Alien vs. Predator: The Critic in Three Recent Films
“What has to happen in someone’s life for them to end up becoming a critic?” asks Michael Keaton’s desperate, contemptuous Riggan Thomson in Alejandro…
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30 Art-Writing Clichés to Ditch in the New Year
It’s a new year, which is a fine excuse as any to ditch old bad habits. Here below, I have assembled a not-at-all exhaustive…
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Year in Review: Montreal From the Ground Up
A principal difference between year-end lists, rankings, and recollections about art, and those about music, books, or films is that it’s much more difficult…
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Year in Review: The Women Represented
To cast back and select my favorite art this year requires a mnemonic leap of faith. I’d hope the ‘best’ exhibitions, pieces, and events…
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Translation & Transcription: A Conversation with Shelagh Keeley
The narrow central clerestory of The Power Plant in Toronto rises from the main floor up between its east and west gallery zones. It…
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Identity After the Internet: Three Berlin Exhibitions in Search of Commonality
Does anyone write diaries any more? Does anyone learn about themselves through reflexive engagement with their own written word? Or do we form conceptions…
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Women and Influence and the Other Things He Got Wrong: A Rebuttal To Brad Phillips
At a time when so many critics are perfunctorily setting about their annual “best-of” surveys, Brad Phillips published a 3,000-word article that carried the…
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After Ferguson, A New Protest Culture’s Challenge to Art
Walter Benjamin has a line about the Angel of History who sees the past as “one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and…
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A Rebuke to the Perceived “Crisis in Criticism”: Social Media and the Liberated Reader
In 2012, Frieze surveyed art critics writing for newspapers, magazines, and online publications, asking how they conceived of their connection with the public. None…
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Criticism Project Altered Twice: A Dual Response to Xavier Le Roy’s Retrospective
I wanted to make “the fourth wall” no longer a mirror, but a membrane that makes the spectator aware of this coming and going…
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