Momus: The Podcast

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 –...

In the final episode of Season 3, which has been devoted to the question of “what’s changed, and what should?”, Sky Goodden speaks to  The White Pube , a UK-based art-criticism collective comprised of Zarina Muhammad and Gabriella de la Puente. Across five years of publishing, The White Pube has been celebrated for its insistence on “embodied criticism” and “sticky subjectivity,” its resistance to...

For episode 23, Lauren Wetmore spoke with Sophia al Maria, a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker based in London. Author of publications including Sad Sack, Virgin With A Memory, and her autobiography The Girl Who Fell To Earth, Al Maria has also written for Triple Canopy, Bidoun, and Harper’s Magazine. Her work as an artist has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Ta...

For episode 22, Lauren Wetmore spoke with Ebony L. Haynes, a gallerist, curator, and writer. Haynes is the Director of Martos Gallery in New York, and Shoot the Lobster in New York and LA. Active for the past ten years, Haynes has insisted on the meaningful inclusion of Black artists and professionals in the contemporary artworld. In this potent conversation, she discusses her experiences as a Bla...

For episode 21, Sky Goodden spoke with Coco Fusco, the legendary Cuban-American critic, artist, educator, and art historian. Speaking from the center of a pandemic, and on the brink of a significant wave of civil unrest and anti-racist protest, Fusco circled themes relevant to each crisis, looping them through the lens of Cuban history and the seismic shifts it is currently undergoing, in relation...

For this episode, still circling the question “what’s changed, and what should?”, Lauren Wetmore spoke with Brussels-based curator Daniel Blanga Gubbay, the artistic co-director of the historic  Kunstenfestivaldesarts . Gubbay has worked as an educator and an independent curator for public programs including Manifesta, Palermo (2018); and was head of the Department of Arts and Choreography (ISAC)...

For this episode, Sky Goodden spoke with art writer and musician Johanna Fateman, a regular contributor to The New Yorker, a contributing editor at Artforum, and a frequent critic for 4Columns.org. Fateman co-owns the historic  Seagull Salon  in New York City, and is, as Lauren notes, “riot grrrl queer royalty” for her involvement in bands like Le Tigre. As Fateman spoke from New York, the epicent...

Momus: The Podcast launched Season 3 with the question “what’s changed – and what should?”, which we continue with Alessandro Bava, an architect and writer based in Naples, Italy. Bava makes exhibitions, installations, interiors, and architecture projects, and writes on the poetics, politics, and technologies that produce contemporary space. In conversation with Lauren Wetmore, Bava reflects, “If...

Momus: The Podcast launches Season 3 with the question “what’s changed – and what should?” with curator and art historian Eleanor Nairne. This prompt was already set, but with the emerging pandemic and its irreversible effects on our economy, cultural metabolism, relationship to art, sense of agency, and connection to one other, there has never been a better time to ask it. This conversation also...

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...

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.” Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, featur...

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 V...

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 r...

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 politica...

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 practic...

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...

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...

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, "W...

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...

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 make...

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 -...

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 Kha...

Art Criticism vs. Journalism with Catherine G. Wagley and Julia Halperin – Ep. 03

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 –...

The Venice Biennale – Ep. 01