Spoiled Roots: Mark Bradford and the Erasure of Community
Artists tasked with filling the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale have often poked at its resemblance to Monticello, the plantation designed by the…
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The Personal and Political Wrestle it Out in Kara Walker’s Rebellious New Show
Before we saw the art, we saw the hype: a press release, consisting of two seemingly mismatched parts, which circulated widely and even garnered…
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Performance Art Blows Open the Prairies, in “Stages”
Midway through the rooftop opening for Stages: Drawing the Curtain – a show of public art at Winnipeg’s Plug-In Centre – I look through…
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The Five Disappearances of Tammi Campbell
One The first threatens all artists, and everyone else too: simple disregard. The viewer makes a rolling stop at each frame, not accelerating past,…
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Momus Best-Of Volume 3: 2016-17
I confess to experiencing regular doubt, lately, about what art criticism can contribute to the fray when the conversations we need to be having,…
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A Shattered Mirror: Geoffrey Farmer’s Disobedient Object in Venice
The Canadian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale has been partially destroyed. Its roof has been punctured, so it seems, by some inexplicable disaster….
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Free to Care Less: On the Cynicism of “Starting a Conversation”
This year’s spate of artworld controversies surrounding cultural appropriation and the ethics of representation suggests that we should sharpen our vocabulary, and find precise…
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Place, Space, or Backdrop: The Dilemma of Desert X, the “Coachella Biennial”
Against this summer’s alignment of Documenta 14, the Venice Biennale, and Skulptur Projekte Münster, the first edition of the Desert X biennial seemed to…
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Post-Confessional: The Aging Intimacies of Sophie Calle
In advance of Missing, French conceptual artist Sophie Calle’s first major retrospective in the United States, both New York Times Magazine and the Guardian…
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How to Act Ethically in Art
Don’t fuck the curator. Or the artist, the gallerist, the writer, or their editor. Unless, of course, you really want to. And, it almost…
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