The Role of the Critical Writer

For The Awl, Maria Bustillos sits down for lunch with writer Teju Cole in Bali, where Cole recently spoke at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. The two discuss art, colonialism, and the role of the critical writer. Regarding the latter, Cole says:

What it’s our job to do [as critics] is to help create and sustain value for overlooked work… The question is not always about what people are paying $50 million for, but the stuff that is only fifty thousand, only ten thousand, and getting that stuff into the museum space and have it be what it needs to be, to write books about it, to get it in the syllabus.

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Jake Slovis is a writer and educator. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Newark and is currently a lecturer in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he teaches courses focused on visual narrative and composition. His work has appeared in The Millions, Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere.

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