An Alien Echo at the Gwangju Biennale
I arrived at the 14th Gwangju Biennale intrigued but skeptical about its goals. This year’s title is Soft and Weak Like Water, an aphorism…
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Proving the Rule: The “Exceptionalism” Problem with Art-World Labor
It’s a rainy winter day in New York amid the ongoing apocalypse and I am struggling to think about museums. I do not, any…
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On Whiteness
In 2017, I started working with Claudia Rankine and a collective called the Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). For their inaugural project they were curating…
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Season 5, Episode 3: Dana Kopel
In this episode Lauren Wetmore speaks with writer and organizer Dana Kopel about her widely-read article “Against Artspolitation: Unionizing the New Museum,” published in…
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A Love Letter in Louisville: Breonna Taylor at the Speed Museum
“It’s like fucking vaporware.” I was on the phone with Kristina, Burnaway’s editor at large in New Orleans. We had been searching for days…
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We Are Gathered Here to Grieve: Salvaging, Mourning, and ‘Cargo Cult Formalism’ in New York
As New York galleries reopened after the first wave of lockdowns, I noticed a trend across a handful of exhibitions that channeled the alienation…
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The Untenability of the Unethical Museum
The last time I visited a museum was in early March, when I saw artist Tishan Hsu’s survey at Hammer Museum in Los Angeles….
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“A Planetary Expenditure”: An Interview with Ensayos on Learning Across a Distance
The work of Ensayos – a strategically covert group of artists, poets, historians, biologists, lawyers, sociologists, ecologists, activists, policymakers, and local community members, around…
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Fantastic Emissions: Mika Rottenberg’s Labor of Mystification
“Once in a while it happens that I vomit up a bunny,” confesses the narrator of Julio Cortázar’s “Letter to a Young Lady in…
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Fake News, Bad Art
When the Oxford English Dictionary announced that its 2016 Word of the Year was post-truth, the understanding was that the political upheavals of the…
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