In the spring of 1988, a few years after graduating from Yale, I was working as a paralegal at Paul, Weiss, wondering if my future lay in academia, law school, or something else altogether. Most evenings I ended up at The Bar, a smoky East Village hangout where Alvin Baltrop tended bar and where figures like Gary Indiana, Bob Gober, Bill Rice, and Taylor Mead gathered. It was there, amid the mix of artists, writers, and misfits, that I met John Boskovich—and, by chance, began my life as an art critic.

One night, in the middle of a conversation that turned to Peter Halley’s writing, someone told me: “You’re so smart, so educated—you should write for Artforum. I know the editor, Charles Miller. Call him.” I did, and a failed hookup became the beginning of my career.

From the start, my criticism carried both a deep investment in modernism and an attention to what lurked in the margins: queerness, camp, alterity. Over the years, what began as footnotes and parentheses moved steadily into the center of my work. Camp was an early point of entry—Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” in dialogue with Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”—but it was also about rethinking how criticism could embody style, wit, and even desire.

Since then, I have chronicled the New York art world for over three decades. From 1993 to 1999, I was a regular contributor to The New Yorker. Since 1997, I have been a contributing editor at Artforum, where my essays, often irreverent and sharp-edged, have sought to make criticism itself a form of literature. I have also written for Bookforum, Interview, Texte zur Kunst, Vogue Paris, frieze, The New York Times, Flash Art, and many other publications.

My criticism is at once informed by art history and cultural theory, and conversational in tone: gossiping with history, queerness, and desire. I have written extensively on artists who were once emerging figures and are now central to contemporary art—Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Thomas Ruff, Matthew Barney, among many others. My essays on Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Andy Warhol, and David Wojnarowicz explore the tenuous traces of queer survival, the elegiac, and the spectral.

I am also active as a curator. My exhibitions have included Bruce Nauman (PKM Gallery, Seoul, the first Nauman exhibition in Korea), Denim (80 Washington Square East Gallery, NYU), Murder Letters (Galleria Filomena Soares, Lisbon), Women Beware Women (Deitch Projects, New York), Harriet Craig (apexart, New York), and Survivor (Bortolami Dayan, New York). These projects, like my writing, push against conventions and search for unexpected juxtapositions where humor, critique, and queer memory collide.

My work has been recognized with a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, awarded for my sustained engagement with queer visual culture. I have also contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues and histories, often blurring the boundary between criticism and literature.

In addition to writing and curating, I have lectured widely—at the Museum of Modern Art, Columbia University, Yale, the Hammer Museum, Tate Modern, and elsewhere—on topics ranging from the erotics of abstraction to the afterlives of modernism. I have taught at Otis College, Art Center, NYU, and Yale, helping to shape new generations of artists and critics.

Throughout, my project has been to move art criticism away from neutrality and toward literature, irony, affect, and queerness. I want criticism to be not only about art, but also an art of its own. My proposal, Desperately, is a book that consolidates three decades of writing into a sustained performance of criticism: sharp yet elegiac, personal yet theoretical, committed to both history and its discontents.

Looking back to that night in the East Village when a stranger told me to “call Charles Miller,” I can see how chance encounters and queer spaces shaped my vocation. What began as a conversation in a dim bar became a lifelong attempt to write criticism that is rigorous yet daring, erudite yet camp, serious yet playful. My work has always been about finding language equal to art’s intensity, and insisting that criticism, like art, can be at once intelligent, ironic, and deeply felt.