THE CRITICS’ CRITICS

THOMAS CROW

Thomas de Monchaux, “The New Era Is a Fact: On Cesar Pelli,” n+1

There is a special pleasure in unexpectedly coming upon a singular critical voice, accompanied by self-reproach over having missed it before. A recent issue of n+1 delivered such a moment. Not only was a long critical piece on architecture unexpected, but so was its subject: the thoroughly established mega-office of the late Cesar Pelli. Its author, Thomas de Monchaux, as I came to discover, is a prolific and incisive writer on the built environment, whose remit goes far beyond the usual preoccupations with feats of form-giving by celebrity architects.

Pelli’s work provides de Monchaux with a signal example of the interplay between the seen and the unseen. He begins with a geographically out-of-the-way example: the glass-clad San Bernardino, California, city hall designed by a young Pelli with Norma Merrick Sklarek, “the first black female licensed architect in New York and California.” In 1969, he avers, its idealistic modernism could be taken for “the fulfillment of a Weimar fantasy.” Now overwhelmed by epigones, it can only evoke the “corporate efficiency of an establishment indifferent to your particular happiness”—that is, if one notices it at all. 

The particular happiness of human subjects running the mazes of contemporary commercial architecture had, in de Monchaux’s view, enjoyed Pelli’s particular support, nowhere more than in his Garden Hall in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. There, the architect combined movement and contemplation, “gazing and glancing,” in an airy, reinvigorating respite from the warren of exhibition galleries. The possibility of such restorative moments now lies buried under two more wholesale renovations, pleasing to donors named on the walls but indifferent to Pelli’s defeated vision.

If a critic can make you see and reorient yourself via an experience that is no longer available, making it vivid in (even because of) its absence, the job has been done. Try him on the reviled Penn Station.

Thomas Crow is a contributing editor of Artforum. 

ARA OSTERWEIL 

Juan A. Suárez, Experimental Film and Queer Materiality (Oxford University Press) 

I first read Juan Suárez twenty-five years ago as a graduate student. Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars (1996), his groundbreaking study of queer avant-garde cinema in the 1960s, nearly blew my pants off. Since then, I have joined Suárez as a “serious” scholar of American experimental film. What astonishes me about his new book Experimental Film and Queer Materiality, is how much he can still teach me about sexuality and its discontents. Swerving from queer theory’s predictable focus on subjectivity and social relations, Suárez investigates the radical queerness of materiality. His interpretations of industrial and bodily detritus, like shit, plastic, amphetamines, sex dolls, glitter, Benday dots, noise, tape, and the grain of analog film, are some of the best that I’ve read. The book is meticulously researched and full of scintillating new takes on well-known weirdos like Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and the Kuchar brothers. But the real wonder is his take on the dazzling innovations of a dozen or so lesser-known but equally far-out cinematic junk-peddlers from North America, Latin America, and Europe, whose outrageous use of synthetics reminds us that queer sexuality was never simply about bodies.

Ara Osterweil is a painter and writer and a scholar of postwar art and cinema. Her book The Pedophilic Imagination: A History of American Film is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2025.

JASON FARAGO

Adania Shibli, “Als das Monster freundlich war” (Once the Monster Was So Kind) and Yevgenia Belorusets, “Die Einberufung” (The Conscription), Berlin Review

Our present wars have made me despair of criticism— despair as writers I’d respected abandoned their principles, despair that against violence words may have no role at all. But since February, the new bimonthly Berlin Review has been reaffirming that judicious criticism is a constituent of any monitory democracy. Its first issue included a poignant, sidewinding essay by the Palestinian author Adania Shibli, beginning from a kind of wartime aphasia—“moving between news outlets in Arabic, English, Hebrew . . . I get amazed by everyone’s linguistic mastery and my own failure”—and crescendoing into a precise defense of her own literary form against political instrumentation. The trenchant artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets, writing from Kyiv for a subsequent issue, faced the grim question of Ukrainian military conscription; mingling reportage and first-person exposition, she asked how much skepticism is appropriate in a country “at war with Russia, and now at war with those who have decided we must question nothing.” Well: In the face of outrages, should a critic become a counterpropagandist and leave critique behind? Shibli and Belorusets have another view: that serious criticism alerts us to perils before us, and safeguards freedoms we may still lose.

Jason Farago is critic at large for the New York Times. He lives in New York.

JOAN KEE

The words of Simon Leung 

Though it’s odd to think about an unwritten text as my pick for the year’s best criticism, I am struck by something the artist Simon Leung said to me over the past year: that Asian American art is “always already a theory of democracy.” Many discussions of Asian American art consider artists and artworks as inherently a function of representative politics, whereby acts of inclusion affirm metaphorical citizenship in a presumed America. Yet the frequent recurrence of certain names and historical events in narratives of Asian American art can make even the most expansively conceptualized exhibitions, surveys, and convenings feel like examples of a tacit epistocracy that mistakes representation for inclusion. Well aware of how institutions can act like countries marginalizing their own citizens, Leung asks us to imagine democracy less as an expression of some harmonious collective will and more as a preemptive defense against the effacement of bodies and imaginations racialized as Asian. This, I think, is what Leung means when he says being Asian American is always being a form of “strategic essentialism.” 

Asian American art becomes necessary not because it helps represent the fastest-growing demographic group in the US but because it lets us secure a modicum of independence for thinking that might otherwise be neglected or even suppressed by the well-funded organizations, groups, and agendas that unduly affect how we understand art, coexistence, even personhood. If, as Leung states, democracy is “a proposition of what constitutes the making of public space,” “Asian Americanness” becomes a restatement of rights to public space. At the same time, democracy only works when there is responsible “intimacy,” or when each constituent becomes open to the other. I may be speculating out of turn here, but Leung’s pronouncement validates new lines of inquiry. For instance, it situates exhibitions of Asian American art as a negotiation between rights and access. Does the right to be seen or to claim public space override unequal access to that space among Asian America’s constituent populations? And can there be an Asian American art even when democracy is dead or in terminal decline? 

Joan Kee is the Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She is the author of 2023’s The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art Beyond Solidarity (University of California Press) and a contributing editor of Artforum. 

MEERA MENEZES

Valérian Guillier, “Vectors Mutate,” e-flux Journal

To my chagrin, I completely missed McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto when it was first published back in 2004. In this groundbreaking book, Wark propounds the theory that the information age had produced two antagonistic classes: a hacker class and a vectoralist class. While the hackers ushered in new ideas and concepts out of raw data, the vectoralists controlled the vectors, or networks, along which information flows. 

In a thought-provoking essay for e-flux Journal this past June, Valérian Guillier took a retrospective look at Wark’s manifesto, examining how it has weathered these past twenty years and what can still be recuperated for our current age. He contextualizes the manifesto, highlighting its origins in a time awash in utopian thinking about the “free” exchange of information online. But the hopes of that moment—that information would stay out of the realm of commodification so that a gift economy could emerge—were largely dashed. The tech giants quickly organized themselves to create platforms, building new business models around the flow of information. Guillier perceptively points out that they feed us what we ourselves essentially produce. Though ostensibly they don’t act as gatekeepers, the platforms have instead become “technologies of surveillance, extraction, and policing.” 

Guillier compellingly argues that if the vectoralist class has mutated, then the hackers must alter their counterstrategies in turn. Aware that exploitation is built into the capitalist mode of production, he homes in on the idea of cooperatives. Could hackers take back control of the vectors by establishing platform cooperatives? The idea is certainly tantalizing. 

Meera Menenzes is an art writer and independent curator based in New Delhi. She is currently organizing the second edition of the Anant Curatorial Forum, to be held in Delhi in March 2025. 

JEREMY LYBARGER

Cait McKinney, I Know You Are, but What Am I? On Pee-wee Herman (University of Minnesota Press)

If anything redeems the tawdry 1980s, it’s Pee-wee’s Playhouse. For a half-hour every Saturday morning, viewers—one-third of them adults—were treated to a punch-drunk inversion of yuppie solipsism. Instead of mercenary capitalism, Pee-wee and his sidekicks modeled reciprocity. Instead of the brilliantined cowboy sundowning in the West Wing: a swishy man-child cavorting in a shrunken suit. Instead of AIDS: jokes. 

Pee-wee’s world was a giddy shindig, but beneath the sucralose was serious subtext. As Cait McKinney argues in I Know You Are, but What Am I? On Pee-wee Herman, the show didn’t just offer a reprieve from quintessential American soullessness; it offered a way of being otherwise. And that way was unabashedly queer—no matter that Pee-wee (Paul Reubens, if you must) played coy with his sexuality.

McKinney’s book is short. You can read it in an afternoon. It’s also a chimera: too personal to be scholarly, too cerebral to be anything but an academic romp. McKinney analyzes Pee-wee via three manifestations: in the playhouse, where he revels in techno-utopian communalism; in a Florida porn theater, where he implodes in a real-life scandal that got conflated with the nation’s neurotic fixation on pedophilia; and as a mass-produced talking doll that became a camp reliquary for the end of innocence. The book is funny (“This image of Reubens looks down-to-fuck in the best way,” McKinney writes of the actor’s sleazoid mug shot) and salted with trivia. Did you know that after his doomed rendezvous with Nurse Nancy, Reubens hid out on Doris Duke’s estate, in a cottage recently vacated by Imelda Marcos? 

McKinney is a true Pee-wee fan, and they write with the queerdo’s avenging righteousness. Their book is as much an elegy as a media history, a requiem for long-gone weekends that are “equal parts joy and wound.”

Jeremy Lybarger is an editor at Poetry magazine. He’s currently writing Midnight Tremor, a book about the late Chicago artist Roger Brown.

PERCY ZVOMUYA

Tom Stevenson, “Incapable of Sustaining Weeds,” London Review of Books 

Tom Stevenson begins his review of Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War (2023), by Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan, with a rhetorical question: “What are​ the major wars of our time?” He names the closely observed conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, but also lists the wars in “Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Sudan.” Why have those conflagrations attracted so little attention? Is it because they pose little risk of nuclear war? Perhaps, he speculates, but that alone cannot explain the West’s indifference. It was because of Stevenson’s essay that I ordered Plaut and Vaughan’s deeply researched book; I wanted to understand a conflict in which, according to estimates by scholars at Belgium’s University of Ghent, between 385,000 and 600,000 civilians have died, killed either in or as a consequence of the war. 

This past March, I visited artist spaces in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, to see how artists work in this environment. What I learned was sobering. In prosecuting the Tigray war, Ethiopia, under the leadership of the 2019 Nobel Peace laureate Abiy Ahmed, partnered with its neighbors Eritrea and Somalia. But since the end of the war, Ahmed has fallen out with those former allies. This past October, the leaders of Eritrea and Somalia met with their Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and signed a security treaty. According to a statement released by the trio, Egypt and Eritrea wanted to “enhance the Somali state institutions to confront various internal and external challenges.” I fear this will mean further instability in the Horn of Africa. 

Percy Zvomuya is an African writer and critic who has written for Chimurenga, The Guardian, Mail & Guardian, and the London Review of Books blog. 

JASON STOPA

Maja Ruznic, “What Is Abstraction?” Brooklyn Rail 

Pluralism remains untouched in America. We blister in the sunlight of perpetual social crisis; everyone agrees we don’t agree. Maja Ruznic thinks this is a problem. She believes art should lead us toward the unknown and the sublime, which is a worthy, albeit loaded, aspiration. Yet when she wades deep into questions of abstraction, moral responsibility, and freedom in the Brooklyn Rail, she does so without drowning in philosophical argument or moral panic. Painting and its morals are increasingly crowdsourced, determined by algorithms and online platforms. But populism is not democracy, and polls are not viable metrics for aesthetic significance or moral rightness. Don’t believe me? Just watch Bruce Nauman’s Good Boy Bad Boy, 1985, a two-channel video work featuring speakers uttering blanket statements with unbridled assuredness. The whole video is absurdism ad nauseam. 

Ruznic is an abstract painter first, and ultimately feels that moral policing has created a hostile work environment for abstraction and its practitioners, one in which we’ve exchanged freedom and transgression for politesse. Everyone is deeply afraid of believing/saying/doing the wrong thing. She ends the article by advocating for the artist’s right to deliver discomfort. A contrarian might ask: What’s so wrong about trying to do the right thing, about trying to make others feel good? In a culture that has commodified wellness but doesn’t grant universal health care, feel-good objects would appear to be yet another empty promise. 

Jason Stopa is a painter and writer living in Brooklyn.

ROBYN SCHIFF

Ben Luke, The Week in Art (Art Newspaper) 

My ritual reward after a long week is the Friday drop of the only podcast I follow, The Week in Art. Running about an hour by the clock but transcending time in depth and scope, each episode amounts to such a fulfilling armchair museum visit I feel energized by the excursion. By way of language and pacing that gives artwork extraordinary presence, host Ben Luke talks with curators, art writers, and art-market analysts, shares brief art-world news bulletins (accompanied by an irresistibly jaunty newsroomy score), and always ends with my favorite segment, “Work of the Week,” in which he interviews an artist or curator about a single work in a new exhibit. These conversations are conducted in situ, with Luke and the curators beholding the artworks inside a range of galleries most art-loving mortals couldn’t visit in a single year—including the Barbican Art Gallery in London; New York’s Grey Art Museum; the National Gallery in Washington, DC; and Paris’s Centre Pompidou—and I am transported by the palpable acoustic shift of Luke and his guests standing in the exhibitions. The unmistakable acoustics of gallery space are sometimes accompanied by light background chatter, but more often we experience the hushed, inimitable, and might I say holy atmospherics of the museums themselves as we enter the sensorium via that cavernous gallery-silence that is the sound of deep looking. I’m not exaggerating when I say that you can hear the space. Have Luke and the sound engineers turned me into a bat? Now that we’re inside the gallery, our host poses questions that result in expertly precise descriptions of composition, material, and process, and he draws out illuminating insights that contextualize a given piece in relation to both the artist’s personal development and world history. Although the Week in Art website helpfully links to images of the artworks, I rarely click through; I’d rather hear the work evoked by Luke’s observant questions than see it flattened and reduced by the Web. I’m sorry, digital age: The kind of looking artwork demands can’t actually be engaged by reproductions on the internet—but it turns out you can hear it.

Robyn Schiff is a poet and a professor at the University of Chicago. Her most recent work, a book-length poem titled Information Desk: An Epic, was published by Penguin Books in 2023. 

KAYA GENÇ

Michael Wood, “At the Movies: The Zone of Interest,” London Review of Books

Each time I open a new copy of the London Review of Books, I immediately page to Michael Wood’s film column, At the Movies. His prose is clear, informative, unsparing. Consider, for instance, Wood’s appraisal this past February of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), a film of extraordinary intellectual heft that tackles German fascism in an aesthetically unnerving, experiential way. Wood opens his piece with characteristic reserve: The film “seems stately at first,” he writes, “even stolid, and a bit too restrained to raise real questions.” Descriptions of the film’s “pastoral mode” follow, as the critic alchemizes Glazer’s imagery into staccato prose: “Trees, river, nature, calm.” What more is needed to distill the chilling opening shots? The film’s protagonist is Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Wood underlines, in passing, the terrifying ironies embedded in a scene depicting a visit by businessmen to his house: “The idyllic mood becomes a bit cloudy here because the meeting concerns the purchase of new ovens for the camp.” 

Toward his column’s end, Wood unfurls historical context. In his prison memoirs, Höss expressed guilt about the extermination of the Jewish people because it didn’t “serve” the “cause of anti-Semitism.” The killings were “wrong,” as they earned Germany the hatred of the world and allowed Jews to “come much closer to their goal.” In the film’s finale, Höss stops in a moment of hesitation to retch, “as if to throw up his disgust at everything that has happened and is happening.” This dry heave, as Wood notes with striking precision, arises from a guilt whose source Höss is incapable of acknowledging. He cannot understand the cause of his retch; he “probably felt it was good for his health.” Such analyses articulate Glazer’s imagery in ways only writing can: This is what criticism is for.

Kaya Genç is an art critic and novelist from Istanbul whose most recent book is The Lion and the Nightingale: A Journey Through Modern Turkey, republished with new material this year by Bloomsbury Academic.

SARAH LEHRER-GRAIWER

Jason Farago, “The Venice Biennale and the Art of Turning Backward,” New York Times

In many ways, and speaking as a Jewish American, it’s been a uniquely destabilizing year. The tumult and division within this very magazine have been emblematic of new fissures opening deep wounds. Within the art world and the progressive left, I no longer assume basic common ground on certain issues, and yet I know there are many who will know what I mean when I say that an event like October 7 and its aftermath makes the scales fall from one’s eyes. It ain’t pretty. 

On the lookout for art criticism with thoughtful reconsiderations of our punitively ideological moment, I found myself grateful last spring for a simple mainstream piece like Jason Farago’s review of the Venice Biennale in the New York Times. In it, Farago makes what shouldn’t be a daring plea for centering the richness and diversity of aesthetic experience over instrumentalized identity and representative politics. He diagnoses our culture’s “thoroughgoing inability—even Foucault did not go this far!—to think about art, or indeed life, as anything other than a reflection of political, social, or economic power.” While many noted that Adriano Pedrosa’s “Foreigners Everywhere” paradoxically reaffirmed the very hierarchical structures it sought to disrupt by swapping in artists from the so-called Global South up top, Farago is rightly more concerned about individuals, noting that “the human complexity of artists gets upstaged by their designation as group members, and art itself gets reduced to a symptom or a triviality.” It is an indication of where the bar is that his modest argument—that “art’s true political value lies in how it exceeds rhetorical function or financial value, and thereby points to human freedom”—felt radical.

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer is a writer and curator in Los Angeles.

CAROLINE BUSTA

K Allado-McDowell, “Designing Neural Media,” Gropius Bau Journal

Anyone making art today must consider the media that will transmit it. For those writing art criticism this is doubly true. Few have written more clearly and compellingly about the evolution of media in the twenty-first century than K Allado-McDowell, who this past year penned a three-part series for Berlin’s Gropius Bau Journal on what the writer/theorist calls “neural media,” or media in a time of accelerated machine learning. In support of a central thesis that “unlike previous media types, neural media sense back,” they offer a resource useful not only for understanding computational intelligence but for thinking critically about cultural production today.

In the first essay, Allado-McDowell explains how neural networks function, presenting an evocative, magnificently accessible summary of machine-learning processes. In addition to being a practical desktop reference, this text advances a pivotal argument: that computational intelligence has given rise to a distinct communicational era that will reshape society just as broadcast media (e.g., radio, magazines, TV) and network technology (e.g., Web 1.0 and 2.0) did before it. The series’ second essay, “Neural Interpellation,” builds on the first alongside the work of Marshall McLuhan and Stanford historian Fred Turner, presenting a taxonomy of media eras since 1920 vis-à-vis the mechanisms whereby each constructs its audience/user-base. The third (forthcoming) explores the hazards of neural media, including bell-curve distribution, “midness,” and AI slop, and investigates the agency we have within.

There are clear reasons why much of the most interesting art is now happening at the level of the protocol (the generative model, the game world, the collective swarm) rather than static output (the painting or sculpture). And there are reasons why, sometime in the past decade, much of the art press lost its ability to shape the (art) public sphere. All those in search of answers, consider this required reading.

Caroline Busta is a cofounder of New Models (newmodels.io).

EDNA BONHOMME

Hari Kunzru, “Above Politics,” Harper’s Magazine, and Isabelle Hammad, “Acts of Language,” New York Review of Books 

Most people I know have been watching in horror as the massacre unfolds in Gaza, rattled by the real-time stream of images showing the destruction of people and their homes. To be clear, we abhor the kidnapping and murder of the victims of October 7, but we also know that collective punishment is not the answer. We are astounded by the asymmetry in state violence and Western governments’ asymmetry in grief. In their respective essays, Hammad, the author of Enter Ghost, and Kunzru (2023), the author of Blue Ruin (2024), demonstrate the moral and political stakes of narrative. They shed light on their subject with lyrical grace. They do so not by acquiescing to the status quo but by digging through the history of a people, Palestinians, and a profession, writers. We learn that language is unruly and disobedient. And rather than suppress our anger at genocide, we should look to the past with honesty. Not only do Palestinians deserve better, but we would be better if we were sounder with our words and actions.

Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science, a culture writer, and book critic based in Berlin. She is the author of History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to Covid-19, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster. 

ANDREW MAERKLE

Pankaj Mishra, “The Shoah After Gaza,” London Review of Books

When whole populations can be incinerated at the push of a button, words are a matter of life and death—words of clarity, words of obfuscation. In this light, Pankaj Mishra’s magisterial essay “The Shoah After Gaza,” first delivered in February 2024 as a spoken address for the London Review of Books’ Winter Lectures in London, is one of the most profound meditations I have seen yet on the global stakes of the war of words, said and unsaid, that has emerged in parallel to Israel’s devastating retaliation for the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. Citing a wide range of sources, Mishra outlines how extremist politicians have instrumentalized remembrance of the Shoah, the bedrock of the international discourse on human rights, to condone the Israeli military’s use of violence against Palestinian and other civilians; and he argues that double standards about which lives count or not will contribute to the “hardening of the colour line into a new Maginot Line.” Mishra’s text is a warning that we may be witnessing the “dynamiting” of “the ideals that seemed so universally desirable after 1945: respect for freedom; tolerance for the otherness of beliefs and ways of life; solidarity with human suffering; and a sense of moral responsibility for the weak and the persecuted.” 

Those ideals, along with a commitment to speak truth to power, are fundamental to contemporary art, and the suppression of speech on Gaza over concerns of anti-Semitism presents a unique crisis for art institutions. Mishra himself was implicated in this situation when the original venue for his lecture, London’s Barbican Centre, backed out of hosting the event. (The Barbican issued a statement insisting the talk had never been confirmed to begin with.) The move was quickly decried as censorship, and a number of artists and lenders withdrew their works from a concurrent exhibition at the institution, “Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art,” in protest. 

There has always been a certain cognitive dissonance to the phrase “never again” (for whom? under what conditions?), but such incidents of censorship, occurring again and again over the past year, are reminders that words are empty unless we actively invest them with meaning.

Andrew Maerkle is an art writer, editor, and translator based in Tokyo.

CHARLOTTE KENT

Sean Tatol, Manhattan Art Review 

Reading Sean Tatol’s Web 1.0–style Manhattan Art Review blog is like going on a quick-fire gallery tour with a friend, moving swiftly from show to show. The judgments come just as fast. You don’t always agree, but the clarity demands consideration. Pithy derision cuts right to the chase. There’s no uncertainty about what Tatol likes or doesn’t like, but he’s willing to change his mind (as in his views on Picabia). And whatever he’s saying, he has a palpable passion for the whole mess of this mixed-up art world/market; whether he’s ribbing artists, gallerists, collectors, or other critics, he clearlycares enough to bother in the first place. Tired of Immanuel Kant’s universalizing demands, I find myself interested in judgment that is situated, willing to be imperfect, and honest. David Hume expected judgment to require education and experience (to make apt comparisons and references), imagination (to appreciate subtleties), and mitigation of prejudice, but also—and importantly—pleasure. I get that with Tatol, and I am inspired to respond with the same.

Charlotte Kent is a writer and visual-culture scholar based in New York.