July 15, 2025

Paul Chan

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Season 8, Episode 5

Paul Chan is an artist, writer, and former publisher. For this episode of Momus: The Podcast, Chan’s self-made automated doppelganger reads “Sade Today (after Judith Butler),” a piece he wrote for Evergreen (Spring/Summer 2025). He speaks to Sky Goodden about the implications of AI on writers (though they agree that criticism could present a special resistance) and his recent efforts to increase accessibility to his writing through audio recordings, while “hemlocking” its content against AI co-option. Chan also discusses the challenges of independent publishing, how he perceives writing as a form of daring, and how writing informs making. But in either case, he says, “ Choices are real choices when they’re neither given nor self-evident. That, to me, is the core of what it means to think creatively.” 

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June 17, 2025

Meghan O’Rourke

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Season 8, Episode 4

In this episode, Meghan O’Rourke, poet, author and editor of The Yale Review, speaks frankly about pursuing a creative and professional life with chronic illness. Joining Lauren Wetmore in conversation, and following a reading from Susan Sontag’s pivotal text “Illness as a Metaphor” (The New York Review of Books, 1979), which O’Rourke updated for the 21st century with her medical memoir The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (Riverhead Books, 2022), O’Rourke speaks to how “The way you make work might not look as consistent as a kind of late-capitalist notion of productivity insists.” She also touches on her experiences as a critic and editor of criticism, insisting that both require one to be “capable of generosity and describing love.”

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May 20, 2025

Legacy Russell

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Season 8, Episode 3

In this episode, we feature Legacy Russell, the writer, curator, and Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Kitchen, an artist-driven non-profit space in New York City. As a cultural critic she has published the books Glitch Feminism (Verso Books, 2020) and Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us (Verso Books, 2024), which questions how we define Blackness through mediated material. For the podcast, Russell reads from Lorraine O’Grady’s iconic essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” first published in Afterimage in 1992, and collected in New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action (Routledge, 1994). Russell speaks with Sky Goodden about her relationship to O’Grady’s essay—one that “came before its time and carried us into the future”—and touches on the central conceit that perhaps also explains its controversy: “Lorraine truly believed in a culture that would allow for contestation.” But, Legacy reflects, perhaps our culture hasn’t caught up to her yet.

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April 21, 2025

Nizan Shaked

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Season 8, Episode 2

 

Nizan Shaked is our guest this month! Shaked is Professor of Contemporary Art History, Museum, and Curatorial Studies at UC Long Beach, and most recently the author of Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (Bloomsbury, 2022). She speaks to Lauren Wetmore about the resources offered by criticality, writing for  ”liberals that I want to become more radical,” and researching her forthcoming book Art Against the System, for which she recently won a Warhol Arts Writers Grant. Shaked offers artist LaToya Ruby Frazier’s book The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2014) to consider the devastation perpetrated by imperial industry, its connection to art systems, and how artists provide models for how to deal with authoritarianism.

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March 18, 2025

Ajay Kurian

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Season 8, Episode 1

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.”

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January 20, 2025

Tiana Reid

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Season 7, Episode 8

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.”

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December 17, 2024

Claudia La Rocco

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Season 7, Episode 7

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.”

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November 20, 2024

Niela Orr

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Season 7, Episode 6

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.”

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October 22, 2024

Joshua Schwebel

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Season 7, Episode 5

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.

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September 20, 2024

Carolina A. Miranda

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Season 7, Episode 4

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.”

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