New Economy/Group Process
The crit will save us.
Last month Helen Molesworth, recent chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, gave a passionate commencement address to the School of the Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

“But even though I am hopeful, it would be foolish not to mention how spectacularly messed up the world is at the moment,” she said. She pointed to “authoritarianism and nationalism” as threats to democracy around the world, as well as a new American oligarchy that “has inserted its values of profit and their inherent belief in money and wealth as the ultimate metrics of success into democracy’s most fundamental institutions: the press, scientific research, concert halls, the universities, museums.”

”The worlds of culture and art, the worlds you are poised to enter are striated with the pressure of these moneyed forces in ways we have never before encountered.”

And then she spoke of the crit. Molesworth suggested that art students are uniquely prepared to fight against these reactionary threats because of their experience with ‘the crit,’ where creatives critique, defend, and discuss their work with their peers and teachers. "The crit is so important during these fractured times, not because it teaches us how to speak about our work, but because it teaches us how to listen. Listening is the basis of empathy and empathy is the only way to think our way out of the stranglehold of the debilitating and outmoded forms of thought we have inherited from our colonial past,” she opined.
Article: Curator Helen Molesworth Welcomes the “Death Rattle of Our Colonial Past” in Commencement Address