Momus: The Podcast

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 allows us an opportunity to reflect on past seismic shifts in history, and the equally loud cracks that can occur within an artist’s practice. How do we seize this historical moment, and what do we wish to see change?

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 her  friends show up in her art, and the soft focus that painting requires. ‘People can be easily impressed by skill, and I know that’s not what art is.’

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.”

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 Village Voice, in addition to his most enduring criticism from The New Yorker. In 2018, Earnest published What it Means to Write About Art (David Zwirner Books), a master compendium of fresh, vulnerable, and reflective interviews with the legends of American art criticism. In the spring of 2019, he curated Young and Evil at David Zwirner, which re-centered the gay artists who pivoted away from “the prevailing trend toward abstraction in the early 20th-century.” His conversation with Goodden encircles his approach to reading and writing, the significance of storytelling, and the heightened relevance of the question “what is art?”

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 real world, and to the peripheries, in art.

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 political language, the infantilization and polarization of political debate; the growth of a simplified discourse that panders to collective fears rather than addressing the real, pressing questions; the lack of accountability from politicians, and of course, ‘fake truth’ and ‘alternative facts’. Clearly there is something profoundly wrong with contemporary politics.”

What follows is a discussion that exchanges this quote’s “politics” for “art,” and interrogates the conditions by which we frame political comment in exhibition-making.

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 practice. She is currently an artist in residence at Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation (2018-19).

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 Chicago, and works in several critical and creative capacities, including as publisher and artist. He is the co-founder of the beloved Paper Monument, among others, and by all indications, the heart of his publishing activity is activist. In a searching conversation, Petrovich and Goodden land on their mutual desire and responsibility to foster a space for criticism and change. What makes great art? Petrovich argues that the metrics by which we know it are being actively altered.

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.

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, “What are their experiences with the ‘itness’, and with tracing it or trying to replicate it in their own work and in their lives?” In the first episode of the season, Goodden and Wetmore speak to performance artist, ficto-critic, and psychoanalyst Jeanne Randolph, as well as celebrated novelist Sheila Heti, who memorably says of art, “The person that loves it is the one that is right.”