reflect on how criticism functions through a sense of curiosity and openness in both their practices, Lynne says, “it’s an intervening hand, right? Like, look at all these other planes that we could be living in. And, why not go there? Like, let's go there. In fact, we know writers who are already there. We know artists who are already there.”

For the 50th (!) episode of Momus: The Podcast, Lauren Wetmore speaks to Nasrin Himada, a Palestinian curator and writer who is currently associate curator at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. "I write for my people. I write for Palestinians, and I write for the liberation of our lands," Himada says of their practice, which foregrounds "embodiment as method, desire as transformation, and liberation through many forms." Wetmore and Himada discuss esteemed Caribbean-Canadian poet and writer M. NourbeSe Philip's text, “Interview with an Empire'' (2003), thinking through how Philip teaches us to decontaminate language from imperialism so that it can "truly speak our truths." Himada touches on strategies, including artistic experimentation, collective action, and love.

Thank you to Nasrin Himada for their contribution to the season.

Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors: the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery’s In/Tension podcast, and the Sobey Art Awards at the National Gallery of Canada.

Lara Khaldi is our final guest on Season 6 of Momus: The Podcast. A curator, artist, writer, and educator, Khaldi was born in Jerusalem, Palestine, and currently lives in Amsterdam, where she has been newly appointed as director of de Appel. In this episode, Khaldi speaks to Lauren Wetmore about the Palestinian American artist, activist, and scholar Samia A. Halaby's book “Liberation Art of Palestine: Palestinian Painting and Sculpture in the Second Half of the 20th Century” (H. T. T. B. Publications, 2001). Both Khaldi and Halaby assert that art is a critical part of the Palestinian struggle for liberation. Although representation may feel impossible in the context of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, Khaldi urges that "the least we can do is talk about it, because the more we speak, the truth is said."

Thank you to Lara Khaldi for her contribution to the season.

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.

Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors: the Sobey Art Awards at the National Gallery of Canada (nominations close March 20th) and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.

Launching Season 7, Elvia Wilk, an essayist, critic, and novelist, talks to Sky Goodden about the decision to quit writing—if only to be able to start again. In discussing rejection, the changing conditions of the field, and the denuding of successful female writers, Wilk also touches on the authors who have modeled quitting ("the authors of the no"), or who have mitigated against their own exposure, including Olivia Sudjic, Enrique Vila-Matas, Rachel Cusk, and Elena Ferrante.

Thank you to Elvia Wilk for her contribution to this season.

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.

Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors: Night Gallery and the AGYU.

Earlier this year, the Momus editorial team gathered for a talk at Plural Art Fair in Montreal. It marked the first time Sky Goodden, Catherine G. Wagley, Jessica Lynne, and Merray Gerges were all together IRL. The lively conversation touched on how we’ve shifted from a discourse of “crisis” in art criticism to its material reality; the ethics of editorial care; and how to address the need for mentorship across all stages of a writer’s career.

Thank you to the Momus editorial team for their contribution to this season. Thank you to Artspeaks for sponsoring the panel.

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.

Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors: Night Gallery and Art Toronto.

Palestinian-American artist and writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi speaks with Lauren Wetmore about the political implication of form through two texts: Tbakhi’s own piece "Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide" (Protean Magazine, 2023), and Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif’s “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure” (The Volta, 2013). “In times of extreme crisis we end up bumping against particular limitations of art,” reflects Tbakhi, while also reminding us that “the idea of artistic engagement with moments of crisis has been curtailed and limited by state powers and oppressive ideologies in many different forms.” This episode continues the Podcast’s platforming of Palestinian voices in line with Momus’s ongoing commitment to PACBI.

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews. Many thanks to this episode’s sponsor, Daniel Faria Gallery.

All episodes are available on momus.ca, and through Google Podcasts, Stitcher, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Carolina A. Miranda, a longtime L.A. Times staff culture writer who has recently returned to the wilds of freelance, speaks to Sky Goodden about looking at things from both sides now. In working on a book proposal about the year she spent in Chile following the fall of Pinochet’s dictatorship, and in exploring new genres of writing for different publications, Miranda is changing the focus of her attention. After so many years of writing-as-response, she reflects on the value of sustained research into one subject. “I'd been wanting to explore new directions I could take my writing, and at the L.A. Times, there are certain limitations to the form.” Taking a more personal approach with her book, she’s thinking about “how do artists survive an autocracy? Culture can teach us about the moment, but also point a way forward.”

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews. Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors, The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation and The Gund.

Joshua Schwebel speaks to long-time collaborator Lauren Wetmore about their shared interest in closing the gap between how art is discursively framed and what it actually does. Schwebel’s artistic practice stems from a deep need to understand the world, coupled with an allergy to authority. “Art is rhetorically positioned as radical,” notes Schwebel, “but what we're doing is advancing capitalism for people who benefit from it and this is not in our interest as artists or workers.” With Nizan Shaked’s Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (Bloomsbury, 2022) as a prompt, Schwebel and Wetmore talk about their upcoming book project, The Employee (forthcoming from Art Metropole in 2025). They also discuss The Paydirt Seminars, a series of talks dedicated to examining the intersections between art, finance, and resource extraction that Schwebel has organized as part of his current exhibition One Hand Washes the Other at Struts Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick.

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews. Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors, NSCAD University, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, and Esker Foundation.

Niela Orr is a culture writer and editor who has published in The Baffler, The Believer, and The Organist, among others. Since 2022 she has worked as an editor at the New York Times Magazine. In conversation with Sky Goodden, Orr discusses her editing as being rooted in service, and her abiding sense of responsibility to the writers that she works with. Orr foregrounds this conversation with a reading from Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007; Wave Books, 2024), by Tisa Bryant, a former mentor of hers. She also talks about the profound pleasure and significance of reading fiction and poetry. “If I'm not reading poetry, I feel like I'm losing access to possibility,” she says. And in turn, Orr says, “I write for patient readers.”

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews. Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation (feat. The Rabkin Interviews), the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and Waddington's.

Esteemed critic and writer Claudia La Rocco speaks to Lauren Wetmore about being a “dance partisan” and how “language can nail things down in a way that dance doesn’t.” This wide-ranging conversation touches on artists including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Simone Forti, and Moriah Evans, through critics including Jill Johnston and Megan Metcalf, to consider how dance and writing move through different institutions and histories. La Rocco reads American choreographer Susan Rethorst’s “Dailiness” from A Choreographic Mind: Autobodygraphical Writings (University of the Arts, Helsinki, 2015), which she describes as a text that “was formative for me but still fits me pretty well, and relates to both how I think about writing, and what is so special about dance.” 

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews. Many thanks to this episode’s sponsor, The Blue Building. 

Momus: The Podcast’s Season 07 finale features Tiana Reid, a Toronto-based critic and assistant professor of English at York University. Reid is a former editor at The New Inquiry and her writing has been featured in Frieze, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review, among others. She reads from an early influence on her practice, Sylvia Wynter, whose text "Jonkonnu in Jamaica: Towards the Interpretation of the Folk Dance as a Cultural Process" (Jamaica Journal, June, 1970) thinks about “what art's function is in unequal and oppressive societies and regimes.” In conversation with host Sky Goodden, Reid also discusses a forthcoming text for Momus, which focuses on an evacuated landscape in Toronto’s cultural institutions due to several curator dismissals, and moves Reid “to this question of action.”

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews. Many thanks to this episode’s sponsor, Esker Foundation.

Season 8 of Momus: The Podcast launches with Ajay Kurian, an artist, critic, and co-founder of New Crits, a platform for artist mentorship. Kurian speaks with Sky Goodden about a text by Robert Pogue Harrison on the art of the zen garden (Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, 2008), and about his artist-writer influences including Robert Smithson, Paul Chan, and Hannah Black. He also touches on his recent response (in Cultured Mag) to Dean Kissick's screed on identity politics (in Harper’s), and what it required to “clean the public restroom” in the wake of Kissick’s feature going viral. “I think I was more upset by how bad the piece was than the ideas in the piece. […] I think especially for artists of color, like none of that stuff is new to us. And to think that there was massive progress … it could all be taken away in a second. I'm not holding it as new solid ground.”

Kurian’s solo exhibition Peanuts (Deluxe) is on view at 47 Canal in New York through March 22.  

Many thanks for this episode’s sponsors, CONTACT Photography Festival, Plural Art Fair, and Workman Arts, for their support of our work.

Thank you to Jacob Irish, our editor, and Chris Andrews, for production assistance.

To launch our sixth season, Lauren Wetmore interviews Sky Goodden on a book that has recently got her all "twirled up." They discuss Art Writing in Crisis (Sternberg Press, 2021) which sits adjacent to an exhausting list of books on art criticism in crisis and points instead to the emancipatory potential of criticism, and, as Goodden and Lauren term it, the "present imperfect" of a field actively redefining itself. "I think it's important to understand what art writing and criticism has recently been in order to have a sense of its future," reflects Goodden. "However, I find that, for decades now, we can get so stuck in what it's been, we never get to the second part."

All thanks to Jacob Irish (Editor) and Chris Andrews (Assistant Producer).

Our deepest appreciation to this episode's advertisers: Plural Contemporary Art Fair and Maleko Mokgosi: Imaging Imaginations at the Art Gallery of York University.

Look for us on Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Please consider donating through our Patreon campaign.

To inquire about advertising opportunities or other forms of support, please contact: skygoodden@momus.ca.

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 Review of Books, Aperture, Best American Travel Writing 2020, Artforum, and Art in America. His honors include a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation grant for arts writing, the inaugural Irving Sandler Award for New Voices in Art Criticism from AICA-USA, the C/O Berlin Talent Prize for Theory, and a Silvers Grant for Work in Progress. I Am Still with You, his memoir on the aftermath of the Nigerian civil war, is forthcoming from Algonquin (US), and William Collins (UK).

We wish to thank Jacob Irish (Editor) and Chris Andrews (Sales Director and Podcast Design).

Thanks especially to Emmanuel Iduma for his contribution to this season. And thank you to Sobey Award for their support.

In this episode, artist and writer Harry Dodge reads from My Meteorite, or Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing (Penguin Press, 2020). Perhaps best known as a sculptor, Dodge 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, this first book gives us a genre-defying memoir that succeeds, as well, 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 venues nationally and internationally, including JOAN (LA, 2018),  Tufts University Art Gallery (2019), Grand Army Collective (Brookyn, 2017), and the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2016). His first book, My Meteorite, was published by Penguin Press in 2020.

We wish to thank Jacob Irish (Editor), Mitra Shreeram (Assistant Producer), and Chris Andrews (Sales Director and Podcast Design).

Thanks especially to Harry Dodge for his contribution to this season. And thank you to Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery for their support.

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 offers emotional and practical resources for organizing work but also acknowledges that “the fight really doesn’t end … the end point is the end of capitalism, the end of institutions, and abolition. And until we get there, this is just what we keep doing every fucking day.”

We wish to thank Jacob Irish (Editor) and Chris Andrews (Assistant Producer).

Thanks especially to Dana Kopel for her contribution to this season. 

Look for us on Google Podcasts, iTunes, and other podcast apps.

Please consider donating through our Patreon campaign.

To inquire about advertising opportunities or other forms of support, please contact: skygoodden@momus.ca.

Days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Lithuanian curator and writer Raimundas Malašauskas resigned as curator of the Russian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Bienniale, along with participating artists Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov, citing the war as “politically and emotionally unbearable.”

Using his letter of resignation, which Malašauskas posted to Instagram on February 27th, Lauren Wetmore interviews him about what led to this decision—“I started from my experience of being in the Empire and not wanting to go back”—and the complexities of its reception within different networks of impact across the international art world, the Russian political and cultural regime, and Malašauskas’s Lithuanian community.

With this episode Momus both condemns the Russian war on Ukraine, and echoes Malašauskas’s assertion of the existence of many “different Russias” by extending solidarity to its artists and creative communities.

All our thanks to Jacob Irish (Editor) and Chris Andrews (Assistant Producer), and thanks especially to Raimundas Malašauskas for his contribution to this season.

Thanks to the Sobey Art Award for its support.

Look for us on Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Please consider donating through our Patreon campaign.

To inquire about advertising opportunities or other forms of support, please contact: skygoodden@momus.ca.

This month, Sky Goodden speaks with Rahel Aima, a prolific critic, art writer, and Associate Editor at Momus. We focus on a text Aima published in Momus, “Depleting Felix Gonzales-Torres” (July 2020), that takes aim at “a mammoth exhibition” of the late Gonzalez-Torres’s 1990 work Untitled (Fortune Cookie Corner). Aima writes “In a move taken right out of the influencer marketing playbook,” Andrea Rosen and David Zwirner, who co-represent his estate, shipped the piece around the world to collectors who would then display and “document them for the ‘gram.” While Gonzales-Torres’s work conjures a body through accumulation and depletion, “we can understand the exhibition as an extension of overwhelmingly white, moneyed arts professionals and their tendency to trivialize Black and Indigenous death by trying to relate it to the art world.” Aima engages us in a gripping conversation about writing, including the discomfort of penning a polemic that goes viral.