Recorded live at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago / CAB Tailgate

In this live MCA tailgate episode, the Bad at Sports crew — Duncan MacKenzie, Ryan Peter Miller, Brian Andrews, and Jesse Malmed — sit down with Chicago Tribune and Hyperallergic critic Lori Waxman to dig into the past, present, and uncertain future of art criticism.

Lori Waxman speaks candidly about being one of the last remaining "paper critics" in the Midwest, the strange privilege and responsibility of writing for a general audience, and the realities of practicing criticism in a media ecosystem that has largely abandoned it. The conversation moves between the lightly chaotic and the deeply reflective: the team discusses accountability, gatekeeping, democratization, descriptive vs. evaluative criticism, and the uneasy role of critics in shaping a city's cultural memory.

A major portion of the episode is devoted to Waxman's long-running performance project "The 60 WRD/Min Art Critic," which she describes as part-service, part-performance, part-publishing experiment — one that temporarily gives a community something most cities no longer have: a local critic writing about local work. From describing her process of writing in public (fully clothed), to fielding questions about dead artists, visibility, taste, and how critics navigate their own spreadsheets, Waxman opens up her practice with humor and clarity.

The episode also includes reflections on Chicago's art ecology, journalism's collapse, how artists use reviews, and what it means to keep going when the platforms keep disappearing.

Names Dropped — With Links

Lori Waxman 🔗 https://loriwaxman.com/

Duncan MacKenzie 🔗 https://badatsports.com/author/duncan/

Brian Andrews 🔗 https://badatsports.com/author/brian/

Ryan Peter Miller 🔗 https://ryanpetermiller.com/

Jesse Malmed 🔗 https://jessemalmed.net/

Dan Attoe (artist) 🔗 https://www.danattoe.com/

Jerry Gogosian (Instagram art-world persona) 🔗 https://www.instagram.com/jerrygogosian/

Tali Halperin (artist/curator; Chicago-based) 🔗 https://tlihlprn.com/ (closest authoritative source)

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) 🔗 https://mcachicago.org/

Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) 🔗 https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/

Masthead Brewing / Mast Brewing 🔗 https://mastheadbrewingco.com/

Chicago Tribune — Arts 🔗 https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/visual-arts/

Hyperallergic 🔗 https://hyperallergic.com/

Other People's Pixels (artist website hosting) 🔗 https://www.otherpeoplespixels.com/

Documenta 🔗 https://documenta.de/en

WLPN-LP 105.5 FM Lumpen Radio 🔗 https://lumpenradio.com/

Bad at Sports 🔗 https://badatsports.com/

The 60 WRD/Min Art Critic 🔗 https://60wrdmin.org/

Mavis Beacon (reference to "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing") 🔗 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavis_Beacon

Bad at Sports: Episode 921 – Lori Waxman