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Critics Round Table: On Hate

 Salomé Burstein, Juliette Desorgues, Graham Hamilton, Aodhan Madden & Brit Barton





The talk in Paris had to have a subject so, when it was decided that Something on Certainty made sense as the title, I also knew that doubt would become the main topic. Artists, curators, and writers alike often exist with hesitation that inevitably informs the work we produce. That night, as things shifted into general inquiries or observations, Aodhan—as the final question—asked: “Do you ever write from a place of hate?”

        When we broke for a drink, several people urged its necessity in criticism, or at least—not indifference; non-neutrality; a commitment for nuance. It was clear that there was an urgency for something else that has been warped or disregarded in the last decade or so. Months later, I am still thinking about it. But even when I suggested a conversation between several writers in the audience that evening, we collectively hedged: hate is such a strong word...

        As with certainty and doubt, when we consider hate as a topic, we're really considering its opposite: love—or at least, not indifference. The attention, the energy, the exhaustion—all the erotics of anger or intimacy that form the desire to write in the first place—that is what this conversation is about.

***

Aodhan: I remember being interested in what you were saying about criticism being a labour of love, and how you didn’t want to spend time with a hated object, let alone duplicate it in writing. This seemed to correspond with how art criticism seems to function in a general sense at the moment—where a negative affect or opinion towards a show or an artist is more likely to result in silence. In today’s attention economy, indifference is perhaps a more effective way to “subtract” something from the art world than hate. That said, I myself have never really written from hatred so-to-speak. I guess because I’ve never really been asked to. In contemporary art criticism, hatred doesn’t have the same currency as it once may have had.


Graham: Yeah, you don't hate it, but it's boring. Indifference depends on your relationship to boredom. I like what you said about not getting invited to write about art you hate, because what one is commissioned to write about is important.

        I wrote this “critical”—certainly not hateful—piece in part on Trisha Donnelly’s show at the MMK. Since I had pitched the piece and it had a strong position I started my essay/review with the question of whether anyone asked for my take. Maybe publications don’t have such strong or coherent editorial positions these days which makes what is written by and about whom a more ambivalent situation. I don't even know where these decisions are happening anymore, who makes these choices. Since we don't have consistently paid critics I feel an idea of consistent critical authority is more diffuse, and so having a critical position and expressing it feels more arbitrary.

Aodhan:  I also think formally it's really hard to write something good or interesting out of hate. Sustaining hatred over a thousand words of reasoned argumentation is difficult. You really have to hate the object. Also, something else that I have been thinking about is today’s aesthetic criteria, which also relates back to indifference: I feel as though we are more likely to judge whether a work of art is interesting or not; regardless of whether we personally “like” it, let alone whether we love or hate it.

Graham: I found this definition of hate from Spinoza: “sadness accompanied by the idea of an external cause.” That's what I felt when I was in this Donnelly exhibition, that the sadness had something to do with this work. That I had been somehow let down. I thought maybe this is an unfair or even immature reaction couched as a critical judgment…I'm also still wondering when is a work really deserving of a kind of hateful or just critical public rebuke. Is it a feeling that we deserve better or that there is something to correct in our general expectation? These feelings also feel moral.

Brit: I think the Spinoza point is really on par. On this last Donnelly text from the second A&O issue: I'd written it over, I don't know, two months or something. And as I had been writing and talking to different people about it, I did realize that I had a lot of support for my critique but also realized so many people had a nervousness to say what they were really thinking.

       I also spoke to my friend and critic Kirsty Bell, who really loved the exhibition and I loved that she loved it. But when we spoke at length about it and discussed where we were both coming from, she pointed out that clearly I was speaking from disillusionment. I wanted much more and realized that I had been had, that I would never get to encounter the work I wanted from the artist I thought I loved for so long. But fundamentally, that's my fault, not the artists.

Salomé: I'm thinking back to what you called “the erotics of hate”—perhaps in relation to sadness or melancholia. In the email you sent us to introduce this conversation, you described hate as this “overwhelming feeling that numbs us all.” To me, it’s quite the opposite.

        Hating has something of a process of individuation, it’s heated and anchoring. While I’d associate numbness with indifference, hate is dynamic, reactive, it pushes the self into movement. There’s something about wanting and desire within it.

Juliette: Yes I would agree. The term ‘hate’ presupposes a level of emotional investment, a kind of attachment, that can be generative in writing. To hate something is not be indifferent to it; it implies proximity, friction, and a refusal of neutrality. Engaging with work that frustrates or repels you can open up a different critical register. Only writing reviews of works or exhibitions that you like or are close to is limiting as a writer. It also narrows the range of what art criticism can do, and does not necessarily advance discourse. At the same time, there are important ethical considerations at play. One should strive to write in a way that is incisive without becoming gratuitously harmful. But there is a tendency in mainstream media today where writing has lost its criticality and it’s important to resist that. 

        Of course, the broader social and economic conditions make this far from easy, especially independent writers, who often occupy multiple roles within the same ecosystem they are asked to critique. This is where the issue lies. It speaks to the increasing precarity of writing, and wider conditions at play in the art world. 



Salomé: Even before the moment of writing, if we simply think of talking about an object of hate—a show for example—that summoned that feeling; I’m hardly ever as vocal or elaborate in my thoughts than when I have to understand or justify what provoked the hate. This is also a pleasurable exercise, one in criticism, in dissecting your thought and affective process. In writing, the point is not just to hate but to be reflective on your criticality. 

        I’m also intrigued by the proliferation of speech that may happen within these moments, how hate sometimes calls for being vocal, for spreading words. Of course, you have the figure of the lonesome hater, one that will lash out online. But there’s also something uncontained about how hatred can manifest within language, which comes from the exercise of writing. It is an exercise in constraints and limitations (if we’re talking about art criticism at least): one where feelings have to be digested, if not even summarized, to be able to be made publicly available. 

        About what you said Juliette… I’ve written very little art criticism actually, I tend to write more exhibition texts, and affect and transactions play out differently there. You don’t have the same ties when you’re commissioned with a text for a show than when you're supposedly ‘free’ to voice your opinions. But of course these ties exist beneath or within art criticism too, whether you’re free depends on whether you feel legitimate enough, un-vulnerable enough to speak your mind directly. 

         The very first piece of art criticism I wrote was about a show I actually sort of hated, but I was not able to voice that directly. I remember smothering the criticism beneath complimentary aspects of the exhibition that I did honestly enjoy. But then, I didn’t manage to be frontal about the aspects I disliked or was angry about; it was all very “subtle.” The gallerist even reposted enthusiastically about the text, and I was like, didn’t he realize that was a bad review? But the fact is, I didn’t write it as such. I remember, Juliette, you and I had talked about it back then, and you were able to read between the lines…Ironically, I also hate the piece now.

Aodhan: I think this is interesting because neutrality, in these contexts, never really does exist. As underpaid freelance critics, there is often some professional relationship at stake. I wonder whether you ever feel like you're writing code? I recently read an excellent review by Laura McLean Ferris of ECHO, REVERB, DELAY at the Palais de Tokyo, excellent because I got the sense that she didn’t particularly like the show, hated it even—perhaps through certain word choices, or the decision to use certain quotes, etc.—but then at the same time, she opened it up in a way that made me rethink my own experience of the show, to think more about it. 

        This is one of the roles of the critic, right? Not to tell the reader what to think, but to make her think differently about something, even just for a short time. Have any of you had similar reading or writing experiences?

Brit: Max Guy wrote on Diego Marcon's first solo exhibition in the United States at the Renaissance Society. Max is not like a critic per se, he's a conceptual artist who enjoys thinking through writing. He’s also one of my very best friends and working through his text, editing him, parsing his words—I, of course, knew how he truly felt about the exhibition. But at the end of it, the reader didn't really know if there was a definitive ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ And it drove people crazy! I think Diego quite liked that actually.

        It calls into question the role of the ambivalent critic. Is it enough that the act of writing on anything should point to the sentiment of merit or value for the writer? Or is writing in a code or indifference within the subtext enough for the current state of capitalist-criticism?

Graham: Sometimes I feel work that generates a feeling of indifference produces this kind of vindictive judgemental writing. We were speaking earlier about hate as being this desire to erase or subtract something from the world, which is not a very indifferent feeling. 

        Aodhan, you said the way one might subtract something from the art world or the social structure of our general shared practice is by ignoring it. That's good hygiene, but people generally aren't able to do that. I feel like certain critics became popular just because they aren’t indifferent. Manhattan Art Review, for instance, was all over the place hating on stuff and people reacted to it I think specifically because it wasn't indifferent in the way people were used to. 

Brit: Well, I will say, even if I wrote a fairly positive, glowing text filled with superlatives, if I even have a sentence in there that has nuance of criticality, it will be that one bit the artist zeros in on and gets after me and spirals out, thinking this is the worst review of all time and I’m somehow out to sabotage them. I mean, I've been cornered in bars. I've been followed. It's a double-edged sword in some capacity to think not necessarily about even writing on hate, but just writing at all. 

        I understand that people have their reasons, that they want their work to be written about, but it's usually that they want to be written about the way they want, as if I didn’t actually exist in thought or labor. And I'm always like, well, be careful what you wish for because have you done your due diligence, have you actually read any of my writing? Usually the answer is no. 

Juliette: It’s important to remain mindful of the people involved —artists, curators, and others—and not resort to violent language. I don’t think that can ever be a method of critique. There is always some value. What feels more dangerous, in a way, is indifference or silence.. Criticism can serve to acknowledge presence – to situate work within a landscape. I find often that a lot of similar discourse gets circulated. It feels important to make a conscious effort to write about practices that fall outside this orbit – those that might be overlooked or excluded from the current canon. 

        This also raises the question of who gets to speak within art criticism. Expanding the range of voices writing – and the subjects they choose to engage – seems essential to sustaining a more dynamic and inclusive discourse. 


Salomé: It’s important to choose your enemies. Maybe ideal criticism is also a form in which hatred can actually be expressed—where you allow yourself to articulate it in a compelling way. It’s not about being violent, but about being convincing: if you hate something, you try to understand why, you analyze it, and you make a point of naming that feeling. Why is this hatred produced? Why does it matter enough to pay attention to it? To always try to put it into words. From there, you build an argument. In a sense, you want to prove your point. To make it engaging for potential readers. 

        But the problem, which I think you pointed out very early on, Aodhan, is the question of form. Where to publish and in how many words is the ideal form for expressing hatred through writing? 

        I was invited by a friend—the artist K. Desbouis—who runs this publication I love called Suckcess, which looks into “negative affects” such as failure, jealousy, envy. K. invited me to conduct an interview and I was eager to play around a bit, to maybe go outside the “art” framework. So I chose to stick with the format, but to interview a paparazzo and to interrogate this specific strain of photography—something that also has some nostalgia attached to it, another era of imagery and the power relations embedded within the act of image-making. 

        I was put in touch with a man that was known as the “king of paparazzi” in Paris and we met at his usual table at Café de Flore, this historic bougie café of Saint-Germain des Prés. And I remember realizing, very clearly in that moment, that I had trapped myself. I had willingly sat down with my political enemy. He was everything I despised. Reactionary, misogynistic, etc. Your typical old French guy. I had prepared questions, even watched videos beforehand, and he kept telling the same stories, the exact same sentences as when invited to talk on TV shows. I tried to push him off script, but he wouldn’t deviate. 

        The whole thing was uncomfortable, but the process of transcribing the recording was the most painful. I started to hate it. And I was mad at myself, too, because I wasn’t occupying the political position I wanted. I feared turning into the caricature of the young feminist who disagrees but can’t quite assert herself. There was something about the form of the interview format…it didn’t feel believable, the guy had turned us both into the characters of his own movie. But because K. had given me carte blanche, it ended up dissolving into a script. I switched from French to English, anonymized the guy… methods for distancing what had taken place. Fiction entered the process, and form became a way of handling the hatred. Because the economy around writing is so minute, something else has to make it worth it. 

        Maybe the question is also: What are the forms that allow us to work with these affects? And perhaps to find pleasure within them? 

Graham: Also, who are these things for? I don't know if we can separate hateful writing or critical writing. But I remember, Brit, what you said when Aodhan asked you if you ever wrote from a place of hatred. You said something like, you don't write criticism hatefully, but that it's fun to do. I don't want to misquote you. It was something that resonated because there is something pleasurable about making an actual judgment, and I wonder if that makes it more for the writer than anyone else.

Brit: It reminds me of my own extreme immaturity in writing angry emails. But, honestly, some of the angriest emails that I've written in my life are like pure poetry. I'm very proud of them! It’s so cringe to admit, but I used to do that thing where I'd write an email and at the very end of it, I'd be like: And don't respond! I’ve said what I need to say and I don't want to hear from you! Or to kind of deflect on the possible consequences by saying, “Whether you respond to this or not…” It is definitely such an ego act of writing for myself, but also maybe for the audience of one—knowing it’s between me and that person who will read it. Because anything opposite of indifference is going to have some element of intimacy to it.  

        But returning to this question of hatred or writing publicly from hate, how I mostly choose to not do it, and fundamentally who is it for? I mean, we all know that it's fun to read something that's written from a very, let's not say hateful place but an informal and nuanced one. Oftentimes it reads as gossip, right? And oftentimes it reads as, “that's exactly what I was thinking, but I didn't know how to or even if I could say it.” 

        Also…I mean, Graham, how should I put it? I felt such a sense of camaraderie reading what you had to say about Trisha Donnelly, because writing is often so lonely. And when you write something and you don't know how it's going to be perceived or how/if you're the only one to say it. It isn’t unlike being an audience member at an artist talk. To stand up and question something that half of the people around might be thinking, or maybe no one's thought of it this way at all. It's such a moment to hold a microphone and invite others into your own ineloquence. So to have a public discourse with one another around a shared object, it's a life of its own and something I do cherish, especially when there is a further reactionary response to what I’ve written, of course I take it to heart.

        I used to think the audience of one for me was always the artist I was writing about. But I’ve learned that I'm writing for other writers.

Juliette: Thinking about strategies of writing, as a critic you’re inevitably positioned in a kind of public role. There is something quite exposing about that – having your text circulate on a public platform. That visibility can be unsettling. It makes me wonder whether writing from a position of anonymity, using an alias or a collective platform. Would it create a space for greater freedom, or alter the stakes of criticism in a productive way? 

Salomé: To me, creating a persona is quite different from anonymity. Even if it’s a pseudonym, even if it’s fictional… I think the question of signature matters when it comes to criticism—maybe it has something to do with embodiment of speech, or also responsibility. 

Juliette: I am wary of the toxic strategies that anonymity can enable—often reproducing the very violent frameworks they seek to critique. At the same time, I think it can open up possibilities for addressing broader structural conditions, particularly those that might feel difficult to confront from a named position.

Aodhan: What you're saying reminds me of the launch of the Downtown Critic last summer in New York. They have a hybrid way of addressing questions of anonymity, where the writers are named, but you don't know which text they wrote. The authors' texts were read by someone else, and this displacement felt interesting, but also kind of strange. I suppose because the texts didn’t seem to particularly take advantage of the freedom that the format granted them. 

        Anyway, I remember the discussions afterwards revolving around the question of community, and how authoring might actually be important to allow for conversation to happen. Situated speech allows for exchange. But these experimental or “outsider” publications or spaces are critical, given that they are less economically dependent on relationships within the art world (or completely dependent in a disclosed way, which can be just as interesting). I also have friends that are part of WhatsApp groups where they seem to seriously discuss what’s going on in contemporary art, and in an organized way: everyone must participate, no lurking.

Brit: I know of very established artist WhatsApp groups that are deeply critical with one another but there is a subtext of self-censorship by virtue of its existence and exclusion.

Graham: It's funny, or sad, or interesting how hard it is just to create community with writing or an exchange of criticality. We have to organize WhatsApp groups and share texts I guess because our media sphere has grown so large or our local social sphere so small, or both. This anonymity thing is complicated because it seems like it often creates bitchiness. Like Contemporary Art Writing Daily, or Jerry Magoo, these kinds of semi-anonymous platforms tend to give license to more reckless forms of expression. There's definitely a glee in their carelessness, or freedom, or meanness, but it seems to produce more of an inside and outside rather than a community.

        I don't understand the Downtown Critic. To mystify the authorship but maintain the clout by keeping the list of popular contributors seems to dilute anything substantial, and honestly just keeps me from being able to engage with it.

Brit: I was the editor-in-chief of a minor publication a few years ago, but was kicked out when I refused to make myself anonymous; they felt like it was an anti-collective stance. But, this is literally my labor. They would never anonymize themselves as a curator or an artist, but my individual writing didn’t seem to matter, as long as I was working on their English in an editorial capacity. It became clear to me that this is part of a political position—as an immigrant and a third country national and a woman—who exists in a country known for a societal standard of passive silence, especially up against these three Swiss men in this pseudo-collective sphere. It’s such a strange warped mentality. When I think of it, I just feel sorry for them. 

        In these WhatsApp groups or in the case of Downtown Critic, we could say that it's in effort for the community and within their right. But to maintain a critical public position and a critical subjectivity, which as we’ve said, is sometimes scary and always lonely, really shows their cowardness. I do take it very seriously to be able to sign my name but I also acknowledge the community of other writers and especially my editors. That's where Manhattan Art Review falls very short for me. Because, you know, he's just in the liminal state of his own voice and being read; he's like, I don't revise, I don't edit, I don't think through it, I just go for it. I think that there's a huge machismo and bravado in that in claiming of casual certainty that isn’t real in criticism. 

        I wanted to mention the erotics of anger, but also tenderness of hate. If I give anyone my attention via text even if it's criticism, it is still time spent, it's still coming from a tender point. I wanted to open that up and think about that criticality as tenderness or hate as a sort of double-edged sword of even economy of attention.

Salome: Hmm…I understand what you mean in terms of attentional scarcity… taking the time to unpack why you hate something is already, in itself, taking time—it’s already paying attention. And for that alone, one should be paid. 

        It reminds me of Georg Franck’s notion of “tax on perception” when it comes to advertising. In a way, now that brands are fighting over our attention, we should be getting something in return when we actually give it to them. But to me, hatred works a little differently. It isn’t tender, because it isn’t willful—hatred seizes you in a way that differs from the voluntary act of paying attention. It has power over you. Of course writing comes in as a secondary act, one that is willful indeed: involving labor and unfolding over an extended temporality. Still, it feels to me that something else is at play when you write from hate, from that initial feeling that overwhelms you rather than something you can fully grasp or control. The balance of power seems slightly different… although maybe it’s about learning to be tender toward your hatred—or even toward the object of that hatred.

Graham: The first time I was in Isabelle Graw’s class at Städel, she presented this Banksy piece that shredded itself during its auction. I remember asking her afterwards why we were looking at what was, in my opinion, a silly artwork. I asked, don't you feel you have a responsibility to direct our attention to things that are meaningful, not meaningless? And she was like, “No. I don't have the responsibility at all to direct your attention.” Maybe she hates the Banksy piece, I don't know. I think she probably loves the way it allows her to think about art and capital. 

Aodhan: I think this comes back to the question of love and interest: criticism today is not so much about writing about objects that you love or that you think have some kind of intrinsic form of value, but that are “interesting.” I don’t really know what this means, nor do I really know what “my personal taste” is. It’s constantly warping and untrustworthy. I do also think one can love weird objects, and—without wanting to sound too pretentious—that this has a kind of democratic function on some minor level, to bring your attention to everything that is there, in life, without a pre-established hierarchy. 

        This is of course very idealistic, but nevertheless seems to be the role of the critic within a democratic society? At least I think it’s important that the critic has a licence to write about whatever she wants, the “justification” of the critic’s judgement upheld (or not) in her work.

Brit: The role of the critic is to have equal parts of some educated, subjective stance of value, the rationale and acceptance that other people might disagree with you, and a sense of self-entitlement of expression in the moment. Foucault refers to it as “writing the history of the present” and writing, for me, becomes a fundamental act of witnessing and what I put forward for future discourse. 

       You’re right, though, Salomé, if I hate something I can actively choose to not write about it and that's not a tender act or whatever. I use this example often but the purest moment of hate I’ve ever had was the Ghislaine Leung exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel. While I’ve never written about it, I’ve been very vocal about it. And you know, this poor artist; she became this symbol for me that whole summer of subsequent examples of exhibitions on motherhood and labor that I thought were totally fraudulent and status quo bullshit to appeal to German speaking moderates. Different editors from different magazines asked me to do a long-form feature and I just couldn’t. I didn’t want my name tied to the artist but also, I didn’t want to put that out in the world much less waste my energy. But the irony is that I bring it up so often, I still have so much to say about this wave of exhibitions from like two years ago. It's become a cruel joke that's clearly still eating away at me as this pinnacle example of an exhibition I truly hated. 

Salomé: Have you ever spoken to the artist directly?

Brit: No and I have zero interest. I'm on an artist break! Sorry, Graham!

Salomé: I don’t really position myself as a critic. Writing is where I flirt the most with anything that could come close to an artistic practice. This is why these “negative feelings” like hate to me have been useful, they’ve challenged aspects pertaining to form. Perhaps also because I haven’t really found the room or the way to express a true dissent within criticism. I remember having to do an exhibition text about a work I didn’t like and switching it into a cut-up poem. It all points back to the question of commissioning again… maybe also to coding. What’s fun about this is the potential for being not only understood by the few people that actually get you or who are close to you, but the potential for being misread. I also find that enticing somehow. 

Graham: When I write about an artist or artwork, I try to really embody a spirit of trust. I feel the artist has made themselves vulnerable and their work is already open to investigation, so I have to approach it carefully. Maybe when I get close to an aggressive judgement, it's when I feel this mutual  carefulness isn't upheld by the artist…but it’s questionable whether that is my business to comment on. I can investigate that hatred like sadness which I have attributed to this thing's interaction with me, but I can't hate it. If I had a hateful will to destroy the thing, to erase the work, I wouldn't write about it, because I really believe in art and artists, and in the end the goal of writing about art for me–I think–is affirming the whole practice.

        It's complicated to take a break or distance from artists, as Brit said, because I do think art people kind of hate artists these days. I saw an interview with Alvaro Barrington. He said it is a weird industry secret that everybody actually hates artists. I don't know if that's true but I do hear things like that from my friends a lot these days, and I have the feeling myself that most people want to have an art world without artists. I think they resent and want to avoid the precarity the artist is inevitably involved with.

Salomé: It’s interesting to think of writing from hate as an exercise in limits. I’m not sure how best to put it, but it’s about containing hatred—holding it back from the point of destruction, and instead bringing it to the point where it can build an argument, and then letting it go. And then moving on. There’s something important in not going all the way to that destructive endpoint. Language can help with that—it can act as a way of tightening things, of giving them form and measure.

Brit: Right, that act of letting go is essential. I say that I'm on an artist break as a joke, but it really is because I have to be careful where and with whom I put my energy. It can really weigh down part of my psyche because, if there is a work I really try to love but that I just cannot, that result again isn’t indifference or hatred at all but disillusionment.

        To get back to the original question and the real answer as to why I have a problem with writing from a position or production of hate: it is that hate is a form of attachment, and ultimately…attachment is rooted in fantasy. And fantasy is always a set up for disappointment. Being disappointed and disillusioned is exhausting, and it hurts my practice too.

       Elsewhere, I’ve been pretty honest about a critical text I’d written and had such an overwhelmingly strong reaction to it after it was published. I had to internalize it twice. I tried my best to interpret what I could given my own artistic understanding and background, to access something in a way that it deserved, but in the end there was a fatal flaw I couldn’t see past. The day the piece came out, I felt like I was having a panic attack. And the artist said that it felt like I stabbed him and much later, mentioned that I had the potential to destroy him. I would never, ever want that kind of subtraction. It was hard to take in; no matter how monumental an artistic practice might seem, there is still such a fragility to it. I know I want to always respect that fragility.

Aodhan: What do you think he meant by destroy? To his opportunities, or markets or his relationship to his practice?

Brit: I don’t know, probably his practice if I had to guess. 

Aodhan: It reminds me of Jean-Paul Sartre’s book on Jean Genet, Saint Genet. I haven’t read it, but I remember reading from Genet’s biography that this book completely depressed him—he didn’t write for a decade after. 

        I also know many artists that don't read any criticism of their work. Not because they're not interested in debate or whatever, but because there's something inherently unnerving and uncomfortable about someone intimately reflecting back to you a version of your public existence, one that is inevitably distorted. Graham, do you read your reviews?

Graham: There's not many of them, but a teacher of mine wrote one, and he’s a prominent critic—like a critic in the classic sense of having made it his living– and it's extremely meaningful to me. It's very impactful to read about your own work, it directs the stream somehow, redirects the flow. It’s probably different for everybody, but I think a lot about the consequences of writing about somebody's work, and I know when I'm writing, it’s something I'm very anxious about.

        With the Donnelly piece, for example, I don't feel I need to say here or anywhere how impactful Trisha Donnelly is in a positive way on my milieu because hopefully the care I put into writing that piece would make my respect evident. And then with that seriousness or respect I have the liberty to feel and write about her work the way I want and share it. 

        When I think about artists and critics, rather than hate, I think a lot about jealousy and envy. There is always this tension of how we are different and how we're not. There's a kind of a permanent discomfort to this exchange.

Salomé: It’s like when you're mad at someone, it's often because there's a resemblance here.  

Juliette: There's also a responsibility in writing of course and what we are circling around here is a question of ethics. Graham, you touched on this as well: that if hate enters into criticism, it shouldn’t operate as an act of destruction, but rather as something that is generative, and productive of discourse. 

Salomé: On what Aodhan said with the reference to Sartre’s Saint-Genet: I don’t know if anything can be found here in terms of ‘ethics’ of criticism, or of writing from hatred, but I think the idea of staying with movement is maybe crucial. To exercise whatever power is attached to the act of writing—depending on the context—not as something paralysing for the reader, the receiver, or the artist, but rather as something that stays in motion, that perpetuates movement (of thought, of speech, of action…).

Juliette: Exactly.

Aodhan: From my experience working with magazines, something that may seem kind of obvious, but I didn't kind of figure out until recently is that there really are readerships, like the magazine’s “community.” Strong emotion isn’t just a question of demonstration but also requires a kind of infrastructure; one would hope that your editors, and your readership can actually do something productive with that emotion. Because hate can be an important way of identifying values or imagining another version of the future. As long as it keeps moving, transforming…



Salomé Burstein is an independent curator and writer based in Paris. She is the founder and director of Shmorévaz, an independent space for art and research located in a former shoe store, and the editor of Shmooks—its affiliated publishing platform.


Juliette Desorgues is a curator and writer based in Paris. As a writer she has contributed to numerous monographic catalogues as well as such publications as Art Monthly, Frieze, Spike Magazine and May Revue. She recently curated an exhibition on G.B. Jones’s films at Air de Paris in the fall 2025.


Graham Hamilton is an artist and writer living in Paris. Recent solo exhibitions include Why do I fill a box with flowers for you at Forde, Geneva (2025); La Busta, basta at Gelateria del Sogni di Ghiaccio, Bologna (2025); and Memorabilia at Turiner Kunstverein?, Turin (2025).


Aodhan Madden is an artist, author, and musician. They are a contributing editor at Spike. They live in Paris.


Brit Barton is an artist and writer. She is the editor of Art & Order Journal.