Can fiction ever be art criticism? How did the merger between the art world and advertising occur? Where is the reward in critical distance?

Natasha Stagg admires art, but would not call herself an art critic. Her book, Artless (Stories 2019-2023) documents the fashion, art and nightlife scenes of New York city. A follow up to Sleeveless (2011-2019), Artless comprises dispatches from NYC’s artistic “scene”- with essays featured in Spike, Artforum, Buffalo Zine and Gagosian Quarterly. Always self-effacing, the author pleads with us not to take things too seriously by describing her new book as “What I think sometimes, some days, about some things”.

You could mistake Stagg’s writing for autofiction (with titles like “Is Anyone Listening to Me? I Love It” and “Social Suicide”) but the star of Artless is Stagg’s foray into pithy, non-autobiographical shorts. Her upcoming fiction work, Grand Rapids, tells the tale of fifteen year-old Tess and her titular Michigan hometown. Published in September through Semiotext(e), its cover features one of Issy Wood’s painted Fiat interiors. Wood’s work is an apt choice - her painted veneration of stagnant objects reflects Stagg’s writing, which transforms Grand Rapids into a collection of architecture and emblems.

Here, Stagg speaks with Hollywood Superstar editor Sydney Sweeney about the moral grey area of her profession, the mythical creature that is the objective art critic and her high school reunion in Michigan.

Sydney Sweeney

Tell us about the title Artless? We know, and love, Sleeveless. Each of your collection titles feels super specific.

Natasha Stagg

My editor Chris Kraus suggested adding date range as as a way of establishing it as a series of essays born from a certain time. The name ‘Sleeveless’ is fairly enigmatic. You don’t necessarily know what you’re going to get from its title, so you add a subtitle : ‘Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019’ and people know it’s a book of essays. Artless is a word often used to describe prose, as in ungainly, naive, imprecise. While I like art, I'm not an expert. A lot of the stories were assignments or press releases, but I call them “stories” because that’s what they all are, even if they were also musings, or reviews, or diaries.

SS

One of my favorite chapters in Sleeveless talks about the microtrend and the micro influencer. Do you think we have micro trends in contemporary art right now?

NS

The NYC scene, which is the only one I would know right now, does feel increasingly niche.It does feel a little bit oversaturated with micro- influencers - that thing of everybody knowing everybody. Is there such a thing as there being too many, or not enough, personalities?

SS

There’s a photo of Charli XCX wearing a t-shirt with - “They don’t build statues of critics” on it. Where is the reward in having critical distance?

NS

I respect critics more than I respect my own profession, probably. I think I'm trying to be as honest as possible about my involvement in the scene, in my writing. Almost all critics have some kind of involvement with what they write on, but serious critics get basically nothing from it, not even good pay, and they work because they are just passionate about unbiased commentary needing to exist. The art world is so circle jerky, and corrupt, and objective critics are so rare at this point, maybe there should be statues of them.

SS

Art speak can be incredibly alienating, it’s a way of excluding certain people from the art world.

NS

I am interested in the way that art can work its way into fashion or marketing - there is a lot of cross pollination. People get tired of the same words, so you have to find synonyms. Sometimes these come from slang, or memes or whatever, but people can see through the application of viral language to marketing really quickly - it’s so painfully obvious when advertising adapts the language of the internet.

SS

A lot of Artless is fiction, moving away from the cultural critique towards a short story format that recalls Mary Gaitskill.

NS

I have always been happier writing fiction. It provides a kind of freedom. In non-fiction you are making a claim, even when you state clearly you’re not an authority on whatever the subject is. In the introduction to Artless I tell the reader not to listen to any of these claims. My favourite story is maybe the one I wrote as a press release for the artist Alex Carver. He did a show of paintings that used a process of layering prints with an intricate stamping process. His research ended up inspiring ‘Transplant’, which follows a family whose patriarch has a transplanted heart.

SS

The combination of fictional writing and the display of art has formed a new kind of art criticism, maybe without the critical element. I think it’s exciting.

NS

I am so inundated with cultural criticism at this point, writing more of it can feel like throwing fuel onto a fire. Or pointless. My goal has always been to focus on language, so that it is the writing that moves, rather than the content. And anyway, there is no such thing as fiction and non-fiction, really. Nothing can be proven to be either or the other. There's also no such thing as critical distance. Whatever lines exist, they can always be blurred.

SS

Do you see yourself as a writer more than, let's say, an art or scene critic? Or are you a mixture of both, like Cookie Mueller, who wrote Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black?

NS

I always go back to Elizabeth Hardwick, who wrote so much criticism and commentary, but also one of the best novels, Sleepless Nights, when she was 63. I feel really good about having written four books. It means I am actually a writer. My first book could have been a one-off; I wrote it in grad school. The second and third were collections of shorter pieces I’d mostly already written as assignments. So it feels good that I’m publishing another novel, even if it’s ten years after the first one.

SS

It feels as if the time period in which Artless is set, the years of Covid, fuelled the transition in your writing practice from cultural critiques to fictional storytelling.

NS

I think you’re right. Covid was an online overload. Many of us experienced a collective media fatigue. To pivot after this time is only natural - there was so much reflection on reality, maybe too much, and life became miserable. Everyone was looking for a way to escape; fiction writing feels like an extension of that desire.

SS

How long have you been working on Grand Rapids?

NS

It’s hard to say. I started it right after publishing my last novel, Surveys, in 2016, but I didn’t do anything with it for a long time and then came back to it recently. I’m sure a lot of people have had this feeling - of coming back to something and recognising any of the words. I feel that way with my Substack, even. I will often re-read something I’ve published to make sure I’m not repeating myself, but it will feel foreign even two days later. It’s all a balancing act. You want to write away from what you have already written, but you don’t want to think so much about it that it inhibits your natural flow.

SS

Natural flow is kind of my worst enemy. I wait until it reaches me to start a piece. Can you tell me a bit about the plot of Grand Rapids?

NS

It’s a kind of coming-of-age story set in the city where I lived during high school. When I finished writing Grand Rapids, I actually went back to Grand Rapids for my high school reunion. It felt like I was doing reconnaissance for the book. When you grow up somewhere, things feel differently sized when you go back. The city felt bigger, not smaller, than I remembered. It has grown, but that wasn’t it. The buildings downtown felt bigger.

SS

I know it’s fiction, but, did you tap into your own autobiography?

NS

Of course. That’s always the easy in for me. I wanted to start with something I had a lot of emotional knowledge of. My high school days were my own and still are, but I was interested in whether revisiting that time and place could get me to a character arc, something more universal. I love talking to people who are younger or older than me who find something to relate to in my writing. It’s cool to know that my stories are not necessarily tethered to a generation. You always hear that millennials are so different from zoomers or whoever else, but I have had an opportunity to see what is similar between us, the opportunity being that I can publish stories and know from the response that non-millennials read them, too.

SS

I mean, it’s the mark of a good writer if your work unconsciously speaks to a group of people, even if that wasn’t the intention.

NS

Definitely. I have a lot of trouble with a specific type of Gen X writer I used to like more when they lately take a defensive stance on their generation. It’s different for each generation but, I don’t think you see the signs until it’s too late.

Grand Rapids is published by Semiotexte. Available to pre order now

Dana Dawud’s Open Secret is a psychological operation with Buddhism in its heart. The primary body of the O.S orbital system is Monad (2024-), recut for every screening- so far it has evolved across 20 countries, conjuring the angelic aliens of the New New international style in film. Dana’s ambient theory podcast Pleasurehelmet and her writing series Interview with an Artist are on Soundcloud and Substack. Here is her "Artist Take" with Hollywood Superstar.

Open Secret x Hollywood Superstar at Sands Cinema on 14/4/25, 6pm.

"Internet cinema is waiting for something to happen altogether".

Liza Tegel, choreographer, poet, dancer, internet poet, internet dancer.

Exceptional presence and so important to the movement of my thought is Liza Tegel, I just revisited the pleasurehelmet episode she did and she says that her work is defined by the phrase “I live to get away from which I lived”. I have always been really into Swedish art/poetry and when I found Liza Tegel https://on.soundcloud.com/eNZYwRSyLxCjjLxs9 Elis Burrau, Jonathan Brott of L’Amour La Mort, Albin Duvkar and others, I was in a way reunited with a scene that somehow I always ready knew and didn’t know and what connects us is understanding that internet poetry is real. She says “Posting is a platform which directs me where I don’t have to be physically present”. In a way posting becomes this movement that carries into these different lines of thought and intersections of subcultures, and Liza’s posting/writing and her dance practice embodies that and more. She is the contemporary to me. The Swedish internet is 10000 years ahead of the west.

Helen Cioux’s on Rembrant’s Slaughtered Ox, from her essay ‘Bathsheba or the Interior Bible’ (1993)

Bataille argued that the slaughterhouse and the museum share a strange intimacy; this closeness is often expressed in the historical development of both spaces and how the objects in the museum function as the skeletal remains of death and violence, or event the fruits of it. However, Helene Cixous’ reading of the Slaughtered Ox turns the slaughterhouse/the painting into a church, the Ox is crucified and the space of the painting creates the space of that possibility.

Helene Cixous has been very important to me as a writer/painter; her essays, specifically in that book where Rembrandt’s painting is featured, attend to writing/drawing/painting and how the possibility/impossibility of their convergence create new meanings and textures. Typing this on my phone right now makes my thought run differently than typing it on my computer; the screen's smoothness and the touchscreen's intimacy make me feel stronger about every word. I actually started answering these questions on my computer, but I would write only the first sentence. The rest flows better from my fingers into my phone.

Monadology, Deleuze’s take on the Monad, as inspired by these two pictures.

What interests me the most in Deleuze’s take on Leibniz is the POV of the subject/object and the idea of Baroque perspective. And that is what I’ve been exploring in my film, a baroque perspective in cinema, with folds and unfolds of memetic references, digital imagery and multitudes of iterations from cinematographies from all corners of the planet. The seriality and the iterative with each cut function as an unfolding/folding that takes us closer to the Baroque.

Driving your car in Dubai

Those who know me (specifically my online friends) know that I’m always sending voicenotes while driving my car. Driving, walking or being in any other vehicle while moving through a city is such an immersive experience, there’s always something to look at that passes you by faster than your ability to capture it. The temporality of how things pass you by is always faster than the duration you need to take a photo on your phone; the car is anti-photography. I find that poetic. In Dubai, you have to drive faster than in other places, and the highways are vast and open. My favorite moments are when light refracts off glass skyscrapers.

The Cross Versus The Circle

Spinning the cross quickly creates a circle, and parts of the longer line of the cross can make a tangent while the small one can create a chord. If the cross had equal sides, then it could be a diameter. The cross and the circle are too intimate, like the museum and the slaughterhouse.

Alien subjectivity in internet Cinema

Going back to perspectivism and thinking about the alien as subject, the alien as the main subject or feminine hero, following Chris Kraus's Alien’s and Anorexia. The image dictates the cut and acts as the alien subjectivity. Internet cinema acts as a space or an environment where alien encounters are expected to happen. It’s like in Chris Kraus’ Gravity and Grace where the group waited for the mystical experience to occur and realised it had already happened because now they are all together waiting for something. Internet cinema is waiting for something to happen together.

Hollywood Superstar asks The Femcels for inspiration and recommendations to increase our cultural capital. “We want to be able to talk to girls at parties” we exclaim, prostrating ourselves at Gabi and Rowan’s feet while they vape. Their hit song “He Needs Me” is about being a crazy manic pixie dream girl and a fem (cell) in 2025. He needs me, He needs me, He needs me, He needs ME. He blocked me on Snapchat. He won't text me when he skateboards.

"Sometimes I trip over so he doesn't think I'm too perfect"

Femcel No.1 Rowan (24)

Dancer, Edgar Degas (1891) Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle.

It’s at the Hamburg Kunsthalle - where I did Erasmus, and I thought I had seen into a wormhole where Edward Degas had painted weird sci-fi dogs. That is, until my boyfriend at the time ruined it. I work as an illustrator, which is already being replaced with AI. Rich people will always want to buy real paintings. Rich people will always want to buy my paintings.

Fluffy (1980) by Gloria Balsam

Fluffy is a dog who tries to run from her but she always knows it will be by her side. The song makes me feel like I’m in a musical in a parallel universe where everything is so beautiful and strange. I’m in contact with Gloria - I am going to interview her soon : 3 I can do a perfect off-pitch impression of the song, and I’m gonna sing it to her on Zoom. Singing always sounds better out of tune.

The Cuck Song by Leonard Cohen

“What really makes me sick is that everything goes on as it went before.” I’m not really a jealous person (I’m so chill), so maybe I would be susceptible to taking cuckoldry like a chump. Cucks should have rights. I read somewhere that allegedly David dobrick is a cuck, and I see that for him, it kind of humanises him. My favourite bit of the poem is where he keeps putting his full name in a line: “You just wanted to cuckold Leonard Cohen”. Then he goes: “I like that line because it’s got my name in it” he’s so funny and real.

I think you have to revel in the cuckoldry. Last year at a party my friend and I [name redacted] were standing next to a sofa of people, and we were saying how we were both flirting with someone, and that it was going well. Then we look down and the two people we were flirting with start kissing. They start lying down on the sofa, caressing each other and smooching their hearts out. It was unbelievable. We put on some cucky drake song and started jumping around and singing it to them, but they were too into it to notice.

Also, I feel like Leonard was kinda being cucked on that record (death of a ladies' man) because Phil Spector kind of ran away with his music and made sweet love to it, and Leonard had to hate it even tho it’s amazing because he fucked his girl.

Soft City (2008) by Pushwagners and Ghost World (1995)

My tutor at university showed it to me, so maybe in 2021. I think dystopia is so hard to do well, and this is a true masterpiece If you like 60s/70s style illustrations then you should buy this. My friend Barney was upset that I didn’t show him sooner and told me off for gatekeeping.

If the Femcels were in a comic, we should find god. Or go up to strangers and ask them random stuff. Ghost World (COMIC, NOT FILM, NO OFFENCE) is a good reference point. It’s so perfect. I love that half the comic is them just saying random ugly men are hot. I think that’s so real. It’s the meat and potatoes of life.

London could be a soft city. I’m on set as an extra on a Jason Statham movie. All of us are dressed in uniforms of green satin Zara and suits with powdered foundation so it feels like a slay soft city.

Buildings used to be scary because people had more hope

Femcel No.2 Gabi (24)

Shiki-Jitsu or Ritual (2000) Hideako Anno

It’s crazy how a 40-something man can know how to convey exactly what a 16-something girl can feel like around a 40-something man. Teenage-girl Gabriella feels like a dream away, but love and pop force me to remember how I felt. I think all I wanted to be was dope and cool.

As a female, I think an appeal of an anime girl is to go “she’s literally meee” when watching; they tend to have hyperbolic versions of our characteristics. The muse in Shiku-Jitsu is psychotic yet relatable; her psychosis is loveable, but the uncovering of her is too grotesque to be an animated chick. She only wears red and lives in a castle she crafted herself, an abandoned warehouse filled with red umbrellas; she’s flesh, a human flesh version of a big-boobed blue-haired character.

“Could I be an anime girl in real life?” Maybe I could if I got a boob job. The closest we ever got to being anime girls was the 2020 e-girl culture. Maybe if we locked ourselves inside for another 10 years, we would come out as animations.

Lip Kit Glosses by Kylie Jenner

Glosses is a 2018 cinematic masterpiece. Kylie Jenner. IG baddies. Convertible. LA. 3 Strikes by Terror Jr. “Literally so cute”.

As a teen, I was prone to disregard anything mainstream, but I always loved Kylie; she’s just an emo chick in a millionaire's body.

Snap Maps (2017- present)

I am a bog-standard victim of panopticism. I can’t do makeup without pretending I am in a YouTube video. My internal monologue sometimes transcends to a podcast; when I have a crush, I dream about how they view me. I would definitely live off-grid. But yeah, I fuck with snap maps, bitimojis, everyone knowing where I am. Dope.

Knockout by Lil Wayne and Niki Minaj (2010), Young Money Senile Ft Nikic, Wayne, Tyga (2014)

Damn young money senile is fire. It's a rap version of a Melanie Martinez video. Knockout is perfect song-wise, though my dream is to scream like Weezy. “Hey, barbie, can I call you Barbra” Perfect. Video-wise, maybe Senile.

Putting socks on top of ur shoes and tying it for security with another sock