Paul Chan’s “Breathers” Turns Away
Paul Chan’s exhibition Breathers, now at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis after traveling from Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, plays with ideas of rest,…
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Pacita Abad Sees the Soul of an Artifact
Pacita Abad, the Filipina artist who roamed the world like a traveling bard, was twenty-four when she left home in 1970. By the time…
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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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Stuck in the Same Muck: Journeying Through Asher Hartman’s Psychic Theater
God seduced Jesus on a Circuit City breakroom table. The seduction began as we, the audience, sat circled in child-sized chairs in a too-bright…
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Worst-Case Scenarios: Contemporary Art’s #Metoo Handwringing
Like most grassroots movements borne of slow-simmering anger and long-standing frustration, #MeToo is both overdue and messy as hell. Its faint whiff of anarchy…
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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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Mourning Jimmie Durham
In April, I wrote a review of an exhibition at the Hammer Museum at UCLA: “Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World.” I…
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Post-Crisis: What’s Next for Art Criticism in a Digital Age
Momus was founded a short time ago. It was initiated as a proposed recovery from a confused and defensive (and, so I thought, largely…
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Aiming to Please: Division Gallery Surveys Post-Internet Entertainment
In the year 2000, curator Phillippe Vergne staged an exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis titled Let’s Entertain: Life’s Guilty Pleasures. It…
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