CF: Can you briefly describe the 60wrd/min set up? You install yourself in a
gallery and artists sign up for 1hour slots to show you their work and have
you write about it, right?

LW>>I set up an office in an art space. Local artists sign up for 30-minute
spots during which I look at their work and write an approximately 200-word
review of it. Artists are welcome to stay whilst the review is written;
passers-by and viewers are invited as well. The review is written on my
laptop, but I am hooked up to a flat-screen monitor that displays my desktop
and every word as I write it (or rewrite it). Reviews are printed on the
spot, hung up in the space, and subsequently published in a local magazine
or newspaper. http://60wrdmin.org/home.html

CF: I love the way 60wrd/min makes a spectacle of criticism and draws
attention to the ways it's changing in the digital age. Was the acceleration
of art writing the specific impetus behind the project?

LW>>In part, yes, though I would say more generally that it is the
acceleration of everything‹more art, made faster, digested faster, alongside
just about everything else in our prolific visual culture‹that really
prompted the project. But also it was the opaque nature of art criticism, of
how mysterious and absent the critic always seems to be. What would happen,
I wondered, if the critic was made available and criticism was made
transparent.

CF: How has the project evolved over time? Has your technique changed and
has that impacted your work elsewhere?

LW>>The project really came into its own when I was invited to perform in
Knoxville, Tennessee. That was the first time I had worked in an off-the-map
place, somewhere regional, with its own compelling scene but one little
known to outsiders. Knoxville does not have an art critic, only a theater
critic, and it certainly never gets written about in the national or
international art press. So suddenly, because of my temporary presence,
criticism became a reality, and all sorts of artists and practices who were
not being written about, who were not being responded to in that way, found
themselves part of a public discourse (which is part of what I believe
criticism can be).
The project has made me that much more aware that different people make art
for very different reasons, and that it is crucial to approach these diverse
practices in ways appropriate to them.

CF: Critical distance has certainly been reduced by digital and internet
communication technologies and this adds pressure on writers working in a
field that's also being crushed by a lack of resources. What benefits are
there to online art criticism? Or perhaps,, rather, what questions do new
technologies allow us to ask?

LW>>Anyone can take on the role of the critic in our digital age, with
online art journals, blogs and other sites. There's less money and
stability, certainly, but also far more opportunity. That's an incredible
shift from the way things have always been, with the critic holding a
coveted and rarified position. For me the important questions that arise
from this situation have to do with the broadening of the practice: Will
criticism become more accessible as result? More or less valued? Will there
be more variations available, more innovations? Will criticism take on new
forms, following the shape of crowd sourcing, social media, reality-based
television or online comment sections? Ultimately, might these new forms be
more adequate to the new ways that art itself is being made today?

CF: Are there any other projects that have inspired your investigation of
contemporary art critical practices?

LW>>Surprising, creative critical practices that I have been following over
the past couple of years include: Hennesey Youngman's "Art Thoughtz," for
his use of vaudeville performance as a mode of criticism, however
conservative much of his commentary may be; Julia Bryan-Wilson's embodied
criticism, in which she learns and performs Yvonne Rainer's "Trio A" in
order to better understand it and write about; the fictional criticism of
Lynne Tillman's "Madame Realism" short stories; Matthew Collings' recent
columns in Art Review, in which he imagines interviews with long-dead
artists about contemporary art issues (e.g. Watteau of Damien Hirst); and
always always always Gertrude Stein.