“What Makes Great Art?” with Jarrett Earnest – Season 2, Episode 7

For this month’s episode, towards our season’s question, “what makes great art?”, Sky Goodden spoke with artist, curator, and writer Jarrett Earnest. Earnest is the editor behind the recent compilation of New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl’s writing, titled Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light (Abrams, 2019), which highlights Schjeldahl’s more risk-taking and experimental art writing from venues like The Village Voice, in addition to his most enduring criticism from The New Yorker. In 2018, Earnest published What it Means to Write About Art (David Zwirner Books), a master compendium of fresh, vulnerable, and reflective interviews with the legends of American art criticism. In the spring of 2019, he curated Young and Evil at David Zwirner, which re-centered the gay artists who pivoted away from “the prevailing trend toward abstraction in the early 20th-century.” His conversation with Goodden encircles his approach to reading and writing, the significance of storytelling, and the heightened relevance of the question “what is art?”Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, features original music by Kyle McCrea, and assistant production from Mitra Shreeram. Our many thanks to Jarrett for his probing contribution to this episode. And our many thanks to Art Toronto for their support.