What Artists and Curators Do for Money - Season 4 Episode 1

Momus: The Podcast

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 Wetmore about a piece that was published in Momus and was shortlisted for a 2016 International Award for Art Criticism, a sharp and farcical review of Manifesta 11: What Artist and Curators Do for Money, which demonstrates a rare example of curatorial criticism. Their conversation ranges from sharpening the perfect retort to writing in bed, with Wetmore reflecting on the driving impulse to write this, her only published review to date: "Like, who's making this? How much are they getting paid? What process are they using to get this done? How are you, the curator, and your artist, and your intellectual conceit, tied to the making of this work? Because isn't that the essentially interesting part of the commissioning process? We're there to be able to touch in some oblique way how this came to be. And if we want to pretend that it came to be out of thin air - as I find a lot of curators want to pretend - then I'm simply not interested. Because it's not true."