Episodes

In episode 4, Dr. Léuli Eshrāghi discusses "tagatavāsā," a text centered on Eshrāghi's grandmother's art practice that interweaves Indigenous language with the vernacular of contemporary art. Eshrāghi works across visual arts, curatorial practice, and university research, "intervening in display territories to centre Indigenous kin constellations, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices." In this intimate conversation with Lauren Wetmore, Eshrāghi says, “I wonder how you...

“Like writing, fisting is both a replicable skill and a rarefied art form.” This brachioproctic line begins writer Tausif Noor’s “Hand In Glove” (Artforum, 12 April 2019), a joyfully loaded review of William E. Jones’s novel I’m Open to Anything, released in 2019 by Los Angeles independent publisher We Heard You Like Books. In this searching conversation, Lauren and Tausif discuss Jones’s oeuvre, the importance of independent publishing, and celebrate sexual transgression while lamenting that wr...

"Let’s stop talking about Philip Guston and start talking about structural racism." This has been critic Nikki Columbus's refrain through the past season, issuing what many considered the final word of a furious debate surrounding the postponement of a Guston retrospective. Titled "Guston Can Wait" and published October 27, 2020 in N+1, the text (which Columbus reads for the podcast) deftly summarizes the controversy's main thrust - the vehemently-shared opinion that postponing the exhibition wa...

"Let’s stop talking about Philip Guston and start talking about structural racism." This has been critic Nikki Columbus's refrain through the past season, issuing what many considered the final word of a furious debate surrounding the postponement of a Guston retrospective. Titled "Guston Can Wait" and published October 27, 2020 in N+1, the text (which Columbus reads for the podcast) deftly summarizes the controversy's main thrust - the vehemently-shared opinion that postponing the exhibition w...

Season 4 of Momus: The Podcast invites art critics and journalists to talk about an important piece of their writing – texts that carry stories, that ran in prestigious publications to great acclaim, or that were killed under tense circumstances. Every two weeks, co-hosts Sky Goodden and Lauren Wetmore will ask a different writer to read their text to us, and then discuss how it came into being – its inspiration, construction, and impact. To launch the season, Goodden interviews her co-host Wet...

In the final episode of Season 3, which has been devoted to the question of “what’s changed, and what should?”, Sky Goodden speaks to The White Pube, a UK-based art-criticism collective comprised of Zarina Muhammad and Gabriella de la Puente. Across five years of publishing, The White Pube has been celebrated for its insistence on “embodied criticism” and “sticky subjectivity,” its resistance to the star-review system of popular art criticism, and its practice of DIY art-publishing as institutio...

For episode 23, Lauren Wetmore spoke with Sophia al Maria, a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker based in London. Author of publications including Sad Sack, Virgin With A Memory, and her autobiography The Girl Who Fell To Earth, Al Maria has also written for Triple Canopy, Bidoun, and Harper’s Magazine. Her work as an artist has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Tate Britain, Gwangju Biennale, and the New Museum in New York. She has written Litte Birds, a televis...

For episode 22, Lauren Wetmore spoke with Ebony L. Haynes, a gallerist, curator, and writer. Haynes is the Director of Martos Gallery in New York, and Shoot the Lobster in New York and LA. Active for the past ten years, Haynes has insisted on the meaningful inclusion of Black artists and professionals in the contemporary artworld. In this potent conversation, she discusses her experiences as a Black female art dealer in a sexist and racist industry, where her significant contributions continue t...

For episode 21, Sky Goodden spoke with Coco Fusco, the legendary Cuban-American critic, artist, educator, and art historian. Speaking from the center of a pandemic, and on the brink of a significant wave of civil unrest and anti-racist protest, Fusco circled themes relevant to each crisis, looping them through the lens of Cuban history and the seismic shifts it is currently undergoing, in relation to protest, artistic freedom, and criticism against the government. Momus: The Podcast is edited b...

For this episode, still circling the question “what’s changed, and what should?”, Lauren Wetmore spoke with Brussels-based curator Daniel Blanga Gubbay, the artistic co-director of the historic Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Gubbay has worked as an educator and an independent curator for public programs including Manifesta, Palermo (2018); and was head of the Department of Arts and Choreography (ISAC) of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels. He holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Palermo and Ber...

For this episode, Sky Goodden spoke with art writer and musician Johanna Fateman, a regular contributor to The New Yorker, a contributing editor at Artforum, and a frequent critic for 4Columns.org. Fateman co-owns the historic Seagull Salon in New York City, and is, as Lauren notes, “riot grrrl queer royalty” for her involvement in bands like Le Tigre. As Fateman spoke from New York, the epicenter of the pandemic, there were ambulances blazing in the background; her son was home from school, her...

Momus: The Podcast launched Season 3 with the question “what’s changed – and what should?”, which we continue with Alessandro Bava, an architect and writer based in Naples, Italy. Bava makes exhibitions, installations, interiors, and architecture projects, and writes on the poetics, politics, and technologies that produce contemporary space. In conversation with Lauren Wetmore, Bava reflects, “If your house becomes a place of labor, this radically changes the status of the home and its place in ...

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 t...

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 imp...

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.” Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, features original music by Kyle McCrea, and assistant production from Mitra Shreeram. Our many thanks to ...

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...

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.  Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, features...

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 disc...

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). Momus: T...

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. H...

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 though...

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 ...

In Momus: The Podcast's 7th episode, we have brought together a group of artists, curators, and scholars to update the conversation around Artist-Run Culture in Canada. It’s a well-known history, one approaching legend, in this country: the emergence of artist-run centers seeking to address a lack of options for artist representation while forming a network across a vast geography; and then their professionalization, one approaching an institutionalization that mirrors the very thing they were m...

For this episode of our Criticism in Conversation series, a writer and collaborative performer, Jacob Wren, speaks with artist Dayna Danger, about the line between empowerment and objectification and the meaning of community in both their work. Danger is a 2Spirit/Queer, Metis/Saulteaux/Polish artist whose images highlight and queer power dynamics, kinship, representation, and sexuality. Wren makes collaborative performances, exhibitions and literature, including 2014’s Polyamorous Love Song and...