Roundtable: The State of Art Criticism in 2026

Artlab Editors: Artlab Editor Shannon Lee led Fellowship Advisors Mira Dayal and Gary Zhexi Zhang in a conversation about the overlapping roles of artists and critics and how writing in fellowship might have a rippling effect that can transform the art critical landscape.

Shannon Lee: In last year’s roundtable, Advisors Rahel Aima and Orit Gat discussed how art discourse has moved away from the notion of critic-as-expert, becoming much more subjective. I’d like to open up the floor to the both of you. How are each of you thinking about art criticism today?

Gary Zhexi Zhang: I feel like there’s this strange disjuncture in how we live in a constant stream of takes. There’s a flurry of opinion and informal criticism, but at the same time, there’s a relative paucity of synthesis.

I find that long form critical writing still has incredible value, which is not necessarily to say it has to be authoritative–authority itself almost feels passé. But when someone comes out with a really strong position, it can be helpful as a stake in the ground. However arbitrary, it serves as a place from which to project positions and hot takes alike. For me, late-20th century authoritative criticism is very far in the past.

Mira Dayal: To respond to that relative paucity of synthesis: The idea of wanting more containers to hold things together, or a common nucleus around which to develop responses, feels like a natural response to this larger sense of fragmentation. There are so many art worlds happening at once and so many different kinds of making happening all the time, in many different places and for all these different reasons. How can you make these broader statements about why people are doing something today without losing nuance and flattening the work? At the same time, I do think that those broader efforts get people talking and provide places from which to respond to a cluster of ideas. I think people are definitely drawn to that and excited when it does happen. One fruitful example of this type of writing is Ciarán Finlayson’s “MANIFESTO!” in 4Columns.

I always think of writing as thinking, as a way for me to sit with something longer and process it. Critical thinking skills are really necessary today and l think it’s important to treat writing as culturally valuable, as a way of encouraging deeper thinking. That’s paired with the idea of writing as learning.

I started writing in college when I was studying art history and contemporary art and figuring out how to make things myself. For me, criticism was a way to understand what other artists and writers were doing in the present, in my own city, to encounter other ways of thinking and producing and talking about art, and be able to respond more fully to what I was seeing. That’s not conceiving of the critic as an expert per se, but you do become more informed over time as you see more and learn from it, and I do think that’s valuable.

Gary Zhexi Zhang: I absolutely agree that art writing is a form of thinking. There are so many thoughts that you think you have that, upon further consideration, either make no sense or, on the contrary, really crystallize what was barely more than an intuition.

Shannon Lee: Both of you, in addition to being writers, critics, and educators, are also practicing artists. How do those different vantage points—artist, educator, and writer—inform each other?

Mira Dayal: Part of the process of learning about what is being made today—and the process of being a critic in the physical world—led to a driving question in my practice: Would I be excited to see this thing out in the world? Would I be interested in writing about this exhibition if I saw it at another venue? It’s difficult to always separate yourself in that way and continually look at your work from the outside, but I do think that’s a lot of what I’m doing: I’m trying to make the kind of work that I would be excited to see as a critic. That often means making work that has a material pull but is also layered, that might continually yield more as you spend more time thinking with it.

Likewise, as a critic, because I’m also an artist, I know some of the many ways in which things come to be made, so it’s perhaps easier to gauge whether something is an interesting decision or not. That type of insight feels important to the way I think about work and how I end up writing about it.

My role as an educator is tied to that function of writing that encourages more rigorous thought or more rigorous making. By articulating—in writing or in teaching—why something is or isn’t working, or by trying to untangle or reverse-engineer something, you also are asking other people to deepen their engagement even further.

Gary Zhexi Zhang: It’s funny, being both on stage and backstage. On the one hand, it gives you a really deep and holistic sensibility as to why things are made, why they’re interesting, and how you feel about the whole infrastructure in which the work happens. At the same time, it can be a little dissociating. You’re across all the tissue at the same time.

I do think that there’s a huge and really important role for the critic as a critic, and that is a diminishing space, at the moment. The artist as critic and writer about art has a very different dimension to how you feel you can empathize with the process of making something. Sometimes you want to look at the work purely as an object, but you can’t really help but think of the kind of person you would have to be to arrive at that object. I’ve personally appreciated being in all of these places at once, but then sometimes I wonder, what if I was just an artistic soul who was there to express myself and nothing more?

Mira Dayal: I share that habit of trying to understand how something was made when you’re looking at it—even when you’re not trying to do that. But of course, that’s only ever one facet of the work, and not always illuminating. Sometimes I don’t want to write about work I really love, because I don’t want to untangle it; I just want to let the knot sit there, as you say.

Shannon Lee: Gary, you evoked this notion of empathy, which is fitting as this year’s Artlab Editorial Fellowship theme is critical empathy. I wonder how you each feel this ethos is or isn’t reflected in your respective writing practices. How do you interpret this theme?

Gary Zhexi Zhang: I’m always interested in this relationship between the material predicament of the world and the psychosocial dimension it expresses.

When I think about critical empathy, I try to sit across all of the different contradictions and conflicts, perspectives, and ideologies that come through when a particular cultural discourse is in play.

I also think about itches and knots quite a lot. I find myself wanting to write about the friction that no one’s talking about or a particular cultural force one is not quite able to articulate. Going back to the “backstage”, once you see too much of how the sausage is made, you get a sense of the infrastructures that produced that particular idea or situation, or artist. I think of that as a question of empathy, as well: How do you feel your way around the whole latent space around the work and get a sense of all the interconnections and spores that make it up?

Mira Dayal: The first thing I’m drawn to talking about is how critical empathy plays a role in the position of an editor. I think that plays out for me in a critical empathy towards the writer—but to take it a step further, that also extends towards the artist the writer is writing about. When I was learning how to edit from the editors above me, it was often framed as a very psychological kind of work that tries to understand what a writer was trying to do, and anticipate how they might respond to you. You have to carefully negotiate ways of expressing what you want them to do, and how you think their ideas and arguments could be honed or improved, but in a way that is also generous and convincing and makes them feel like they want to do it.

The second layer is within the writing: Writing a bad review requires a lot more care and justification of argument than writing a more positive review. This is, in part, because of this question of empathy. I don’t think it feels right to write a review that is very critical in a way that doesn’t feel bolstered by actual observation about the thing you’re looking at, that didn’t try its best to engage with the thing before developing an analysis or conclusion about it. The same should happen in a positive review, of course, but that doesn’t usually prompt the same concerns about potential responses because it’s the more expected approach—though we could talk more about that… Rachel Hunter Himes actually wrote a great essay on this topic called “Black Block” for Triple Canopy, where I’m an editor.

Shannon Lee: To build on the overlap between the role of editor and a practice of critical empathy, how are each of you preparing for your roles as advisors? What are you expecting as we go into the open call?

Mira Dayal: I think I could support someone on a wide range of things, but I’m actually really curious to go through the applications and see what people are articulating as their goals, what they think they need, and the kind of support they’re looking for. I look forward to being specific and individualized.

Gary Zhexi Zhang: I feel a happy uncertainty, open-endedness. I’m curious about who this interlocutor could be. What kind of space are they coming from? I see my role as being a generous reader. I imagine it will be a certain kind of intimate relationship, to be a really close reader of someone’s writing.

Mira Dayal: The idea of a generous reader is exactly what I think about too, as an editor. You reminded me of some experiences I’ve had in residencies or exhibitions alongside artists who are a bit older, or a bit more experienced. Having this ambient chitchat and getting a sense of how they figured things out in their careers gave me a lot of confidence in my own work. I hope this fellowship can be like that, giving someone else the confidence to be more introspective, or more mischievous, to go there in a way they might not have otherwise given themselves permission to.

Shannon Lee: How do you see this Artlab Editorial Fellowship program shaping the broader landscape of art criticism? What are you open to seeing more of?

Mira Dayal: I’m teaching a class this semester called Photo as Material that’s essentially an expanded photography course. We were talking about the camera obscura, which of course on a literal level means “dark chamber.” The camera obscura is a great metaphor for the image of the writer in fellowship… You’re holed up in a dark room, and there is light outside—something that you’re interested in and trying to represent or let in—but you need to make a small aperture so that it can enter, so you can get the inverted image on your own wall. But importantly, you need a long exposure in order to produce that image for yourself.

I think the editorial fellowship is one of these small apertures that can let light into a writer’s room, and there are very few opportunities to create those openings that can offer extended exposure—especially with the other key ingredient, funding. I think it’s also great that the Artlab Editorial Fellowship is a global open call. Most of the art writing opportunities I know about are more centered on the US and Canada.

Gary Zhexi Zhang: I totally agree on the international scope. To be honest, I’m not that aware of comparable opportunities outside of North America. In a lot of places around the world, art criticism is really a labor of love. If it happens, it’s because a really small handful of people truly and deeply care and do it. We’re used to thinking of fellowships in the scholarly context, but actual fellowship—camaraderie, and togetherness, of pairing writers to advisors—is really beautiful. I hope we can inspire more of this.