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Guests: Annette LePique, Curtis Anthony Bozif, Pia Singh, Gareth Kaye
Recorded with the support of Columbia College Chicago – Colum.edu
What happens when you gather a room full of critics in a moment when criticism itself feels both endangered and newly alive?
In this long-awaited return to the Chicago Critics Roundtable, Duncan sits down with a new multi-hyphenate crew of writers, curators, artists, and exhibition-makers to unpack the shifting role of criticism in a fractured “art ecology.” What emerges is a conversation about care, attention, subjectivity, labor, and the strange intimacy of thinking deeply about someone else’s work.
From the death of legacy media to the rise of Substack, from writing as love to writing as agitation, this episode positions criticism as a lived, embodied, and often obsessive practice.
Criticism is relational, literary, emotional, and deeply entangled with the conditions of making and showing art in Chicago today, and certainly never “neutral”.
Name Drop List (with links)
Duncan MacKenzie—https://kurasmackenzie.com/
Brian Andrews—https://www.brianandrews.org/
Annette LePique—https://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/byline/annette-lepique/
Curtis Anthony Bozif—https://www.curtisanthonybozif.com/
Pia Singh—https://curatorsintl.org/collaborators/22319-pia-singh
Gareth Kaye—https://chicagospleen.substack.com/
Derrick Guthrie—https://derrickguthrie.com/
Lane Relyea—https://www.artic.edu/authors/71/lane-relyea
James Elkins—https://www.saic.edu/profiles/faculty/james-elkins
Michelle Grabner—https://www.michellegrabner.com/
Lori Waxman—https://www.60inchcenter.org/lori-waxman
Charles Baudelaire—https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/charles-baudelaire
Dave Hickey—https://www.artforum.com/contributors/dave-hickey
Werner Herzog—https://www.bfi.org.uk/filmography/werner-herzog
Timothy Morton—https://www.timothymorton.net/
Rachel Carson—https://www.rachelcarson.org/
Peter Schjeldahl—https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/peter-schjeldahl
- Episode 939: Sarah Higgins - April 19, 2026
- Episode 938: Tori Tinsley - April 18, 2026
- Episode 937: Nato Thompson - April 13, 2026
