Editor’s Picks: Merve Emre’s Podcast Demystifies the Art of Criticism

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to.

Merve Emre, The Critic and Her Publics

Criticism often manifests as a polished object, tumbled smooth by writing and editing. It’s a rare pleasure, then, to trace the live pinballing of thought as a gifted critic works in real time. In writer and literary critic Merve Emre’s podcast The Critic and Her Publics, a new series from the New York Review of Books and Literary Hub, critics across disciplines discuss the unorthodox arcs of their careers and ‘perform criticism’ then and there. Food critic Hannah Goldfield must contend with cookies baked by Emre’s students and cultural critic Doreen St. Félix is tasked with unpacking Awol Erizku’s photograph Girl with a Bamboo Earring (2009). (Though the premise is that the guests may be unfamiliar with the objects of critique, many of them are known – it’s hard to imagine that, say, Moira Donegan, who reports on reproductive rights, wouldn’t immediately recognize the iconic dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.) Characterizing criticism as a process, this smart show makes the genre more accessible and commutes more bearable.

Beach Sessions Dance Series

Modern dancer Isadora Duncan once remarked that her ‘first idea of movement, of the dance, certainly came from the rhythm of the waves’. Returning dance to the ocean, Beach Sessions Dance Series is an annual performance programme of site-specific dances set on Rockaway Beach in Queens, New York City. Past iterations have featured brand-new pieces – such as Madeline Hollander’s ARENA (2017), a palimpsestic choreography performed by dancers and beach cleaner trucks – as well as fresh arrangements of existing works – like a stage-to-sand adaptation of Merce Cunningham’s Beach Birds (1991), in which dancers contort, leap and tremble with avian grace. For its tenth season, Beach Sessions has commissioned experimental choreographer Faye Driscoll, whose work has previously been shown in performance and museum contexts. On 2 September, she will debut a roughly 90-minute, 16-person dance structured around ‘oceanic feeling’: a summer swan song.

Aruna D’Souza, Imperfect Solidarities

What if empathy isn’t the means by which we realize solidarity? In her slim, eminently readable new book Imperfect Solidarities (Floating Opera Press, 2024), art critic Aruna D’Souza points out what often goes unexamined in calls for empathy: namely, that empathy is doled out with violent selectivity; can be paradoxically solipsistic in centring the empathizer; and fails to support relations built on alterity, untranslatability and what Martinican writer Édouard Glissant famously called the ‘right to opacity’. Her critical analyses of art, literature and social media grapple with the utterly necessary mess of more fruitful solidarities.

Case studies range from ‘Dialectics of Isolation’, a 1980 exhibition co-curated by artists Ana Mendieta, Kazuko Miyamoto and Zarina – where, D’Souza argues, a critic mistook the heterogeneity of Third World Feminism for incoherence – to Stephanie Syjuco’s photographic series ‘Block Out the Sun’ (2019), which was recently included in the Guggenheim Museum’s visibility-problematizing show ‘Going Dark: the Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility’ (2023–24).

_{Main image: Soundwaves going into ears. Courtesy: We Are/Getty Images}