Brian Sholis

- "As an activist on the left, I long assumed that my role consisted entirely of raising awareness, sounding alarms, and deploying arguments; it took me years to realize that I needed to help build and defend spaces in which listening could happen, too. As citizens, we understand that the right to speak has to be facilitated, bolstered by... See more

- "In charting what is relevant at a given moment, bringing new art and cultural developments to our readers’ attention, we aren’t just embracing topicality for topicality’s sake; we’re trying to stay unsettled."

- "Criticism in the broadest sense is a key tactic for maintaining a nonrigid, noncomplacent orientation toward the world. [...] Never get too comfortable, never be quite congruent with yourself, and never assume anything else is entirely congruent with itself."

- “When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything... See more

* “Instead of growing your Rolodex, double down on your best friendships, and find your 10 Club.”

- “Art exposes us to the universal experience of being a meaning-making animal in a universe where meanings falter. A good definition of art, it seems to me, might be the science of making meaning-making tools.”

- “My discomfort with our current use of “relevance” as a term of judgment is that it conceals its criteria, and that those criteria are not aesthetic, but social and political. I worry that if we make such “relevance” not just one among other judgments we might make about art, but a condition of our interest, we have made that condition purely... See more