This is the first of two reflections Momus published on the occasion of Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999, on view at Dia Beacon through 2027.

I got lost several times on my way to Casa Susanna, the exhibition I had set out to write about. It was a sticky Friday night in July—“date night” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as the Met ...

Momus: The Podcast is a monthly arts and culture program hosted by Sky Goodden and Lauren Wetmore. Bringing Momus's unique insistence on criticality into a more conversational register, the podcast is ...

Pablo Picasso is so famous and so ubiquitous and so dead that he is easy not to think about at all. It’s as though his most renowned artworks are in the next gallery along with his clownish public ...

Launched in 1995, SITE International Biennial was the first biennial for contemporary art in the United States. Over the course of its eleven editions, the organization has primarily focused on ...

I first saw Martin Wong’s prison paintings when I visited a two-person exhibition of Wong and the contemporary painter Aaron Gilbert at PPOW Gallery in 2021. Five of them were included in the show. I ...

An eight-foot wooden ramp was propped up at a forty-five-degree angle in one corner. Knotted ropes hung from six holes drilled near the ramp’s top. The din of the ongoing installation echoed from ...

For the ancient Greeks, the division of time was represented by a separation of chronos from kairos. To symbolize durational or cyclical time, Greco-Roman mosaics personified chronos as a god turning ...

Historical hypocrisies are thus made into moments of sincere personal shortcomings rather than situated as forms of systemic oppression essential to the construction of the world’s most merciless ...

As the longest-running institutional survey of contemporary American art, the Whitney Biennial never fails to create “discourse.” Each iteration makes a claim about the cultural moment in which it ...

Milling through the Vancouver Art Gallery earlier this spring, I stopped before a towering diptych that paired a cartoon prince and a back-turned nude….

A soft, warm light morphs into a shadow of a woman’s braided hair on the back of her neck. There is the sound of faint footsteps as she moves around her flat, shifting objects in the kitchen, the ...