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cultural critics 2025

The Art Angle podcast hosted eight cultural critics, theorists, and artists throughout 2025 to reflect on key tensions and transformations in the art world. The roundup features voices including Nadia Asparouhova on the value of intimate 'antimemetic' art spaces, Andrea Fraser on the fragmentation of the art field, Alison E. Gingeras on the necessity of all-women exhibitions as resistance, Dean Kissick on the problems of social justice art, and Sean Monahan on social surveillance in the art world. Each thinker offers a snapshot of the debates, anxieties, and aspirations shaping contemporary cultural discourse.

article culture schedule May 27, 2025 visibility 10 link 1 artist

the new rules of subculture

Writer and theorist Nadia Asparouhova has published a new book titled *Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading*, which introduces the concept of "anti-memes"—cultural phenomena whose influence derives from being hard to find or difficult to understand, rather than from popularity and visibility. The book is released by the Dark Forest Collective, a group of artists and thinkers inspired by Yancey Strickler's metaphor of the internet as a "dark forest," where meaningful exchange retreats to private spaces away from commercial and contentious public platforms. Artnet News critic Ben Davis reviews the book, connecting its ideas to contemporary art that deliberately operates below the radar.

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