4 Columns
Ciarán Finlayson and Johanna Fateman at the MANIFESTO! event on March 19, 2025.
On March 19, 2025, a rowdy audience packed into KGB Bar in downtown Manhattan, elbow-to-elbow, knee-to-knee, to join 4Columns for a reading of manifestos by five of our finest critics: Brian Dillon, Johanna Fateman, Ciarán Finlayson, Alex Kitnick, and Emily LaBarge.
The evening was a protest against the many, oft-repeated death knells for criticism promulgated in various panels and publications over the past decades—criticism has been in crisis, it seems, for a lifetime or more. Instead of conducting a postmortem, our contributors were tasked with sharing a brief manifesto declaring their vision for the future (and possible reformation) of criticism. Each reader approached this performative task from distinct, personal positions, making for an evening of rousing ideas, intriguing demands, and productive dissent.
And now, at last, by popular demand, we are making those manifestos available to the public! Click on each critic’s name below to access their text, presented here in reading order: