DC: I want to begin by asking about how you came to be interested in arts writing as your practice. You received your MFA in Arts Writing from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Had you been working in either studio art or art history prior?
I never planned to write about art, I rolled into it by chance actually. I have been working in journalism since I was 19. That was in Jerusalem when I was a college student, I started working at a local newspaper. From journalism I rolled into documentary films and writing and researching for documentary films, and then from there I went into fiction films and from there I started experimenting with making art and writing about it. And then came the opportunity, just when I was done with journalism and writing in general, to join this MFA program, which I joined fairly late at 36. There was one spot open with a scholarship at SVA, and I took the opportunity, and since then I have been writing about art.
I take it as a huge privilege after, what I wrote about before was all about war, conflict, and politics, and I was yearning for some tenderness and writing about things other than conflict and war. When I started writing about art I found out there was no escape, it’s political.
DC: That’s kind of the premise of this publication, asking whether or not cultural production is implicitly political—and if it is, what are the responsibilities and opportunities that come along with that.
As the editor of Hyperallergic, how do you think through the question of local vs global approaches as an arts publication? Both in terms of what art you are looking at, but also in terms of what perspectives are offered through the publication. Do you see it as a global survey?
That’s a good question. We are based in New York City, in Brooklyn, and we do feel a responsibility to write locally, not just globally. There has been a major globalization of the art world that made everything look the same and just follow global capital. And so the language became globalized into this one art-speak language. So everything got professionalized in a way that made it all flat and that serves global capital and global markets, and so there was a lot of authenticity and moral purpose in the process.
So we do have a commitment to the local community of the artists we know here in New York, Brooklyn and beyond. We find that that anchors us. It so happens to be, its not a coincidence, that we are based in a major center of the arts, and there is a huge population of artists here, over seventy-thousand people who call themselves artists and practice their art.
There’s the cliché of the local is the universal, and the more local you get the more universal you get, but we are attuned to similar communities everywhere else in the world, the great majority of artists who have to take on multiple day jobs to afford making their art, not the superstars and the one percent of artists who are supported by the global network of conventional galleries and commercial interests.
DC: Do you think of it as being New York or U.S. focused or do you see it as more globally-focused and beyond geographic borders?
We look beyond the geographic borders but the fact is that most of our readership comes from North America, so we do we serve them and their interests. And it so happens to be that the people from New York are from all over the world, and people from all over the world come to New York to show their work. There are also practical reservations that limit our ability to cover every place, we don’t have writers in those spaces. Most of our writers happen to be in those global clusters of art and artists.
DC: I wanted to touch on the article you recently wrote for Hyperallergic, “The Fabricated Crisis of Art Criticism” where you talk about this wave of people who perceive contemporary arts criticism as being not critical enough.
I think that notion parallels a trend that has happened in music criticism in which there is a thought that being critical of a certain genre of music from outside of it can appear elitist or exclusionary, and that there should be a more postmodern, relativistic view.
How do you think through this balancing act of not wanting to create hierarchies of taste but also maintaining a sense of criticality?
It’s become a cliché that arts criticism is dying. As somebody who does the work and supports people who do the work of arts criticism, I wanted to defend the people who still do it. Now I’m not saying that the things you describe of criticality and people writing more affirmative stuff and people caving into commercial interests because they can’t afford to criticize Taylor Swift or Beyonce. Not just PR machines, but like big powers supporting them who come and intimidate you and take away your income or your ad revenue and so on and so forth. There’s a lot of pay to play, all of those problems exist, but the production of art criticism still exists just not in the centers of power that it used to exist in. They have moved to blogs and TikTok and so on.
There is an elitist approach in thinking that ten white guys that are writing art criticism in legacy publications will define what art criticism is and who should write it. Even in the best of times and the golden era of art criticism, it was always down to the same five to ten guys in major newspapers, and they’re going away and I’m saying, “good riddance.” It was a very limited perspective over there, and elitist and patronizing. The things that the New York Times wrote about Black artists in the 1980s were outrageous, and some of these people are still in there.
I’m saying that if somebody is putting a fifteen second video on TikTok about an artwork and makes a sincere argument about it, I call that art criticism. So art criticism is still out there, actually there is more of it, because it is not just limited to those ten positions in legacy newspapers. There’s a lot more of it, but the gatekeepers and the old guard doesn’t regard it as art criticism. After publishing that piece a lot of art bloggers, people who write about art for their enjoyment and don’t run any paid advertisements or make money from it, reached out and said thank you.
The reason for our whole existence here at Hyperallergic is to fight against that PR-led, market-oriented art journalism, and the problem goes back to the ownership of course. I don’t know if you’re aware, but half of the landscape of arts media is owned by one guy, Jay Penske from the Penske Media Corporation, he owns Artforum, Art News, and Art in America. Artnet is owned by Andrew Wolff, a British billionaire, and Frieze, both the publication and the art fair, is owned by Ari Emmanuel. So billionaires control the scene and they own the shows that are being covered and the venues and that is why you don’t get any critical stuff.
DC: There was the firing of David Velasco, the editor at Artforum, for writing a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Jay Penske, the billionaire owner who bought the publication, also owns a lot of their competitors so you get that problem of consolidation. You won’t find anything to critical there in any of those publications any more.
DC: How do you view Hyperallergic’s position in the field of arts criticism in relation those other publications?
I recently published this letter from the editor-in-chief as a micro-manifesto of our values here at Hyperallergic. We are the only art publication that is not owned by a big corporation or a billionaire. The only major publication of the top five let’s say. And we care about community, we are not just covering the superstars and the big names. That is what differentiates us. We have a moral compass and a moral purpose, and we stand by the powerless and disenfranchised, and the people who are oppressed by the structures of power. There is a very clear political slant here against the PR-driven, market-oriented art media that considers art as a luxury item or status symbol or an investment asset for the ultra-rich. We look at art as a basic human right that everyone has. Everyone has the right to enjoy art and practice it and be recognized and being considered a part of the so-called “art world.”
It’s a very different approach from all the rest. Just generally speaking, they are approaching art from the perspective of the collector class, whereas we approach it from the perspective of the people who make art, and the people who love it and enjoy it and consume it.
DC: Before our final question here, I want to quote something you wrote: “good art criticism links the art on the wall to the world outside.” What do you see as the most important political responsibilities and opportunities of art criticism?
I think writing about art is not worth it if it is separated from what is happening in the world. I’ll give you several examples. The killing of Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis. Some people may wonder what is the connection to art there, but we responded immediately with an article seeing what artists have done, how they’ve reacted, what kind of work they’ve put out in response to this killing. We also consider protest art as something important to cover. We look at protest signs, and people are doing some of the most creative stuff there, and it’s very effective to convey a message. That’s one example.
We spoke to five Venezuelan artists in the diaspora about how they feel in that moment (the U.S. seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January) and we got very complex and nuanced responses about not wanting to support U.S. imperialism on the one hand, and on the other, recalling the strife they lived under.
We always connect it to what is happening in the news because we look at the world through art, and I think that is very important. That is what excites me about it. The excitement is the opportunity and the commitment, and the obligation is to speak the truth through art, and its always exciting to discover that courage to tell the truth even if its not convenient or commercially rewarding.